Bibliographic record
Abstract
Suzanne Desrochers. Bride of New France. Toronto: Penguin, 2011.294 pp. $25.00 sc. Bride of New France is Suzanne Desrochers' debut novel. A popular success, Bride stems from Desrochers' Master's thesis, conducted at York University, which combines history and creative writing to paint an unromanticized portrait of the lives of the files du roi before and after their arrival to New France in the late-seventeenth century. The files du roi were young women, mostly under the age of twenty-five, whose forced migration to New France between 1663 and 1673 was part of a population-building program for the colony sponsored by King Louis XIV--hence, the term King's Daughters. Bride of New France is told from the perspective of the fictional Laure Beausejour, a stubborn yet naive inmate of Paris's notorious Salpetriere hospital which housed the poor, prostitutes, the mentally ill, and orphans, many of whom, including the files du roi, were expelled to New France over the course of the late-seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Like many of her real-historical counterparts, the orphan Laure finds her life irrevocably changed when she is sent to Canada. Unlike the mythical files du roi that Desrochers learned about as a child, however, Laure sees her life in Canada as a fate nearly worse than death, and certainly worse than imprisonment in the dreadful Salpetriere. In her feminist historiography, Desrochers offers readers what she describes in the historical notes as a counterweight (292) to traditional romantic nationalism, which celebrates the grand historical narrative of the files du roi as founding mothers (292) of New France. Laure's characterization enacts a corrective to traditional history on at least three levels: Laure is a reluctant housewife to Mathurin, a coureur de bois and absentee husband; she begrudgingly adjusts to the material hardships of habitant life; and she becomes sexually uninhibited, finding an outlet for sexual self-expression in her affair with Deskaheh, a young Iroquois man. Yet for all the revisionary potential that inheres in Laure, Bride is peopled by relatively conventional secondary characters. Laure has an affair with, and is impregnated by, an Iroquois who may not carry potions of mysterious poisons (77) as Laure is taught to believe of native North Americans prior to her departure from Paris. Instead, Deskaheh conforms quite uniformly to the Rousseauesque ideal of the noble savage. Laure's husband, Mathurin, represents a fairly stereotypical coureur de bois, happier in the woods--and in the arms of aboriginal women--than he is at home with his wife. …
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".