{"id":2075,"date":"2014-10-25T07:24:57","date_gmt":"2014-10-25T12:24:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/winedarksea.org\/?p=2075"},"modified":"2014-10-25T10:55:39","modified_gmt":"2014-10-25T15:55:39","slug":"the-novel-and-moral-philosophy-2-telling-and-feeling-aunts-and-letters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/winedarksea.org\/?p=2075","title":{"rendered":"The Novel and Moral Philosophy 2: Telling and Feeling, Aunts and Letters"},"content":{"rendered":"

Before I begin commenting on what I see in Serendip\u2019s findings, I think it is worth providing some general information about the work from which the screen shot below is taken. The author, Charlotte Lennox (1730-1804), is most known for her novel The Female Quixote<\/em> (1752), a picaresque about a romance addict who perpetually confuses the plots of the novels she reads as reality itself. Euphemia<\/em> (1790), the last novel Lennox (1730-1804) published before she died, unfolds its narrative through the 12-year correspondence between two friends, Maria Harley and Euphemia Neville. The young women are separated by Euphemia\u2019s move to colonial America with her husband, a British lieutenant. As a domestic novel, Euphemia <\/em>devotes part of its narrative to depicting the unhappiness of this marriage. The novel is also remarkable for its depiction of American colony life in the province of New York during the middle of the eighteenth century from a British female perspective. In this novel and in her earlier Harriot Stuart <\/em>(1750), Lennox drew on her own experience of growing up in colonial Albany. True to epistolary format, individual letters from the correspondents organize the novel, rather than chapters. The screenshot I am commenting on comes from Letter II.<\/p>\n

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When looking at the screen shot of Euphemia<\/em> labeled TEXT: K062108.001 above, I saw what Witmore saw: words identifying social titles such as \u201cSir\u201d and \u201cLady,\u201d as well as family relations such as \u201caunt,\u201d score highest as novel words. Yet there are slight distinctions between the familial words themselves. While \u201caunt\u201d is shaded most deeply as a novel word, \u201cuncle\u201d is a shade lighter, and \u201cdaughter\u201d is a shade lighter still.<\/p>\n

The obvious conclusion to draw from these slight distinctions of shading is that the word \u201caunt\u201d appears more frequently in novels than the word \u201cuncle,\u201d and the word \u201cuncle\u201d features more in novels than the word \u201cdaughter.\u201d This is not to say, though, that eighteenth-century novels are more about aunts and uncles than about daughters. In fact a number of them are about or feature female characters that are at the stage in their lives where they are transitioning from being daughters to wives, and the novels themselves have the didactic purpose of educating female readers. In this regard, I think it\u2019s important to recognize that topic word<\/em> frequency might tell a different story from the frequency of a topic itself. The distribution of words in a topic matters.<\/p>\n

Other high scoring novel words are \u201ctold\u201d and \u201cdear.\u201d Both words in themselves are interesting to me as they are highly suggestive of the eighteenth-century novel\u2019s history. \u201cDear,\u201d for instance, is doubly significant in that history. It is a word that can be used to convey affectionate regard for someone when referring to or addressing them, or to address someone at the beginning of a letter. Both senses of the words are used on this page. Why does Serendip mark the word \u201cdear\u201d so intensely red in both cases?<\/p>\n

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The word \u201cdear,\u201d in its guise of addressing or referring to someone with affection, registers the age of sensibility in which the novel genre developed. (It does so without being an invention of the epistolary novel.) \u00a0Sensibility celebrated the ready expression of sympathy and feeling for other humans as a mark of high moral standing as well as social prestige. It promoted a language pattern that displays one\u2019s emotional disposition towards another, such as attaching the word \u201cdear\u201d as a term of endearment to someone\u2019s name. In its function of representing social relations between characters in day-to-day contexts, the eighteenth-century novel would inevitably capture such language patterns. As a popular medium of entertainment, the novel promulgated the patterns further. One might argue that the rise of the novel was in itself a major factor in sensibility\u2019s growth and development as a pervasive cultural movement.<\/p>\n

On the other hand, the word \u201cdear\u201d as a form of address used to begin a letter is also a high scorer as a novel word. Like the other usage of the word, it is invariably attached to a proper name, or the role of an identified person, such as \u201cfriend.\u201d\u00a0 The first canonical novel to spur the cultural movement of sensibility was an epistolary novel, Samuel Richardson\u2019s Pamela<\/em>. So influential was this novel on the development of the novel genre, literary historians of the early 20th<\/sup> century identified it as the <\/em>\u201cfirst novel\u201d written in English. This passage from Richardson\u2019s Pamela<\/em> (volume III, letter II) displays the same pattern observed in Euphemia<\/em>:<\/p>\n

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A high number of eighteenth-century novels were written as epistolary narratives. Fiction that presented a series of letters written from the point of view of a character created a sense of intimacy and immediate involvement with narrative events in recognizably day-to-day contexts. Such experiences were not available in earlier forms of literature. This is one of the reasons why epistolary narrative was such a novel (new-seeming) and popular genre for eighteenth-century readers, and why it was conducive to the flourishing of sensibility in eighteenth-century culture.<\/p>\n

A key moment in the novel takes place when one of the main characters, Mr. B., undergoes a conversion from villainous sexual aggressor to loving suitor of the heroine because he was so \u201cmoved\u201d by the letters to her parents in which she details her ordeals: \u201cO my dear girl!\u00a0 you have touched me sensibly<\/strong> with your mournful tale, and your reflections upon it.\u201d\u00a0 Likewise, eighteenth-century readers were \u201csensibly touched\u201d by Pamela\u2019s letters\u2014the very letters that make up the novel\u2014to the extent that they could not get enough of the style of fiction in which they appeared. Eighteenth-century fiction writers imitated Pamela<\/em>\u2019s epistolary format as well as theme of \u201cvirtue in distress\u201d for several more decades of the remaining century. It is no surprise, then, that in the epistolary novel Euphemia<\/em> (1790) by Charlotte Lennox (a novelist Richardson whom admired and supported), Serendip is picking up on \u201cdear,\u201d used as a form of address in beginning a letter, and as a more general novel topic word that appears over and over again.<\/p>\n

