Repression and revelation: Exploring the function of the Gothic mode in Alice Munro's Too Much Happiness
Bibliographic record
Abstract
My thesis will explore the use of the Gothic mode in Alice Munro's most recent collection of short stories, Too Much Happiness. Sigmund Freud's theory of the uncanny will act as a framework for my argument as I explore how repression is portrayed at both the individual and the domestic level in Munro's work in order to perform two prominent functions of Gothic literature: either her stories demonstrate the possibility for one's own psyche to be more threatening than any external force or villain; or, they explore the impact of social norms which repress female agency. The uncanny occurs when something which was once familiar becomes unfamiliar, and according to Freud this is due to a novel event which stimulates some part of an individual's repressed thoughts and leads the self to experience dread. Munro depicts how, when certain repressed desires and memories are stimulated, one's own psyche can actually be the most unfamiliar part of an individual. She also depicts an uncanny representation of domesticity at the familial and community level which has a terrifying effect on readers because this representation contrasts familiar people and settings with drastically unfamiliar behaviours and situations. I will also study Munro's ability to invert the traditional Gothic binary of a female character victimized by a dominant male villain, either by depicting male characters who do not exercise dominance, or by portraying the escape of a repressed and damaged female protagonist. I will argue that, while exploring in uncanny terms the social implications of a male-dominated world, Munro's portrayal of characters also inverts traditional gender roles, thereby effecting a turning point in the female Canadian Gothic tradition by providing a positive sense of 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 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.025 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
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".