Voyant and "Levitical" in Charlotte Bronte's Shirley

"Levitical" and Voyant

In Chapter 1 of Shirley, entitled "Levitical," the novel begins with a humorous discussion between three characters: Peter Malone, Joseph Donne, and Davy Sweetling. These men are curates of local churches and are engaged in a lively conversation that involves Mr. Malone ridiculing the other two gentleman, and then Donne and Sweetling criticizing and ridiculing Malone for his Irish heritage. Suddenly, Mr. Helstone, a reverend enters and chastises the men for their behavior. However, he also seeks to employ the men to attack or simply threaten Mr. Moore, the owner of Hollow's Mill, due to the animosity that his laying off of employees has brought. Moore is replacing workers with machinery, a problem that was very common during this the early 1800s in England. As an introduction to the novel, it seems to set the tone for the Anti-Luddite sentiments of the clergy in West Yorkshire, England.

For this week's response, I decided to input an electronic version of this chapter into Voyant in order to continue my investigation concerning identifying key themes and ideas. For this analysis, I simply used the Cirrus visualization tool in order to understand if it can be used without other tool to understand the text in any meaningful way.

The first Cirrus that was created contained many meaningful nouns that helped to display the basic features of the chapter. Words like "malone" (23), "moore" (12), "donne" (15), "sweeting" (17), "helstone" (5), and "mr" (40) all appeared through the chapter. These items were easy to isolate and determine their relevance: they are characters in the chapter. It is obvious that these terms would appear numerous time due to the author's need to distinguish who is the subject of the chapter at any given time. Due to this analysis, I decided to use the "stop words" function to remove these terms and look for more appropriate terms that could display any thematic relevance.

After the names of these previously mention characters were filtered, I was able to identify other terms that appeared with some frequency. "Curates" refers the three men mentioned earlier in this blog post. These three men are central figures in this chapter and are the central focus of the events within these chapters. By identifying this term through Voyant and it use eleven (11) times, a reader may be able to understand that the chapter revolves around these gentlemen, therefore allowing the reader to understand the framing of this chapter before necessarily reading it. Although the novel is named Shirley, it seems the central characters of the novel seem to be left out, save Rev. Helstone. This chapter seems to be ancillary in that it covers non-major characters and their interactions in an attempt to build up the plot and social circumstances of the novel.

"Mike" also appears quite often in the text, showing up ten (10) times throughout the chapter. This "mike" is referring to Mike Hartley, an Antinomian weaver who had recently been let go of Hollow's Mill, which is under the ownership of Mr. Moore, a central figure in the novel. This term seems to be very important because it helps to highlight the Luddite mindset in West Yorkshire during this time period. Voyant does well t identifying this term; however, without investigating the term more thoroughly, the reader may not understand its significance. Antinomian refers to the belief of some Christians that they are excused from the living according to moral laws and codes due to being "saved." Therefore, Mike is an important character in that he can be forgiven for violence, such as what Rev. Helstone has in mind for Mr. Moore.

One last term that seems to be recurring is the terms "like," which is mentioned seventeen (17) times. I find this term most interesting because it does not necessarily reveal themes or plot arcs. However, it does reveal the writing style of Bronte and her use of similes. Using a content analysis for the word "like," I was able to identify the context of each use of like within the chapter. Out of these seventeen (17) uses, exactly nine (9) of those uses were similes. Other uses include the literal use of "like" to refer to something similar in a non-literary fashion. I came to the conclusion that use of "like" as a simile is by no means particular to Bronte, but it does give the reader an idea of the literary genre of the text. One could assume that texts with an abundance of similes would be more likely than not a literary story and novel.

However useful this type of textual analysis could be is left for debate but understanding the text's themes and common features before or after reading the text seems to have at least some potential for a richer understanding of the text. Instead of going blindly into a text, putting the text into Voyant beforehand seems to at least allow a reader to see common themes that they should look for and pay attention to. Also, using this tool after reading the text could be a way to better understand what was read and/or understanding of the major plot events of the text being analyzed. I would argue that this tool is useful to add to the richness of the text and a reader's understanding of it, but I am not sure how useful it would be in isolation from a through reading of the text.