Frankenstein and Thematic Understanding through Voyant

Frankenstein "Chapter 5" Voyant Analysis

This week, I chose to look at "Chapter 5" of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, the chapter in which Victor marvels and laments at his creation of the Monster. I chose this chapter because this was one of the first chapters in which the genius of the scientist is realized by both the audience and by Victor himself. I decided to use Voyant to see if I could use this tool to pull out relevant thematic knowledge before I read the chapter. By doing this, I hoped to prove the usefulness of this tool for understanding the general happenings in terms of thematic importance for literary works.

Cirrus

By looking at the Cirrus visual, I was able to see a few things. The word "eyes" appears largely besides words like "time," "Clerval," and "felt," emphasizing their importance. Understanding who the protagonist of the novel is, I assumed that the use of "eyes" would denote a way that Victor is seeing things through his own perspective. However, upon inspection of the text, the use of "eyes" denotes the actual physical form mostly, not a symbol for the perspective of Victor.

The word "Clerval" was easy to understand, as he was mentioned earlier in the novel. Victor's friend would seem to be an integral piece of this chapter, and indeed he is; Clerval serves to illuminate the demeanor of Frankenstein after the horror of his creation is realized. Knowing that he is possibly important to the text allowed me to prepare for his appearance, studying the text to understand his purpose within Frankenstein.

Trends

Looking at the trend data on Voyant for "Chapter 5," I was able to see the narrative arc in a way. The term "Clerval," for instance, showed me that about halfway through the chapter, the character would appear and would remain throughout. I was also able to see that "time" seems to be a constant function of the chapter, appearing throughout the text in various intervals. So, before reading the chapter I was able to identify a theme that seems to be important. "Time" seems to be important to this chapter, and to the novel, in a few ways: 1) much time has elapsed since Victor's childhood and the last time he saw Elizabeth and his family; 2) the story is being told from the perspective of a flashback; and 3) the time Victor has spent on his endeavor of animation has taken up much of his life, time that cannot be returned. Upon inspection of "Chapter 5," it seems that "time" is important for the same reasons I have observed earlier in the text; namely the temporal aspects of the author's travels from Geneva to Ingolstadt. These beliefs were also supported by a collocate analysis of "time."

Collocates

Lastly, the word "felt" appeared significantly within the analysis. Looking at the data from Voyant, I came to hypothesize that "felt" would be significant in displaying the internal feeling of the protagonist, Victor. The correlation data from Voyant showed significance for one use of the word "felt" with any other words: that word was "capable." I took this to infer that Frankenstein was confident in his abilities, so "feeling capable" does not seem very important. Upon inspection of the text, however, "felt" appeared to—as I had expected—display the internal feelings of the protagonist more so than it displayed his capability.

Correlation

So, upon inspection and reading of the text after performing the analysis first, I was able to grasp a few of the concepts and themes, although the thematic messages did not always appear within Voyant. I would conclude that using these types of tools to get a basic understanding of what to expect would be useful; however, using these tools to try and understand the actual text and happenings within them does not seem to work so well. So much for hoping! These tools seem to help enrich a reader's understanding of the text and pull out important thematic ideas, and in doing so, they should be used for interpretive purposes more often