Contesting the English Sartorial Style in Trollope’s The West Indies and the Spanish Main : Self-Fashioning in the Caribbean
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract: The article examines Anthony Trollope’s affective responses to dress in the Caribbean, with a view to revealing how they shaped his clothing practices while travelling and informed his resistance to transplanted English sartorial codes. Drawing upon Jane Bennett’s conceptualization of distributive agency, I approach Trollope’s clothed body, his attire, and the tropical environment as interdependent vital forces that affected his relationship to clothing’s materiality and its symbolic significance. I argue that his dress exerted its agentic force through its materiality—the colour, the fit, and the texture—in the tropical climate and its surrounding environment. The tropical heat and humidity afflicted Trollope when he was dressed in dark, tight English attire, causing him physical discomfort and emotional anxiety that he dramatized and diffused through humour. These feelings motivated him to ponder clothing’s materiality and the need to adapt it to the environment. I shall argue that the tropical weather, in causing digestive discomfort and even physical breakdown, threatened Trollope’s sense of masculinity. He therefore resorted to alternative forms of clothing to fashion and refashion his masculinity. His masculine self-fashioning, however, was met with resistance from the capricious tropical climate. Adopting an environmentally-inflected cultural materialist approach to clothing, this article illuminates the challenges posed by what Jane Bennett might term clothing’s “agentic” power to travellers in the colonies, contributing to the recent increase in materialist studies of clothing.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
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".