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Literary Writing Style of Women: English-Language Authors of the Victorian Age

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Literary Writing Style of Women: English-Language Authors of the Victorian Age Literary Writing Style of Women: English-Language Authors of the Victorian Age Pleuni van Laarhoven s1211242 Book and Digital Media Studies MA Thesis Dr P.A.F. Verhaar Dr C. Koolen 9 September 2018 19246 words Table of Contents 1. INTRODUCTION 3 1.1 Socio-Cultural History of Victorian Women Writers 5 1.2 Approaching Data in the Digital Humanities 8 1.2.1 Quantitative Research in the Humanities 8 1.2.2 Stylometrics 11 1.2.3 Examples of Quantitative Research 12 1.3 Hypotheses 15 2. METHODOLOGY AND PRACTICALITIES 17 2.1 Requirements of the Research Corpus 17 2.2 Terminology and Application: Gender and Writing Style 21 2.3 Methodology 24 2.3.1 Method 24 2.3.2 Techniques 25 3. RESEARCH RESULTS AND INTERPRETATIONS 31 3.1 Section One: Vocabulary 31 3.2 Section Two: Sentence Structure 37 3.3 Section Three: Use of Tone 57 3.4 Conclusion 69 4. FURTHER RESEARCH AND REFLECTION 72 4.1 Further Research 72 4.2 Reflection and Concluding Statements 75 BIBLIOGRAPHY 77 Published Secondary Literature 77 Websites 79 APPENDIX A: RESEARCH CORPUS 81 Female Authors 81 Male Authors 96 APPENDIX B: POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE WORDS 143 Words Classed as Negative 143 Words Classed as Positive 157 2 1. Introduction The influence of gender on products of arts and culture is an extensive subject of study in the Humanities and literature is no exception to this curiosity. The socio- cultural background of the author is often analysed as well as their works, which introduces questions about the influence of nationality, religion, time period and gender on their writing styles. By making use of computational analyses as introduced by the Digital Humanities, these questions can be investigated for large corpora. Consequently, collections of works from lager periods of time can be compared and contrasted without having to analyse each work individually and separately. Focussing on a period that is well-known for the rise of feminism and the novel – which will be discussed in paragraph 1.1 – this research will investigate female authors’ writing style in the Victorian Age. Various authorship studies have shown that the identity of an author can be tested by analysing the writing style of a selection of works. For instance, short stories published under the initials of Edgar Allan Poe’s brother Henry have been argued to be written by Edgar instead by making use of stylometric textual analysis – a method which will be explained in paragraph 1.2.1 Another well-known example is J.K. Rowling’s The Cuckoo’s Calling, published under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith. Using computational analyses similar to the previous study, Rowling was proven to be the author of this detective and she later confirmed this as well.2 Regardless of the methods used or the conclusions drawn, it can be observed that the question of authorship is a compelling debate for Digital Humanities scholars. Perhaps this stems from the notion that all authors have their own unique ‘fingerprint’ and use the same writing style and structure over time.3 If this is the case, then this introduces the question: are there similarities between the fingerprints of female authors and do female writing styles differ from male authors’ writing styles? Numerous attempts have been made to explore the influence of gender on writing style. According to Ben Blatt, author of Nabokov’s Favorite Word is Mauve: What the Numbers Reveal about the Classics, Bestsellers, and Our Own Writing, 1 P. Collins, ‘Poe’s debut, hidden in plain sight?’, The New Yorker: Page-Turner, 4 October, 2013, n.pag. <https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/poes-debut-hidden-in-plain-sight> (8 January, 2018). 2 P. Juola, ‘The Rowling Case: A Proposed Standard Analytic Protocol for Authorship Questions’, Digital Scholarship Humanities, 30 (2015), pp. 100-113. 3 B. Blatt, Nabokov’s Favorite Word is Mauve: What the Numbers Reveal about the Classics, Bestsellers, and Our Own Writing (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2017), p. 6. 