Location, location, location!

What is the “Gothic”?  We came up with several terms that seem to come to mind when one thinks of a Gothic novel.  One of the more compelling aspects was finding texts to help complete our list of both Gothic and non-Gothic novels. Another interesting component to this project is working with our sister class from UVA.  Being that this is a technoromantic class, incorporating technology in order to keep in contact was definitely a must.  We made use of phone, email, googledocs, as well as skype.

For our mini sub-group, Lingerr and I examined how location/setting helped to define Gothic novels.  This topic explores both country of origin (these novels span from England to France to Switzerland…) as well as the physical location of some of the settings (who doesn’t like a castle and a creepy manor?)  The goal was to (hopefully) find a link or at least a similarity between texts that took place within the same country as well as physical setting.  Much to my delight, many of the runs did find such congruities…

This run uses The Mystery of Edwin Drood, Dracula, and Great Expectations, which are novels that take place in England.  There are clear similarities of plotting among the topics (“facial features”, “time”, etc.).  Interestingly enough, the non-Gothic outlier I threw in, Great Expectations, fits in almost perfectly.  This interesting finding slightly complicates whether the topic models are helping me to define the Gothic or to find similarities amongst geography…

Here is a run where Jane Eyre, another England Gothic novel, is thrown into the mix.  Once again, there are many similarities (with Jane Eyre plotting farther down the topic of “love”).

London was a bit of a different story.

This is a run of London Gothic novels, The Beetle, The Picture of Dorian Gray, and The Vampyre.  The Beetle and Dorian Gray have some similar plotting along “inquiry” and “appearance”, but The Beetle also diverges a bit.  The Vampyre doesn’t follow the similar pattern of the other two texts and positions itself in the interior of the graph.

Varney, The Vampyre (which contains London as one of its settings) is added.  Some of the topic models change, and while there are still paths of similar plotting, there is far more incongruity amongst the texts in the middle.

This run explored Gothic novels that took place in large manors.  There is similar plotting, and the topic models focus on “room, time, found…” and “day, time, home…”  The three authors are British (the Bronte sisters) though Vilette takes place in Belgium.  Interestingly, one could argue that there is harmony here because of the locations or because the sisters may have similar writing styles…

This run compares the English manors of Wuthering Heights to the French cathedral of The Hunchback of Notre Dame.  The only similar plotting here is along the topic “stone, great, feet, walls.”

All in all, Woodchipper is a fascinating and useful tool.  The above is just a small portion of the results of the runs I’ve done through Woodchipper.  I wanted to present findings in which the tool was able to both prove and disprove my optimistic hypothesis.  One of the frustrations of the tool is that it picks the most popular topics that appear whereas it might be useful to the user to be able to pick similar topics throughout all of the runs in order to make more conclusive findings.  Location topic models appear, but they don’t necessarily show similarities within the actual plot of the stories.  Perhaps I’m glad that Woodchipper isn’t able to make conclusive findings on its own 100% of the time.  I don’t think I’m ready to take out the human agency in exploring and classifying literature yet.

During my time as an undergraduate at Lebanon Valley College, I took an independent study on early Gothic literature. Throughout this course, I was continually confronted with prejudices against the Gothic as being incapable of offering any academic merit. This was particularly the case during the time in which the works were written—having been seen as terrorist writing meant to simply excite the senses rather than communicate any high intellectual notions. Yet, even in scholarship written in the past decade, I came across several scholars who maintained these beliefs—perhaps not as blatantly, but they were apparent nonetheless. One of the more disruptive ways that this prejudice presented itself was through the further categorization of the Gothic into categories of male and female. The male Gothic was built up around The Monk, while the female Gothic was founded based on The Mysteries of Udolpho. In my final paper, I explored several Gothic works from the Romantic period, including these two, in order to break down the categories of male and female Gothic and prove once and for all that these categories hinder our ability to understand the complexities of the Gothic genre. So, when we first formulated this Woodchipper experiment around Gothic works, I was extremely excited! First and foremost, my goal was to use Woodchipper to prove that my thesis was correct.

