title: Women (Un)Moored: Shirley Jackson's entropic female characters

authors: Grard, Pascale

subjects: Shirley Jackson

abstract: Shirley Jackson’s fiction presents an expansive catalogue of female characters who find themselves in eerie predicaments that they negotiate in interesting ways. This thesis explores the presentation of female characters in these predicaments. What roles do the female characters play in the stories they inhabit? What modes of escape do they employ from their predicaments? What makes their situations fundamentally anxious? To explore these questions, I examine the roles ascribed to female characters and their various responses to them. I inspect Jackson’s use of the ghost story and the fairy tale and the ways in which she engages with characteristic tropes to explore female agency. I interrogate anxieties about the self, and examine how these anxieties haunt many of the stories through their presentations of the female protagonists. These anxieties play out in the spaces that form and deform possibilities for women – the home, the suburb, the city – and through their allotted roles as wives, mothers, daughters, women alone. This study hopes to illuminate the entropic and anti-entropic nature of Jackson’s female characters: women variously unhinged by their roles or grounded by them. These women produce diverse reactions to oppressive situations as they negotiate their restrictive circumstances that simultaneously anchor and imprison them.

text: Women (Un)Moored: Shirley Jackson's entropic female characters Shirley Jackson’s fiction presents an expansive catalogue of female characters who find themselves in eerie predicaments that they negotiate in interesting ways. This thesis explores the presentation of female characters in these predicaments. What roles do the female characters play in the stories they inhabit? What modes of escape do they employ from their predicaments? What makes their situations fundamentally anxious? To explore these questions, I examine the roles ascribed to female characters and their various responses to them. I inspect Jackson’s use of the ghost story and the fairy tale and the ways in which she engages with characteristic tropes to explore female agency. I interrogate anxieties about the self, and examine how these anxieties haunt many of the stories through their presentations of the female protagonists. These anxieties play out in the spaces that form and deform possibilities for women – the home, the suburb, the city – and through their allotted roles as wives, mothers, daughters, women alone. This study hopes to illuminate the entropic and anti-entropic nature of Jackson’s female characters: women variously unhinged by their roles or grounded by them. These women produce diverse reactions to oppressive situations as they negotiate their restrictive circumstances that simultaneously anchor and imprison them.

year: 2022

title: Functional responses of an invasive top predator Mustela erminea to invasive meso-predators Rattus rattus and Mus musculus, in New Zealand forests

authors: Jones, Christopher David

subjects: New Zealand

abstract: Context: Management of suites of invasive mammal species can lead to perverse outcomes, such as meso-predator release, or can achieve desirable reductions in the abundance of top-order predators by controlling their prey. Predictive models for predator–prey systems require estimates of predator functional responses, i.e. predation rates as functions of prey density.
Aims: In New Zealand, estimates of the functional responses of stoats (Mustela erminea) to mice (Mus musculus) and ship (black) rats (Rattus rattus) are required to improve management models for these invasive species.
Methods: We derived fitted relationships between the presence or absence of mouse or ship-rat remains in stoat guts and corresponding indices of prey abundance in beech and podocarp forests, respectively. To convert field data on stoat-gut contents to minimum kill rates, we used data on feeding activity and estimates of gut-passage time, observed in captive stoats.
Key results: The most parsimonious fitted curves were Type II functional responses, with a steeper stoat–mouse curve for autumn–winter, indicating a more specialist feeding habit than that in spring–summer. Estimated kill rates of mice per stoat per day reached an asymptote of 1.13 during autumn–winter. Our maximum observed kill rate for spring–summer was 11% less than the extrapolated upper limit of 1.04 mice per stoat per day for New Zealand ecosystems. No asymptote was reached within the limits of the data for the stoat–rat relationship.
Conclusions: Recent models for trophic interactions between stoats and the primary rodent prey have overestimated kill rates by stoats in forested ecosystems, particularly at very low and very high densities of mice. We show how data on stoat-gut contents can be rescaled to estimate minimum kill rates of rodent prey.
Implications: The functional-response relationships we have derived can be used to improve modelled predictions of the effects of natural or management-driven perturbations of invasive stoats and their primary rodent-prey populations.

