Understanding Gender and Character Agency in the 19th Century Novel

• Main Authors: Matthew Jockers, Gabi Kirilloff
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at McGill University 2016-12-01
• Series: Journal of Cultural Analytics
• Subjects: Cultural Analytics; Digital Humanities
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/sw85m

The relationship between character identity and character action is an established topic of literary study. In Morphology of the Folktale, Vladimir Propp argues against the separation of "who acts" from "the question of the actions themselves," instead advocating an approach that studies characters according to their functions. Similarly, the notion of the literary archetype, as influenced by both Joseph Campbell and Carl Jung, highlights the way in which what characters do influences the way we perceive who characters are. The notion of literary stereotypes is also tied to this discussion. As Bamman, O'Connor, and Smith observe in their study of personas in film, stereotypical characters are "defined by a fixed set of actions widely known to be representative of a class." While actions are only one part of a complex network of descriptive tools that authors may use to create characters, they may offer us a useful insight into the way that certain behaviors can align with various character identity traits in literature. A study of character action may serve as a proxy to not only demarcate character types, but also to investigate what behaviors, and types of behaviors, were conventionally aligned with different groups of characters. Bamman, Underwood, and Smith (2014) attempt something similar in "A Bayesian Mixed Effects Model of Literary Character." In that work, the authors focus on modeling specific character "personas" by studying semantically related words that occur in proximity to character mentions. The authors note that "articulating what a true 'persona' might be for characters is inherently problematic" and they acknowledge that the "personas learned so far [by their model] do not align neatly with character types known to literary historians." Nevertheless, their study revealed compelling associations between certain personas and certain genres and, more importantly for our current research, that certain personas were "clearly gendered." In noting the later, the authors write that "analysis of latent character types might cast new light on the history of gender in fiction." Our work attempts a more direct and specific study of character agency in the context of character gender. To do this, we explore trends in behavior associated with male and female characters in 3,329 19th century novels.