Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines Cornell Woolrich’s representations of his female protagonists’ black angels, that is, self-sacrificing but vengeful and dangerous women. As black angels, female characters in Woolrich’s novels, such as Julie Killeen in The Bride Wore Black (1940) and Alberta Murray in The Black Angel (1943), are seemingly defending their homes and standing up for justice but ultimately, they get caught up in a violent world and face the inescapability of failure. It is argued here that Woolrich’s trope of the black angel subverts the stereotype of the femme fatale by mirroring and simultaneously challenging the depiction of the roles of women during the turbulent sociopolitical period around the Second World War in the US, as well as the shift in gender dynamics at that time. Woolrich’s narratives become a vehicle to express this very sense of insecurity and anxiety and the need to both articulate and subvert the pressing need for order and control, particularly in relation to women. This article also illustrates that Woolrich’s black angels are complex creations that are part and parcel of the recipe of sex, paranoia and violence that fill the pages of Woolrich’s noir novels, and it is this recipe that destabilizes both gender norms and legal codes as far as the portrayal of female criminality is concerned.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".