Distinguished Speakers: Keyword Extraction and Critical Analysis with Virginia Woolf's The Waves

From the earliest epistolary novels of the eighteenth
century to the stream-of-consciousness narratives
of the twentieth, English novelists have constructed
narratives in which a single story is told from a variety
of different first-person viewpoints. The motivations for this technique are as ramified as the variations of
the technique itself; some authors have used it to
demonstrate the contingent nature of subjectivity, while others have employed the technique merely as a way of increasing dramatic irony and tension. In most cases,
the individuated chorus of speakers is distinguished
stylistically. One might compare, in this context, the scientific formality of the male characters in Dracula with the more personable journalistic endeavors of Mina and the twittering effusions of Lucy; the unprepossessing
nobility of Hartright with the urbane wickedness of
the Count in The Woman in White; the fractured, acausal narrative of Benjy Compson with the neurotic eloquence of his brother Quentin in The Sound and the Fury.
Virginia Woolf’s 1931 novel The Waves employs this
approach to narrative in order to trace the lives of six friends
from early childhood to old age. The characters each tell their stories at seven distinct stages of their lives. Each monologue is clearly delineated, and all six characters share some of the same experiences at different points in the narrative.
Yet some critics claim these characters are not differentiated from one another stylistically, and that the distinguishing
features of the characters have more to do with the
complex symbolic landscape each one inhabits -- a motif
foregrounded by the lack of stylistic differentiation.
J. Guiget, for example, maintains that “these are not voices,
in the sense that they are not differentiated. But for the ‘Bernard said’ or ‘Jinny said’ that introduces them, they would be indistinguishable; they have the same texture,
the same substance, the same tone” (283). Likewise
M. Rosenthal suggests that although the speeches are
highly stylized, the language is undifferentiated. He goes
on to say that “although the different speakers all have different points of view and preoccupations, they use the same kind of sentence rhythms and employ similar kinds
of image patterns” (144). For these critics, the six
characters are not characters at all, but voices
indistinguishable by means of language or imagery.
There is, however, an opposing critical position that stresses the importance of stylistic differentiation among the characters in the novel (the specific contours of this difference being the main point of scholarly contention). Charlotte Mendez draws the line of differentiation along the gender axis. Hermione Lee emphasizes the distinction
between the worldly speakers and the more solitary
speakers. Susan Gorsky emphasizes the individuality of the characters through a clustering of their primary images. According to her research, “the speech of each character is made distinct within the mask of the formal monologue by the repetition of key phrases and images. Diction varies from one speaker to the next because of the words repeated in the image patterns” (454).
With this critical backdrop, certain questions naturally emerge. Do the characters employ similar image patterns or distinctive language patterns? Is there a way to group characters based on similarities in their speeches? Are there six voices in the novel or is there only one?
Our goal was not to adjudicate the matter, but to seek further entry points into these axes of intelligibility. Knowing that vocabulary (symbolic or not) would be one vector of interest, we employed several variations of the tf-idf formula as a way to separate the characters.
Tf-idf -- a popular formula in information retrieval -- weighs term frequency in a document against the
frequency of that term throughout a corpus. By assigning
weights to terms, it attempts to re-fit a word frequency list so that terms are not distributed according to Zipf’s law. We compared every word token in each of the six characters to every other character’s vocabulary, and used the resulting lists of “distinctive terms” as the basis for further reflection on the individuation of character in Woolf’s novel.
In generating our results, we had recourse to Tamarind (one of the software subsystems for the nora project). This system, which acts as an XML pre-processor for scholarly text analysis, tokenizes, parses, and determines
part-of-speech markers for each distinct token in a
corpus. Using this system as a base, we were able to conduct
comprehensive term-comparisons using only 50 lines of code (in Common Lisp). We therefore think of this
project as a test case for the feasibility of using Tamarind as way to simplify complex text analysis procedures of the sort envisioned by the larger nora project.
In this paper, we present the results of our investigation into Woolf’s narrative, while also looking at the ways in which the software architecture for nora enabled us to undertake the study quickly and easily. Drawing on similar work with tf-idf in digital humanities (e.g.
Rydberg-Cox’s work with Ancient Greek literature), we suggest some of the ways in which the results of keyword visualized. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, we discuss the ways in which the computerized generation of “suggestive pattern” can enable critical reflection in literary study.
References
Gorsky, Susan (1972). “The Central Shadow:
Characterization in The Waves.” Modern Fiction Studies 18.3: 449-466.
Guiguet, Jean (1965). Virginia Woolf and Her Works. London: Hogarth.
Lee, Hermione. Virginia Woolf. New York: Vintage, 1996.
Mendez, Charlotte Walker (1994). “Creative
Breakthrough: Sequence and the Blade of
Consciousness in Virgina Woolf’s The Waves.”
Virginia Woolf, Critical Assessments. Ed. Eleanor McNees. Mountfield, England: Helm Information.
Rosenthal, Michael (1979). Virginia Woolf. London: Routledge.
Rydberg-Cox, Jeffrey A. (2002). “Keyword Extraction from Ancient Greek Literary Texts .” LLC 17: 231-44.
Woolf, Virginia (1931). The Waves. New York: Harcourt.