Frames of Glass: Goldfish and Gender in Paint, Performance, and Print, 1870–1914
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract: This article draws upon examples from fiction, popular journalism, travel writing, theatre, and fine art from 1870 to 1914 to trace the evolving representation of goldfish in relation to shifting attitudes toward women in British and American culture. Beautiful and domesticated, yet quiet, unobtrusive, and often confined to its own miniature domestic "sphere," the goldfish seemed initially to parallel the domestic wife and had been used to naturalize domestic ideology. In the 1870s and 1880s, however, the importation of fancy goldfish with different and exaggerated morphological traits unsettled what the Victorians had taken to be self-evident and natural about this species and, by extension, their own. I argue that, at a time when the gender debate was inflected by biologically deterministic arguments about women's "natural" societal roles, the figure of the goldfish became a remarkably flexible discursive tool to grapple with (or endorse) the changing economic and social trajectories of Anglo-American women. A hitherto unexamined alternative to the quintessential Victorian image of the "bird in the cage," this study of the goldfish and its bowl provides insight into how the Victorians' confrontation with other species encouraged them to look more critically at themselves.
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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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".