Margaret Laurence's Women: Isolation and Survival in the Manawaka Sequence
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This bachelor thesis examines the theme of isolation and survival in A Jest of God (1966) and The Fire-Dwellers (1969), the second and third novel in Margaret Laurence's Manawaka sequence, on the background of Margaret Atwood's book Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature (1972). At a time when Canadian literature was a nebulous term, Atwood identified the notion of survival as the common, unifying theme in literary works produced by writers across the vast country, with victims, death, terror and isolation as the accompanying motifs. She defines the concept as multi-faceted, distinguishing the external/physical survival found in early Canadian explorer writing and the internal/psychological survival common in later fiction writers. Furthermore, based on the argument that as a colony, Canada is inherently victimized, she proposes a system of four Victim Positions into which we can categorize Canadian protagonists. Margaret Laurence (1926-1987) is considered one of the fundamental figures of the English- Canadian novel. In the Introduction I provide insight into the socio-cultural climate of the time period and the bleak state of Canadian publishing industry at the time. Since Laurence's works are tied to the Manitoba prairie, I touch on the significance of regionalism in understanding Canadian...
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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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.041 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".