My Inner Feminist Hates Jane Austen

I know that as historians we are not supposed to judge the past by the standards of the present, but in this instance, I just can’t help myself; the piece of my personality that’s a little bit feminist hates Jane Austen novels. I think her male characters could benefit from being socked in the jaw a time or two and I dislike her female characters enough to think that they might actually deserve the idiots they end up married to.

This week’s experiment in data mining reminded me of a paper I had to write for my first year English Literature course on the theme of love and marriage in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. After reading the novel, I ended up going through the book page-by-page and physically highlighting all of the sections pertaining to either love or marriage before I began to formulate my arguments and write my essay. Needless to say, it was an extremely tedious process and one I’m not eager to repeat.

But now it seems there’s a simpler way to gather the same information using a free, Canadian-made digital data mining tool. Using a plain text copy of the novel available on the Project Gutenberg website, I copied the URL into TAPoR (Text Analysis Portal for Research)’s Word List and Concordance Tools, and ran three different word/pattern searches for “love,” “marriage” and “money.” I was interested in seeing how many instances of each word were present in the novel, if the words were used in relation to each other, where in the novel the majority of these three words were used, and if that would help me to come to any new conclusions about the themes of the novel.

The first thing I found out from using TAPoR’s Word List Tool was that the word “love” was used 91 times, “marriage” 66 times and “money” only 29 times in Pride and Prejudice. Considering that we know money was a major factor in the marriages of the period in which Jane Austen was writing, these results were somewhat surprising. I then used the Concordance Tool to tell me where and in what context each word was used. “Love” was used most often in the first third of the novel, with a small spike again towards the very end. “Marriage” spikes mildly towards the end of the first third of the book but is practically off the charts in the last quarter of the book when Austen is working to tie all of the relationships between the characters into neat little bows. And “money”, of course, is mentioned most often just as the discussions about marriage start to heat up.

My favourite aspect of the Concordance Tool is that although you can set the program to only return the specific words you are looking for, it also lets one look at their search results in terms of the context of the words, lines, sentences or paragraphs surrounding the specified words. Essentially the tool allows a historian to look at a text both quantitatively and qualitatively.

The one downfall, as Sara mentioned in her blog post about TAPoR, is that the returned search results lack page references. I understand that this is due to the fact that one can currently only use a plain text copy of a text with the TAPoR tools, but it does seem like an aspect of the program that could benefit from some improvements. This improvement would be especially beneficial for those in an academic environment who must be careful to adhere to copyright protections and site all of their sources in footnotes/endnotes and bibliographies.