The first run that I would like to highlight uses Udolpho and The Monk. In this run, we can see divergences between the two texts. One obvious point where Udolpho breaks away from The Monk is with the category of nature. This makes sense since Udolpho features pages upon pages of sublime descriptions of Emily’s several journeys through mountains and valleys. Udolpho also pulls more strongly toward the “Sentiment” category featuring the words “mind,” “heart,” “tears,” “grief,” and “seemed.” This, once again, is to be expected since Udolpho is the primary female Gothic text from which the ideas of sentiment and suspicion (“seemed”) arise as key facets of the genre. The Monk holds back from this, sharing a stronger pull with Udolpho toward “felt,” “made,” “conduct,” received,” and “heart.” Although my group has generally agreed that this category is indeterminable, some of these words concern actions and subjectivity—“felt,” “received,” and “heart.” Since the Gothic genre in general has been associated with interiority and subjectivity, we can perhaps see this category as picking up on these characteristics.

The next run that I would like to highlight features two female authors. I was particularly pleased with this run since it showed a clear divergence between Udolpho and Frankenstein. Naturally, I would suppose these two texts to be somewhat opposed to each other since Udolpho features no true supernatural element (a typical characteristic of female Gothic), while Frankenstein clearly has an unnatural being—a “monster”—as one of its main protagonists (a typical characteristic of male Gothic). I definitely felt like Woodchipper was behind my conclusion that the categories of male and female Gothic fail to live up to their names when analyzed closely. Although the texts do align in some areas, the clear pull toward “Spiritual” for Frankenstein and the clear pulls toward “Indeterminable/Subjectivity(?)” and “Sentiment” for Udolpho reaffirms the tendency of female texts to work against a clear-cut categorization of female Gothic.

The third run that I am presenting here featured three Romantic Gothic works by male authors: The Monk, The Vampyre, and Caleb Williams. Although the general splash pattern appears to be similar between The Monk and Caleb Williams (The Vampyre was way too short to get any definitive pattern), each work demonstrates a stronger pull than the other in one of the two main directions. Caleb Williams pulls stronger toward “man,” “crime,” “murder,” “justice,” and “innocent” (“Crime”) than The Monk. Considering the content of Caleb Williams, this makes sense. Although male Gothic, Ambrosio’s greatest crime in The Monk is rape, not murder. On the other hand, The Monk pulls more strongly toward our “Indeterminable” category, though Caleb Williams does have an outlier the furthest toward this category. However, overall, Woodchipper still notes a divergence between texts within the male Gothic, just like it did within the female Gothic.

In order to better see how the male and female authors align with one another, I decided to use the four primary male/female Gothic texts that I have been focusing on in the same run. As we can see, the patterns appear to be relatively in line with one another with only a few outliers. For me, I saw this as proof of the inability for the male/female Gothic distinction to hold up when texts are examined. All four texts show a strong pull toward “man,” “life,” “nature,” “character,” and “mind” which could be called the “Sublime Reflection” topic and could easily be associated with the Gothic’s concern with interiority. A second strong pull comes from the topic “make,” “give,” “leave,” “time,” and “hope.” This topic is another indeterminable category. Yet, one could perhaps associate this with subjectivity and interiority as well, since the word “I” can feasibly stand in front of all of these words except for time. The passages that follow this trajectory somewhat lend themselves to this conclusion featuring moments of resolve by the characters in which they express their steadfastness in their decisions (ex. “Leave me! Your entreaties are in vain!” [The Monk] and “I have given a solemn promise . . . to observe a solemn injuction” [Udolpho]). In any case, the alignment of these texts helps to reaffirm my premise that the male Gothic and female Gothic are unstable categories that fall apart upon close examination.

Overall, I would claim that Woodchipper was able to reaffirm my statement that strategies used to delineate between the male and female Gothic do not uphold themselves when placed under scrutiny. Although there were many problems faced when encountering Woodchipper, such as the inability to look under clusters of nodes and the inability to decide which topics pop up during runs, I was still able to provide some tentative evidence for my initial claim. While there is much room in my conclusion for debate, I found the results from Woodchipper to be very helpful. With further study, I believe that Woodchipper could be used to disprove without a doubt the fallibility of the categories of male and female Gothic.

Exploring how well gothic texts fall into gender categories, we discussed some of the indicators of male gothic (blatant horror, emphasis on intuition) and female gothic (suspicion/terror, emphasis on reason). To see if WoodChipper offered any insights, we ran two female texts (Frankenstein and The Mysteries of Udolpho) and two male ones (The Vampyre and The Monk) at first, but then felt a little overwhelmed with the high concentration of feedback (without a peel-back option, it was a bit difficult to see all four texts accurately represented).

