Proto-Spiritualist Masculinities in Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Captain of the ‘Pole-Star’
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper examines Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1883 story The Captain of the ‘Pole-Star’ in light of his later intersecting interests in spiritualism and masculinity. Conan Doyle uses the Arctic as a space where scientific and spiritual ways of viewing the world struggle to co-exist, comparing ship doctor Ray’s official journal with the ‘superstition’ of the crew, examining the role of spiritual belief in an increasingly scientific age. The paper examines how the story focuses these themes through the lens of masculinity. By reading Ray and Craigie as embodiments of possible British futures—that of scientific rationality and Romantic spirituality, Ray’s rationality is ultimately confounded and unsettled by the spectral events of the story, leaving him haunted by the events on board the ship, unable to resolve them or prevent Craigie’s death. Meanwhile, Craigie’s Romanticism leads him to embrace the spectral, but at the cost of his own life. As a result, Conan Doyle depicts both definitive worldviews as ultimately cold and desolate, neither wholly sustaining on their own terms. The ghost, as a result, becomes key to determining what sort of man ought to usher in the future—whether we recognize it as having a rational explanation or a sublime supernatural one.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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 it