3 there was not enough substantial evidence to support the claims that there are concrete differences between the styles of men and women before the introduction of computer oriented research, such as text and data mining tools.4 In the chapter ‘He Wrote, She Wrote’, he details a few attempts at applying these types of methods to literary works, which he divides in three different sub-corpora: ‘Classic Literature’, including the fifty most popular English-language novels by male authors and the fifty most popular novels by female authors of the 20th century; ‘Modern Popular Fiction’, which includes the last fifty number one bestsellers per gender – making use of the New York Times bestseller lists from 2014 and preceding years; and ‘Modern Literary Fiction’, listing the last fifty books written by women and the last fifty books written by men to receive recognition or an award between 2009 and 2014.5 Blatt’s methods of selecting his sub-corpora are versatile and seem to be based on relatively well presented arguments. However, by only focussing on the well-known works, he excludes a significant number of novels that may provide different insights or could further corroborate his findings. Moreover, Blatt tests multiple approaches by other researchers in his study, such as the methods employed by H. Andrew Schwartz et al. and Neal Krawetz – both cases focus on which words are ‘male’ and which are ‘female’, the first based on the comparison of social media posts and the second based on the classification of common words – which prove to have one limitation in common: they are both in some degree based on presupposed gender norms, which, Blatt agrees, impacts the objectivity of the results.6 This underscores the importance of gathering an extensive collection of various texts, clarifying the limits of the corpus and research techniques used, and defining how this supports the research goal. Since bias and assumptions can never truly be excluded from research as there are often certain expectations or hypotheses, transparency of the methodology that was used is required to argue and provide evidence for the framework with which the research is built. In order to conduct a specific comparison of female and male authors, a few requirements for the research corpus have to be set. Appropriating 4 Ibidem, p. 32. 5 Ibidem, pp. 34-35. Blatt addresses his methods more extensively in his work and also explains how he defined and selected the most popular books, as well as how he selected the latest novels. 6 Ibidem, pp. 37-39; H. A. Schwartz, J. C. Eichstaedt, M. L. Kern, L. Dziurzynski, S. M. Ramones, M. Agrawal, A. Shah, M. Kosinski, D. Stillwell, M. E. P. Seligman, L. H. Ungar, ‘Personality, Gender, and Age in the Language of Social Media: The Open-Vocabulary Approach’, Public Library of Science One, 8 (2013), pp. 1-16; N. Krawetz, ‘Gender Guesser’ <http://hackerfactor.com/GenderGuesser.php> (29 August 2018). 4 some of Blatt’s criteria and adding some more, this results in three main conditions which will be introduced here and further elaborated upon in chapter two. Firstly, all authors must write in the same language and come from regions that predominantly share the same socio-cultural history. Secondly, all works must be published within a predetermined period of time. Thirdly, all texts must share the same textual form – e.g. prose, drama or poetry – and to further simplify the comparison of these texts they must share the same textual construction – e.g. novel or short story – within that form. The corpus of this research’s case study will thus consist of English-language writers born in Great Britain or Ireland who published their novels during the Victorian age (1837-1901). The Victorian period has been selected because of the great availability of its novels and its well documented gendered socio-cultural environment which will be explored below. 1.1 Socio-Cultural History of Victorian Women Writers The socio-cultural history of female authors of the Victorian period is vital to understand any differences or similarities in writing style with their male contemporaries. A prominent difference between men and women in the Victorian age is that women did not enjoy the same rights and liberties as men. Before the nineteenth century, literacy was mostly confined to men from the upper and middle classes.7 Literacy was thus an indicator of privilege. With the introduction of free schools in the second half of the nineteenth century literacy increased rapidly – especially amongst women from the middle class – and reading was encouraged to aid in the improvement of education and morals.8 However, the increasing literacy rates and popularity of reading did not immediately improve women’s role in society. For instance, women who publicly spoke their minds in the presences of men were in danger of risking their femininity and being criticised.9 Public speaking was inherently male and women who attempted to do the same were characterised as masculine. Moreover, women who spoke in public were considered as trying to impersonate men – or more specifically, they were often portrayed as women cross- 7 G. Tuchman and N. E. Fortin, ‘Gender Segregation and the Politics of Culture’, Edging Women Out: Victorian Novelists, Publishers and Social Change (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012), p. 8. 8 H. J. Graff, The Legacies of Literacy: Continuities and Contradictions in Western Culture and Society (Bloomington/Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1987), pp 313-314. 9 R. R. Warhol, ‘The Victorian Place of Enunciation: Gender and the Chance to Speak’ Gendered Interventions: Narrative Discourse in the Victorian Novel (New Brunswick/London: Rutgers University Press, 1989), p.
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