I’ve recently been interested in the connection between letters and the bodies of the people who write and receive them. In what ways are letters extensions of peoples’ bodies? How does the materiality of letters sent across space affect the content of those letters? What is the function of letters in novels, epistolary and otherwise? More specifically, how might nineteenth century courtship letters have embodied the sexuality of correspondents?
With this last question in mind, I decided use Voyant to mine five early American sentimental novels. I haven’t read all of these novels, but most sentimental novels involve some sending of letters, so I figured something interesting might pop up.
When looking at word trends, I found that Foster’s The Coquette frequently used the term “letters,” which is unsurprising because it is an epistolary novel. Uncle Tom’s Cabin frequently uses the term “body,” but not “letters.” This is interesting, but not very surprising, since Uncle Tom’s Cabin is more explicitly about bodies. I also noticed that Caroline Hentz’s book Love After Marriage uses a high number of body-related words, such as heart, eyes, hand, face. The most frequently used word in the corpus is, by far, said, which draws attention to sentimental novels’ focus on dialogue.
I actually found the differences between the five novels more illuminating than the similarities. I had assumed the five word clouds would be close to identical, with words like love and heart looming over the rest. In fact, each novel has a somewhat distinct set of words connected to it. One is distinguished by dark, gothic words, for example, while another has a lot of romantic, abstract words.
I was happier with my results on HathiTrust. It was surprisingly difficult to curate a group of 30 texts I wanted to mine, but I finally settled on collections of letters, on which I used the topic modeling algorithm. This was satisfying, because my strongest topics were related to letter writing (letters, write, signed, sent, received) and bodies/nature (eyes, feet, face, beauty).
A couple of take-away thoughts: 1) a larger and/or more closely related corpus is likely to produced more readable results. 2) with smaller corpuses (like my 5 sentimental novels), a program like Voyant is more likely to reveal nuances in tone and rhetoric than highly specific connections. If I were to move forward with this project, I would be interested in exploring the context in which correspondents write about their bodies–is it literal, metaphorical, etc.? More specifically, do bodily descriptions depend on the motive of the letter? For example, one topic revealed by the topic modeling algorithm is related to the state/public/government. Bodies would probably function differently in this grouping than in the friend/heart/love topic.
