“Those Who Wait, Burn”: New Penelopes in Plays by Sarah Ruhl, Suzan-Lori Parks, and Naomi Wallace
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Homer’s Penelope is a nostalgic symbol in the patriarchal imaginary of war literature. Standing for the ever-faithful and dutiful wife who patiently waits at home while her husband returns from war, her paradigm has fulfilled two purposes in traditional war literature. She has helped to preserve, on the one hand, the dichotomy of home front versus war front and, on the other hand, those gendered expectations that have shaped and limited the notion of womanhood, both in war and in peace. This discussion of plays by Sarah Ruhl, Suzan-Lori Parks, and Naomi Wallace discusses the revisions these writers have undertaken on the figure of Penelope. With Passion Play, Part Three (2005), Father Comes Home from the Wars (Parts 1, 2 & 3) (2015), and In the Heart of America (1994), Ruhl, Parks, and Wallace, respectively, revisit the figure of the waiting woman to reflect on the interrelations between war and home front and to invite the audience to question patriarchal notions of womanhood that continue to operate today. In their feminist revisions of Penelope, this article argues, Ruhl, Parks, and Wallace reconstruct an iconic figure to reclaim women’s agency, independence, and sexuality.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".