Rise of the Novel: Dec 12, 2017
I wanted to compare the frequencies of indefinite pronouns between the Austen corpus and Brunton, Chawton, and Canon corpora with respect to Gallagher’s argument about the novel’s referentiality and the ironic credulity of its fictionality that serves as its very appeal to us readers. The beauty of novels is that they DON’T make us wish these characters were real in our world. Rather, they make us wish we could be part of theirs; we feel for them “not despite our awareness of their fictionality but because of it.” (354). This is because we are allowed to partake in a “protected affective enclosure space that encourages risk-free emotional investment,” a safe space if you will, that allows us to empathize with characters often more relatable than real people. (351-2) In fiction, ‘he’ or ‘she’ or ‘they’ can be interpreted to mean ‘you.’ As Gallagher astutely points out, “The character is … called an ‘imaginary nonentity,’ for its nonexistence sustains its effects on reality, that is to say, its effect on the reader. If such a person did exist, the usual boundary of personhood would be in place, and the realty created by the fiction would disintegrate.” (357) Similarly, the non-specificity of indefinite pronouns advocates for a universal relatability, a sense of all-encompassing shared identification that words like ‘anyone,’ ‘anybody,’ ‘everybody,’ and everyone’ inexplicably connote. Implicit in their usage is an invitation of imagined communality, perhaps the telos of the novel, according to Anderson. Novels, in their exemplification of the ordinary or the forgotten/invisible, explore the narratives of Othered figures, humanizing and making legible stories of the nobodies/no one’s as anybody’s/anyone’s, as everybody’s/everyone’s. In other words, indefinite pronouns seem to imply a shared time and consciousness that are crucial to the novel’s ontology. So for this exercise, I searched up the following words because they were more prevalent in the Austen corpus than any other corpora: ‘anything,’ ‘everything,’ ‘anybody,’ ‘everybody,’ ‘anyone,’ ‘anywhere.’ In contrast, the Brunton corpus frequently used words specifying social status like ‘hostess,’ ‘landlady.’ Likewise, the Chawton corpus had high scores for ‘countess,’ ‘earl,’ ‘lordship,’ and ‘prisoner,’ though such words exuded more feudalistic overtones than household/domestic titles like hostess and landlady. Unlike Austen, they refrained from indefinite pronouns, often yielding less than ten instances for them. The Canon corpus, on the other hand, had as many instances of indefinite pronouns as the Austen corpus, but its most prevalent words included ‘prisoner,’ ‘lordship,’ ‘and ‘thou,’ which had an especially high score of 267.7. I found this especially interesting not only because in Old English ‘thou’ was used as a singular pronoun while ‘you’ could easily be used as plural, but also because ‘thou’’s historical connotations of affection and familiarity. It’s fun to follow thou—> you and you—> thou shifts in Shakespeare when tailing the progression of characters’ relationships, so I thought this a detail worthy to note.
