Distance Reading

Wordle: Pride and Prejudice

http://www.wordle.net/show/wrdl/5883767/Pride_and_Prejudice

For my distance reading, I chose to take a look at the text from the novel “Pride and Prejudice” by Jane Austen.

I was initially struck by the prominence of names in this wordle. Every single “large” word is a name or a title – Elizabeth, Darcy, Mr., Mrs., Jane, etc. But then I remembered that Pride and Prejudice is a 3rd person novel and therefore proper names are a lot more frequently used than “I” or “you” which would have been excluded from this wordle anyway and therefore made way for some of the other words to show up, aside from names.

Something I do find interesting and possibly telling about the prominence of names, however, is that it shows the age and gender differences between the different characters and the way that those differences were represented in conversation and relationships between those characters in the novel and in that era of life. Mr. is more commonly used than Mrs., even though I’d say there was a pretty even split of female and male characters of prominence. Furthermore, the most popular female name is Elizabeth, a first name, while the most common male name is Darcy, a last name. It was Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy, not Elizabeth and Fitzwilliam, or Ms. Bennett and Mr. Darcy. It seems to indicate that the males and the elders in the novel got a heightened level of respect. This trend of male surnames and female forenames is further represented in the wordle by the appearances of “Jane,” “Bingley,” and “Lydia,” among others.

There’s also an interesting trend that pretty much every word that isn’t a name or a title is some word of relationship – “father,” “family,” “daughter,” “dear,” etc. all indicate an emphasis on relationships between people – a focus of the novel. It is also intersting that the biggest non-name word is “must,” a theme in this book. The novel focuses on what Elizabeth and Jane and proper ladies in society must do in order to lead happy and fulfilled lives – ascribe to gender norms and marry well, living as a happy housewife for the rest of her life.

I was really intrigued to see that the word “love” is one of the smallest words on the graph. For a novel about women getting married, it’s interesting that the word barely gets used, and I think someone who was just looking at this graph would have no idea what the novel is about. With some context though, I think the lack of the use of the word “love” indicates the nature of the plot – the girls were not supposed to get married for love. it could be a fortunate side effect, but the aim of marriage was wealth and social status.

A distant reading tool I wish existed would be one that detects time period of a text based on types of words being used. It would analyze the words and spellings of those words, as well as their context, to determine their time period. Beyond using this as a tool to analyze literature once it’s developed, I think it would be cool just to be able to develop this tool and determine the potential of a collection of words to deliver historical meaning and determine the possibilities of distance reading.

 

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