text: Functional responses of an invasive top predator Mustela erminea to invasive meso-predators Rattus rattus and Mus musculus, in New Zealand forests Context: Management of suites of invasive mammal species can lead to perverse outcomes, such as meso-predator release, or can achieve desirable reductions in the abundance of top-order predators by controlling their prey. Predictive models for predator–prey systems require estimates of predator functional responses, i.e. predation rates as functions of prey density.
Aims: In New Zealand, estimates of the functional responses of stoats (Mustela erminea) to mice (Mus musculus) and ship (black) rats (Rattus rattus) are required to improve management models for these invasive species.
Methods: We derived fitted relationships between the presence or absence of mouse or ship-rat remains in stoat guts and corresponding indices of prey abundance in beech and podocarp forests, respectively. To convert field data on stoat-gut contents to minimum kill rates, we used data on feeding activity and estimates of gut-passage time, observed in captive stoats.
Key results: The most parsimonious fitted curves were Type II functional responses, with a steeper stoat–mouse curve for autumn–winter, indicating a more specialist feeding habit than that in spring–summer. Estimated kill rates of mice per stoat per day reached an asymptote of 1.13 during autumn–winter. Our maximum observed kill rate for spring–summer was 11% less than the extrapolated upper limit of 1.04 mice per stoat per day for New Zealand ecosystems. No asymptote was reached within the limits of the data for the stoat–rat relationship.
Conclusions: Recent models for trophic interactions between stoats and the primary rodent prey have overestimated kill rates by stoats in forested ecosystems, particularly at very low and very high densities of mice. We show how data on stoat-gut contents can be rescaled to estimate minimum kill rates of rodent prey.
Implications: The functional-response relationships we have derived can be used to improve modelled predictions of the effects of natural or management-driven perturbations of invasive stoats and their primary rodent-prey populations.

year: 2011

title: Maori and Pakeha at Te Aroha: the context: 2: Maori in Hauraki in the nineteenth century

authors: Hart, Philip

abstract: After the arrival of Europeans, the Maori population of Hauraki suffered a rapid decline. Some rangatira opposed Pakeha ways, whereas others adopted these for their personal benefit. Keeping ‘the peace of Hauraki’ required government agents to intervene in various disputes between hapu (Ngati Hako in particular causing concern in the 1870s and early 1880s). Although rangatira had links to both Queen Victoria and King Tawhiao, the government was relieved that most remained ‘loyal’ to the new order, and only an intransigent minority opposed the spread of ‘civilisation’ through its roads, telegraph, and the snagging of the Waihou River. A liking for Pakeha goods encouraged collaboration, with Maori joining the cash economy through their involvement in road making, gum digging, and European agriculture to raise money for, in part, traditional gatherings that for a while were more lavish than earlier possible.
Maori of all ranks were quick to stand up for their rights by using the court system, reminding Pakeha of the Treaty of Waitangi, and, in some cases, violence. Tensions were eased by Maori socializing with Pakeha in sport, horse racing, and even the Volunteers, but drinking together in hotels could result in fights, and the lure of alcohol had to be countered by temperance movements. A few Maori children attended school, with Pakeha, and for a time the government provided a (free) doctor and vaccinated them against smallpox (though some preferred traditional ‘cures’ for other ailments). For most, living conditions remained poor. Criminal behaviour was of a minor nature. Christianity had to compete with old beliefs (notably in maketu), newer ones such as ‘Hauhauism’, and by the later years of the century the popularity of the Mormons.
Examples are included of intermarriage, ‘half-castes’, and Pakeha Maori, all being notable features of the time. In a variety of ways, Maori society was sufficiently resilient to adapt and thereby to survive the impact of Pakeha settlement, which produced massive changes and dominated the region well before the end of the century.

text: Maori and Pakeha at Te Aroha: the context: 2: Maori in Hauraki in the nineteenth century After the arrival of Europeans, the Maori population of Hauraki suffered a rapid decline. Some rangatira opposed Pakeha ways, whereas others adopted these for their personal benefit. Keeping ‘the peace of Hauraki’ required government agents to intervene in various disputes between hapu (Ngati Hako in particular causing concern in the 1870s and early 1880s). Although rangatira had links to both Queen Victoria and King Tawhiao, the government was relieved that most remained ‘loyal’ to the new order, and only an intransigent minority opposed the spread of ‘civilisation’ through its roads, telegraph, and the snagging of the Waihou River. A liking for Pakeha goods encouraged collaboration, with Maori joining the cash economy through their involvement in road making, gum digging, and European agriculture to raise money for, in part, traditional gatherings that for a while were more lavish than earlier possible.
Maori of all ranks were quick to stand up for their rights by using the court system, reminding Pakeha of the Treaty of Waitangi, and, in some cases, violence. Tensions were eased by Maori socializing with Pakeha in sport, horse racing, and even the Volunteers, but drinking together in hotels could result in fights, and the lure of alcohol had to be countered by temperance movements. A few Maori children attended school, with Pakeha, and for a time the government provided a (free) doctor and vaccinated them against smallpox (though some preferred traditional ‘cures’ for other ailments). For most, living conditions remained poor. Criminal behaviour was of a minor nature. Christianity had to compete with old beliefs (notably in maketu), newer ones such as ‘Hauhauism’, and by the later years of the century the popularity of the Mormons.
Examples are included of intermarriage, ‘half-castes’, and Pakeha Maori, all being notable features of the time. In a variety of ways, Maori society was sufficiently resilient to adapt and thereby to survive the impact of Pakeha settlement, which produced massive changes and dominated the region well before the end of the century.

year: 2016