It should not be surprising that the word \u201ctold\u201d is picked up as a high scoring novel topic word as well. Telling is an activity of narration, and the novel itself is a narrative genre:<\/p>\n

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Narratives in eighteenth-century novels often involve the revelation of stories about unhappy or unfortunate events that happened in the past, events that affect the characters of the novel. This is certainly the case with Gothic novels, which derive their narrative tensions and conflicts from the inadvertent uncovering of long suppressed criminal events and actions. For instance, the epigraph for Ann Radcliffe\u2019s non-epistolary Gothic novel, A Sicilian Romance<\/em>, is a line from Hamlet<\/em> spoken by Hamlet\u2019s father: \u201cI could a tale unfold.\u201d In an epistolary narrative, where the fictional letter writer is reporting to the addressee what has already happened, the act of telling would be in the past tense, \u201ctold.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cTelling,\u201d as Stuart Sherman reminds us in Telling Time<\/em>,is not only what narratives do (they tell what happens in time), but also what clocks<\/em> do with time. The fact that Serendip shades \u201chour\u201d a deep red conveys the time-specific quality of narrative during this period, its concern with the quotidian and the everyday above all. A sentence from the screenshot of a page from Lennox\u2019s Euphemia <\/em>certainly captures this sense of \u201chour\u201d: \u201cShe complains of a pain in her breast; of shortness of breath; and declares, that when she has read to you an hour or two, she feels as if she was ready to expire with a strange oppression and faintness.\u201d In this sentence, the quotidian context of the word \u201chour\u201d is strikingly apparent in its connection to the experience of a character\u2019s body at a specific moment in time.<\/p>\n

The very premise of epistolary correspondence is to overcome not just spatial distance, but also temporal disconnection. The letter-writer wants to replace one\u2019s absence from another\u2019s life with a sense of living through the same experiences one has had by retelling those moments through the medium of the letter. By being specific about time\u2014how long things take by the hour, for instance (\u201cwhen she has read to you an hour or two\u201d), this sense of intimacy with someone else\u2019s everyday experiences becomes possible.<\/p>\n

In shading darkly those words that denote familial relations and social standing (aspects of subjectivity that render oneself legible in day-to-day social settings), as well as words related to conventions of epistolary and emotional address such as \u201cdear,\u201d as well as words signifying temporality, such as \u201chour,\u201d Serendip picks up on the novel\u2019s reality effects. It picks up, in other words, the features of eighteenth-century novels that defined its groundbreaking method of realism.<\/p>\n

Even as it confirms and reinforces critical commonplaces about the novel\u2019s generic markers\u2014especially those concerning its status as a unique mediator for realism, verisimilitude and individual personhood\u2014Serendip also reveals generic tendencies that have not been so well-covered by literary historians. The words shaded blue\u2014or, the words strongly related to moral philosophy\u2014indicate this. Scholars such as Ian Watt have argued that the novel\u2019s generic identity lies in the way it represents experience through seventeenth-century epistemologies, such as the subjectivism of Ren\u00e9 Descartes and the empiricism of John Locke. These philosophical tendencies are already apparent in the novel words\u2014red-shaded\u2014I have commented on above; the words all relate to the assumption that events and experiences derive from subjective standpoints, and are realizable through their placement on the time-space continuum.<\/p>\n

However, the words shaded blue by Serendip reveal another level of philosophical realism in that they come out of a vocabulary of moral philosophy that Serendip helps us to recognize. What I notice about these words is that they are abstract nouns and impersonal words that are detached or detachable from human agents. They are also adjectives or adverbs that relate to philosophical measurements such as \u201cnatural,\u201d \u201cperfect,\u201d \u201cperfectly\u201d and impersonal seeming actions, such as \u201cenumerate\u201d and \u201cproduced.\u201d<\/p>\n

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I also notice that some \u201cmoderate\u201d or \u201clight\u201d novel words\u2014words shaded medium or light red as opposed to dark red\u2014do not seem as if they would be out of place in the list of philosophy words from moral philosophy texts. These include \u201cmind,\u201d \u201cconsequence,\u201d \u201copinion,\u201d \u201clife,\u201d and such abstract nominalizations as \u201cviewing\u201d and \u201cdisposition.\u201d\u00a0 (Indeed, given the way that the topic model works, some of these words would<\/em> at times belong to that topic, but that is for Eric and Mike to explain in a future post.) This notable tendency toward abstraction in the novel might express some historically distinctive formality of social language in eighteenth-century England, or even a higher state of fusion, during this time, between works of fiction and non-fiction, or both. We should investigate these possibilities a more focused way, perhaps with some of the techniques we are getting a glimpse of here.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Before I begin commenting on what I see in Serendip\u2019s findings, I think it is worth providing some general information about the work from which the screen shot below is taken. The author, Charlotte Lennox (1730-1804), is most known for her novel The Female Quixote (1752), a picaresque about a romance addict who perpetually confuses […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":17,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2075","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/winedarksea.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2075","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/winedarksea.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/winedarksea.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/winedarksea.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/17"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/winedarksea.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2075"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/winedarksea.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2075\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2081,"href":"https:\/\/winedarksea.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2075\/revisions\/2081"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/winedarksea.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2075"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/winedarksea.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2075"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/winedarksea.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2075"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}