Under the Moon’s Healing Influence: George MacDonald’s Literary Re-envisioning of Women’s Health
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This article demonstrates how the work of fantasist George MacDonald interacted with Victorian debates regarding women’s health. Participating in the trend to interpret MacDonald’s fiction as invested in contemporary societal issues, I bring to the forefront MacDonald’s interest in women’s rights and alternative medicine. Emphasizing MacDonald’s belief in the persuasive power of appealing indirectly to the imagination, I argue that MacDonald aimed to participate in women’s health reform through his short fiction. Focusing on works published between 1850 and 1880, I discuss MacDonald’s fairy tales in conjunction with his realist fiction in order to discern a pattern of literary tropes, such as the cursed princess, deployed to subvert dominant medical views of women’s bodies. I consider how MacDonald represents elements of Victorian medicine, such as the clinical objectification of patients, the medicalization of disability, and the early social eugenics movement. In his countercultural representation of impaired female characters as empowered heroines, I argue that MacDonald challenges the medical stigmatization of women’s bodies. This article also considers how MacDonald challenges the interventionism of Victorian allopathy by celebrating the practices of established alternative approaches, such as homeopathy and hydropathy. As an early proponent of bibliotherapy, MacDonald demonstrates his belief in the healing potential of narrative both within the context of his narratives and in his use of narrative to improve women’s health practices.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.027 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".