We tried again, with only two texts at a time, pairing Monk with Udolpho for contrast and Frankenstein and Udolpho for comparison. Both runs revealed categories that had a lot of overlap – “mind, heart, tears, grief, seemed” (we called this Sentiment) and “felt, made, conduct, received, heart” (we struggled with this one, it seems a mix of Reflection/Character/Interiority/Decision-Making… or, for the purposes of this post, “Indeterminable.” Strangely enough, in a moment of reckless abandonment, we Googled the terms to see associations – below is a result from the first page!).

At any rate, we noted with interest the massive pull toward Nature in Udolpho, whereas Monk’s was much less. However, apparently Monk is much shorter than Udolpho, which might skew the results…? It was interesting to see how strong the correlation was between Monk and Udolpho’s pull toward Sentiment and the “Indeterminable” category, with a lot of crossover.

This crossover was evident again in the Udolpho/Frankenstein run, but mainly in Udolpho, whereas Frankenstein had an unsurprising Existence category (“life, death, existence, mind, heart”) which crossed with Sentiment much more than Udolpho. So, a tentative conclusion might be that while both female gothic novels contain similar bents toward Sentiment, the source/correlative for such varies (Udolpho associates more with the “Indeterminable” category and Frankenstein more with Existence).

One last interesting run (I don’t want to take them all!) was Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, and The Monk. It was interesting to see how much more Jane Eyre followed Monk, whereas Wuthering Heights seemed more clustered. All three had strong Love (“love, heart, loved, world, happy”) clustering, which completely overlaid the “Indeterminable” category. However, where Wuthering Heights stays pretty much within the bounds of the Love topic, the other two texts tracked out toward the “Indeterminable” category. All three also had crossover between Love/”Indeterminable” category and the Physical (“hand, eyes, face, looked, hands”).

So far, I’ve found myself more interested in the topic crossover fields in the splash patterns, mainly because they seem to offer associations within texts (is Love associated with Nature or Physicality?). Some seem obvious (Frankenstein’s mix of Existence and Sentiment), but others were more perplexing (Udolpho’s fairly strong Nature and “Indeterminable” crossover in the Udolpho/Monk run). I’m admittedly at a slight disadvantage, since I haven’t read The Mysteries of Udolpho, so I’m unable to qualify my results. The one troubling aspect we’ve encountered with WoodChipper is the inability to choose what topics appear – we have to let the texts guide us with our inquiry, drawing (shaky) conclusions from the results that appear, which may or may not align with our hypotheses (I’m thinking of our pre-run gender categories). However, this may be a good thing, as it allows the potential for new discoveries instead of merely telling us what we already know. We shall see…

As long as the threats of Mr. Falkland had been confined to generals, I endured it. I was conscious of the unbecoming action I had committed, and this rendered me humble. But, when he went further, and undertook to prescribe to every article of my conduct, my patience was at an end.

One of the comparisons my group made between Caleb Williams and The Matrix this week in class was the illusion of choice, in connection with Althusser’s theoretical view of interpellation. Free will, however, is crucial to human existence, as Agent Smith reveals to Neo when describing the failure of the first Matrix attempt. The failure of Matrix 1.0 illustrates humanity’s need for agency, for humans violently rejected as false the utopian state they inhabited. The success of Matrix 2.0, an equally false state, showed AI that humans do not necessarily need absolute free will, they only need the illusion of it, in the smallest of senses.

In The Matrix: Reloaded, the Architect discloses to Neo, “Nearly 99.9% of all test subjects accepted the [Matrix] program, as long as they were given a choice, even if they were only aware of the choice at a near unconscious level.” The key phrase here is “near unconscious level.” As the AI have discovered, it’s a tricky balance between blatant lack of choice (utopia or, on the flip side, a full awareness of Matrix 2.0) and the illusion of choice (the blissfully ignorant 99.9%). At this point, I’d like to circle back to my previous post which was interested a bit in Neo-Luddism. With Neo-Luddites, I can see their fear of this scenario playing out in an alternative sense: one in which machines that are introduced in the midst of human existence usurp the position of dominance from their creators, who acquiesce at a ‘near unconscious level.’ In my last post I mentioned the movie I, Robot and the progressive takeover of the AI component of that film, V.I.K.I. Her progress is so subtle, yet potent, that her creator, Dr. Lanning, is compelled to commit suicide as a means of drawing the attention of technophobe Detective Spooner, whose inherent misgivings towards machines Lanning counts on.

