Unlovely Mechanical Devices: Disability, Masculinity, and Sexuality in Victorian Fiction
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation surveys disabled masculinity in Victorian fiction. I track how masculinity became contingent on labor-based able-bodiedness in the mid-nineteenth century. My interpretations of Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend, George Augustus Sala’s “The Ghost in the Double Room,” and Lucas Malet’s The History of Sir Richard Calmady delve into the cultural anxieties that men faced about becoming disabled and, by proxy, failing to perform a masculine gender role. However, through my analysis of Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White and George Eliot’s Adam Bede, I show how some disabled men exploited their disabilities to subvert their culture’s prevailing definitions of manliness. In my readings of Dinah Craik’s John Halifax, Gentleman and Charlotte Yonge’s The Heir of Redclyffe, I examine how this subversion emerges in the Victorian novel’s marriage and domestic plotlines. Authors often exclude disabled men from marriage plotlines over concerns that they might pass their disability onto potential descendants. Disabled men consequently allowed authors to develop alternative households based on love and mutual care instead of reproduction.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".