The Weight of Things: Inheritance and Gender in Alice Munro's Short Fiction
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis examines the role of the material world in Alice Munro’s short fiction, particularly as it relates to gender roles imposed on women and girls in mid-twentieth-century rural Southern Ontario. In analyzing a body of work, including two short stories from the 2001 collection Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage: “Family Furnishings” and “Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage,” the study employs a new-materialist framework, informed by Bill Brown’s definition of “Things” as more dynamic and personal than what we consider objects. It uses close textual analysis to explore the relationship between the dynamic role of material things, especially inherited material things, and Munro’s comments on the female body and women’s role in society. The findings suggest that inherited material objects convey inherited gendered expectations of domesticity, and their aggressive behavior in the text evokes a hostile domestic world, one in which dynamics of ownership and inheritance complicate the presentation of gender roles in the text. This analysis sheds light on Munro’s portrayal of the complexities of female identity and domestic life.
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 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 | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".