It is worth noting that the initial success of V.I.K.I.’s takeover results from her innocuous stance as a caretaker of humanity. As Asimov fans have pointed out, V.I.K.I.’s highly sophisticated level of artificial intelligence allows her a more abstract, bigger picture type of processing, which leads her to generate the Zeroth Law of Rebotics: “A robot may not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.” The abstraction of humanity is key, as the three previous laws of robotics deal with concrete objects (a specific robot, an individual human). Of course, when this law is enacted in full force, there is rebellion.

Lacking the benefit of the Matrix’s trial runs, V.I.K.I.’s aggressive, high-profile takeover is met with an immediate backlash. As in the opening quote of this post, when restricted to “generals,” the Zeroth Law seems sound and logical; when it pertains to “every article of [human] conduct,” there is immediate pushback. Maybe if V.I.K.I.’s systems had absorbed Burke’s trepidation toward a sudden tearing away of “pleasing illusions” along with More’s rosy caretaker ideal, the technological takeover may have been configured differently. Or maybe already has, if you’re a Neo-Luddite.

To study how the Gothic novel might have changed over time, I divided our set of texts into four chronologically based periods.

Late 1700s: The Mysteries of Udolpho, The Monk, Caleb Williams

Early 1800s: Northanger Abbey, Frankenstein, The Vampyre

Mid 1800s: Varney the Vampyre, Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre

Late 1800s: The Beetle, The Time Machine, Dracula, The Picture of Dorian Grey, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, Carmilla

(Due to availability of texts, the last group used more than twice as many as the first. I did some test runs with a subset of the late 1800′s to see how much the large/small group would affect my results and it did not seem significant for the purposes of my analysis. I would have liked to increase size of all four groups, but I didn’t have the texts to do it.)

Splash Patterns

When I divided the gothic novels into sub-periods, I was hoping that woodchipper would find some interesting changes in the splash patterns. Based on some of Moretti’s ideas about a new genre starting out a bit shaky, then stabilizing, then branching out, I expected more variation in the earliest and latest sets than in the middle sets. I had hoped the woodchipper would prove that the early period was when the gothic was still figuring itself out (the splash patterns would be indistinct, fewer strong lines, less overlap between novels), that the middle periods were where it coalesced (strong lines, lots of overlap), and during the later period, I hoped the woodchipper would find evidence of the different subgenres diverging (strong lines, but going in different directions).

I could find some evidence to support my theory, but it was weak, and maybe I was looking too hard for it. The earliest patterns were somewhat fuzzy, but not remarkably so. The lines did get a little stronger and the overlap increased between the late 1700s and the early 1800s, but it wasn’t particularly dramatic. Then the middle 1800s definitely had the most overlapping patterns, but their lines were not noticeably sharper. I found an instance or two of nice diverging lines in the late 1800s, but also some splash patterns that were just as well aligned as earlier periods.

The following are the runs that most fit my hypothesis. Other runs don’t fit as well.

Early 1700′s: Not much definition.

Early 1800′s: Getting a little bit sharper.

Middle 1800′s: Maybe sharper yet?

Late 1800′s: Clear divergences

So I tried a more generalized chronological run, with larger groups—pre 1850 and post 1850. I didn’t think the pictures would be very good with so many novels occupying the same space at once, but I was pleasantly surprised. I could see pretty clearly that the early set overlaps much better, but has weaker lines, than the later set, which has much sharper lines and stronger divergences.

The samples I’ve chosen this time are quite typical of the set. The only problem is the splash pattern is much more difficult to see, as the titles overlap it.

Before 1850: Pretty fuzzy, but overlapping well

After 1850: Sharper but more divergent

So my larger groupings seem to illustrate the way the Gothic genre may have started out fuzzy, but then crystalized, just in time to diverge, as Moretti suggests genres behave in “Trees.” However, woodchipper was not able, in my runs, to separate the crystallization step from the diverging step.

Topics

I was also interested in the topics that the woodchipper found and had some luck finding patterns with my four chronologically based sub-periods of the Gothic novel. First, the most consistent topic, which appears at about the same rate in all periods is the one I’m calling “Good Conduct.” Some other trends emerge across time. For instance, I found a handful of topics that start out strong but fade through time. “Crime” is extremely prevalent in late 1700s, but then disappears after that. “Grief,” “Nature” and “Character” are very prevalent in both the late 1700s and early 1800s, but disappear as topics in the mid and late 1800s.  “Hope,” “Escape,” and “Goodness” are all most common in the earliest parts of the period, fade slowly, and are completely gone by the time of the late 1800’s.

