A Critical Analysis of Bernice Morgan’s Portrayal of Female Characters and their Experiences
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Due to the decline of the oral tradition and the omission of women’s stories from the official narrative, records of those living in the rural Outport communities of Newfoundland were rapidly vanishing. Within the sub-genre of Newfoundland women’s writing, and classed as part of a settler literature, Bernice Morgan’s fictional novels Random Passage and Waiting for Time offer insights into the daily lives of 19th and 20th century women living in the Outports, thus retrieving their stories from the margins of the male-dominated literary canon to ensure their survival. As Morgan’s novels focus on women’s narratives, this thesis provides a critical analysis of her portrayal of female characters, and their experiences. It contends that these characters negotiate the boundaries of transcendence and immanence and explore the possibility for a partial transcendence. In particular, the thesis investigates how Morgan’s fictional account of female experience within the 19th and 20th centuries reflects the social and cultural mores of these periods, and analyses how the novels explore the attempts made by women to extend their legacy and impact beyond the confines of the domestic space. Informed by the existentialist feminist theories of Simone de Beauvoir, the study considers the characters within three stages of their lives – as young girls, married and unmarried women, and as mothers. The incorporation of socio-cultural and historical elements further informs contextual detail relating to women’s situation during the timeframes of the novels. By depicting both characters who conform to and diverge from conventional female roles, Morgan both facilitates a more encompassing representation of life experience in the Outports, and illustrates how her female characters’ choices and attempts to extend their legacies enable them to occupy liminal spaces of partial transcendence.
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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 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.020 | 0.018 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| 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".