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.

Frankenstein contains aspects of both of these types of films. This book is not simply a horror story warning people about the dangers of technological advancements, it is a reflection on the way we define monstrosity. Although Victor believes his creation to be a daemon from the instance he sees its eye move, he is making a definitive claim based on the process by which he brought the monster into being and his physical appearance. It is not the wretch that is implicitly monstrous, it is the actions of Victor who irresponsibly pieced him together, brought him to life, and abandoned him, failing to take responsibility for his actions, that are monstrous. In this way, the monster represents Frankenstein’s abject fears. The daemon embodies what he sees to be himself and the work of his own hands and what he clearly wants to see as something that is definitively Other, not him that he can conquer. The wretch necessarily becomes a monster because, for Frankenstein; the creature embodies his own ties to monstrosity and must be conquered. Thus, he labels the creature based on his own need to make the wretch his Other.

When Justine describes the murderer of William, she labels him a “monster” and “the devil himself” (66). In this, she is not referring to a man with a horrible deformity; rather she is basing these judgments on the action committed. The wretch himself only becomes truly monstrous once he has committed deeds that go against the grain of humanity. When the wretch realizes that Frankenstein will not make him a companion, he gives himself over to revenge much like any human would when faced with such circumstances. At the end of the tale, he describes his monstrous actions as a choice: “Evil thenceforth became my good. Urged thus far, I had no choice but to adapt my nature to an element which I had willingly chosen” (188). We see from his narrative that the wretch is initially gentle. He does not even kill animals for food until provoked by Frankenstein’s insensitivity and refusal to understand. Victor constantly runs away from the thing he has created because it is a reminder of his own monstrous deeds in creating an ugly being unfit for society. The wretch has high aspirations, longing to abide by the laws of virtue, but he is denied the ability to overcome his label as a monster due to his unconformity. Appearance prevents his becoming like Rachael and condemns him to act like the Terminator.

As a result, Frankenstein exposes two aspects of how we term monstrosity: 1) a perversion, physical nonconformity and 2) a decision to engage in actions that go against the grain of appropriate societal behavior, active nonconformity. Haunted by the first, the wretch is forced to engage in the latter. This, in turn, causes us to reflect back on the man who made the monster and recognize his own participation in monstrous behavior in abandoning his creation and running away from his responsibility until no one is left but Ernest. We feel sympathy for Frankenstein’s monster because he was abandoned and left to his own devices. He tried to be good, but was met with repulsion by society. The deeds he commits are clearly terrible, but they can be seen also as a cry for help from one who has been denied the ability to demonstrate his ability to function appropriately within society, and thereby save himself from being deemed a monster.