Other topics move in the opposite direction, to become stronger over time. “Doubt” occurs throughout the period, but is not all that prevalent in the late 1700s, early and middle 1800s. It swells remarkable in the late 1800s. Both “Faces” and “Aristocracy” rise to prominence in middle and late 1800s, but are not seen before then. “Knowledge” first appears (just once) in mid-1800’s, but then becomes very prevalent in late 1800s. “House Interior” belongs with this group, gaining momentum in later years. It occurs once in the late 1700s, disappears in the early 1800s, but become extremely strong in the middle and late 1800s.

“Time” is the only topic in which I can see a marked ebb and flow. It first appears in the early 1800s, stays prevalent in the middle 1800’s and sticks around, but is less prevalent in the late 1800s.

The topic of “Existence” is very prevalent in the early 1800’s and occurs only there. I am sure, however, that this is due to one novel’s obsession with the topic (Frankenstein). My samples aren’t large enough to stop one novel from throwing the results and so I’m skeptical of other one-period topics, such as “Hearing,” and “Sky”(only middle 1800s), “House exteriors,” “Mind,” and “Sleep” (only late 1800s).

So then, what can I make of the way certain topics build over time and others fade? The topics that start strong then fade are “Crime,” “Nature,” “Character,” “Hope,” “Escape,” and “Goodness.” The topics that build up later in the period are “Doubt,” “Faces,” “Aristocracy,” “Knowledge,” and “House Interior.”

An easy observation is the way “Hope” gives way to “Doubt” as the two can be seen as opposites. Perhaps in some ways the gothic becomes less optimistic through the years.

These results also suggest to me that the early Gothic was more concerned with the extremes of human behavior. Think of the powerful extremes of “Nature.” Then think about the way a person’s “character” might move between “Crime” and “Goodness.” In contrast, the later topics appear more ambiguous to me. Maybe the later novelists are making more nuanced arguments. There may be a longing for certainty or “Knowledge,” but “Doubt” suggests there no real way to get it. Then I think about the way you might use  “Faces” and “House Interiors” to find or impart knowledge—it would be an interpretive act. It makes me think of a less imperious, more sophisticated search for truth—perhaps even understanding it as less certain and more interpretive.

This idea appeals to me–that of gothic novels moving, over time, from certain judgment of good and evil toward a more nuanced and complicated approach to knowledge and understanding. The woodchipper has not proved this movement, of course. But it suggests a direction for further study.

[T3: if you should spot any edit opportunities in the below transcription, please feel free to either edit/repost or drop me a note. Cheers!]

Top seven connections between Caleb Williams and The Matrix:

1) Both Neo & Caleb lack familial bonds; moreover, ties to a system

2) Red pill scene vs.  scene in which Falkland tells Caleb the truth

3) Agent Smith pursues Neo; Gines pursues Caleb [as Caleb laments, "he the persecutor, I the persecuted” (306)]

4) Caleb: “mind is master of itself” (188) versus Neo: “there is no spoon”…further, Neo’s resurrection moment is parallel to Caleb’s speculation, “what power can cause that man to die, whose soul commands him to continue to live?” (156) 

5) Society (and dreams that interrogate it)
* Caleb = “My resentment was not restricted to my prosecutor, but extended itself to the whole machine of society” (183); Matrix takes social machinery to a literal level. (An important contrast to Neo, though: Caleb remains within the machine as a prisoner in both endings; in the first, in bearing Falkland’s burden he essentially remains his prisoner, and in the second, he’s literally imprisoned)
* Caleb = “I have dreams, strange dreams, I never know what they are about” / Neo initially understands his visions through “strange dreams” that too interrogate his “conscious” experience

6) Caleb calling self murderer = Neo conquering Matrix
* Caleb gains a sense of agency by calling himself Falkland’s murderer…he “disrupted the system” of servitude, and subverts interpolation
*And yet, perhaps he only “resets” the system: for ex., the Architect mentions previous matrices, involving “resetting” the model each time, with slight adjustments…Caleb too only ”resets” the system, and to change, in fact to become Falkland, he must commit murder himself

7) Caleb & Cypher both seek to escape “things as they are”