Distant reading has allowed for a rather incredible phenomenon in modern literary interpretation—the luxury of objectivity. Literature, like any art form, is extremely subjective in its analysis. However, the distance that accompanies the ubiquitous nature of the digital landscape serves to reveal literate in its most raw form—pure information, stripped of decorum or aesthetics—largely invisible to everyone, including the author. Unlike close reading, distant reading does not cater to the holistic view of literature; instead, it examines texts in the most impartial way possible, allowing a more quantitative look at the data. Through the completion of the class project, it is clear that distant reading is not only a convenient part of modern literary interpretation, but also a necessary one; with the amount of literature readily available and the digital content being constantly created at any given moment, an unbiased and uninvolved perspective is important. Thanks to digital tools and resources, rather than engaging in a large volume of literature at the micro level, scholars and researchers can now view literature as sets of encoded data, which make comparison and analysis much easier than using abstract data. This class project demonstrated the usefulness of distant reading and investigation in literary interpretation today, by providing us with the resources to analyze a corpus of over a hundred children’s fiction books from the 1880s.
In our preliminary research for the class project, Ashley and I were assigned to compile a contemporary comparison corpus for our 1880s children literature corpus. However, while we did our research independently, we encountered similar problems. Firstly, it was difficult to decide what kind of children’s literature to pick without having a research question in mind. In order to select appropriate reading material for comparison, it would have been useful to know exactly what kind of data we were seeking. And secondly, there was a noticeable lack of contemporary children’s fiction available online, due to copyright infringement issues, which severely limited our options. It also brought to attention a fundamental flaw in digital literary study: it does not allow a comprehensive view of all literature, only the easily accessible works, which are often self-published or uncited.
For the text analysis portion of the class project, our group chose to use Voyant Tools, Lexos, and AntConc. Personally, I liked Voyant Tools and Lexos for their visual representations of data; they were colorful and easy-to-read, which made it easy to evaluate data with a single glance. We were most interested in word frequency and how it created patterns that could be analyzed and from which conclusions could be drawn. In conducting different experiments, looking at word frequencies, and analyzing different trends that emerged, along with considering the significance of our research in proportion to the theme of the course, I was struck by the data we uncovered in our corpus. We first studied Jo’s Boys by Louisa May Alcott, because all of us had a generally vague understanding of the storyline. Upon first inputting it into Voyant Tools, we noted that the language was very simplistic, perhaps to cater to the presumably younger audience; however, the phrasing was much more sophisticated compared to that of contemporary children’s books. From this information we could make the generalization that a) either children were more well-read in the 1880s, or b) children’s fiction in the 1880s was more sophisticated.
We also looked at gender in both broad and narrow sense. We discovered that out of the 105 male authors and the 29 female authors, the men overwhelmingly wrote about male characters (with effectively zero of them in the corpus about solely female characters), and the women wrote mostly about female characters. Using a holistic view of the entire corpus, it was also clear that the male characters in the aforementioned novels were also written more positively than the female characters. Men and boys were hardworking, adventurous, and pioneers; women were weak-willed, passive, and wholly uninteresting. While women and girls were featured in some of the novels, they almost always played supporting roles like wives or mothers, or the girls were secondary characters to the main male protagonist.
We also noticed that Jo’s Boys, while largely centered on boys and their activities, portrayed women and girls in a favorable light—well-mannered and self-sufficient. The novel featured high frequencies of words with positive connotation, such as “like,” “good,” “dear,” “great,” “happy,” “love,” and “better.” In contrast, G.A. Henty’s A Final Reckoning contained almost no mention of women, with a predominance of male-oriented words like “Mr.,” “master,” “man,” and “boy,” and that these words had a strong correlation to the word “work.” Henty, who is well-known for his books about the adventures of boys, includes very few feminine words like “girls,” “women,” “Mrs.,” and “lady.” In Oliver Optic’s All Adrift, Optic (also another author known for writing “boy’s stories”) uses words like “wildest,” “wanderings,” and “unwholesome” to describe the male characters, suggesting that boys were more unconventional, can’t-be-tamed rule-breakers and adventurers that girls.
It is important to note that although these gender ideals are rather antiquated (reflective of the values of the 1880s), even today we struggle with equal gender representation in popular culture media today. While the focus has shifted off of literature, the new areas of criticism are television, movies, and video games, in which it has frequently been pointed out that women are still held to unrealistic standards, faced with racist and sexist stereotypes, or objectified. The glaring inequalities in the gender binary were much more accepted or commonplace in the 1880; thus, it wasn’t surprising to find such stereotypes in children’s literature of the time period. However, it brings to light an important contemporary problem: if we are portraying women and girls in a particular light in the media, it is no wonder that they suffer from unrealistic expectations for themselves and from others about how they should look, dress, and act. While our research revealed a lot about the 1880s and the patterns and thoughts of writers about gender roles in society, it also provoked a thoughtful examination of our modern values and how they have and have not changed.
Although we gleaned a good of information from this project, it seemed that the research questions we really wanted answers to were better suited to in-depth studies of individual novels than a broad analysis of a whole corpus. Many of the questions we asked were specific to particular authors or storylines, and it would have been more useful to ask more comprehensive questions. In addition, we could have chosen questions with more direction; rather than analyzing for correlation, we should have written specific parameters for the novels we were testing in order to obtain more concrete data. While “distant reading” can be an effective method of exploring literature, perhaps it is not the best procedure when attempting to get the root of fundamental problems such as the ones we posed.
