Review of <em>Unnatural Affections: Women and Fiction in the Later 18th Century</em> by George Haggerty, and <em>Empowering the Feminine: The Narratives of Mary Robinson, Jane West, and Amelia Opie, 1796-1812</em> by Eleanor Ty
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Empowering the Feminine is straightforward in its organization and rather modest in its claims.The same, unfortunately, cannot be said about Unnatural Affections.What distinguishes these two works and why they make such a timely comparison at this particular historical juncture is their use of very different critical methodologies.Although both books are examining ostensibly the same subject--middle-class women writers from the same historical period and milieu--they do so in radically different modes and intentions.Empowering the Feminine is Ty's second study in which she seeks to bring long overdue attention to largely forgotten British women writers of the late eighteenth century.By my count, only three of the nine novels she discusses are currently in print.The others--as I know from experience--have to be copied page by page from microfilm.With the advent of Broadview Press in Ontario, a press committed to publishing long out of print women's novels, several of these titles should eventually become available.That problem aside, Ty performs a valuable scholarly service in bringing to our attention the most important novels of each of these writers: Robinson's autobiographical Memoirs (in print) alongside her Walsingham, The False Friend, and The Natural Daughter; West's A Gossip's Story, A Tale of the Times, and The Infidel Father; and Opie's The Father and Daughter, Adeline Mowbray, and Temper.Ty's stated focus is literary depictions of "empowerment" for female characters as well as women authors, none of whom wanted to be seen as "breaking with cultural definitions of the feminine" (vii).Such a notion--which I label "passive aggression" in my Gothic Feminism (1998)-is obvious in women's fiction.The more interesting and problematic issue is how to talk about "empowerment" through pretended weakness in a theoretical way that is both grounded in the historical background of the period and at the same time is informed by current psychoanalytic attempts to understand female psychology.Ty sets the historical stage by beginning her book with
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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 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".