Formulaic Emotion: Reading Victorian Deathbed Scenes from a Distance

There is perhaps no other scene as quintessentially
Victorian as the deathbed scene. In one of his
more humorous observations, Garrett Stewart observes:
“Some characters must die in any period of novel writing.
As everyone allows, characters die more often,
more slowly, and more vocally in the Victorian age than
ever before or since” (8). A scene such as the death of
Little Nell in The Old Curiosity Shop, which has now
come to represent over-the-top Victorian sentimentality,
once “sent most of literate England into mourning”
(Kuchich 59).
In deathbed scenes, Victorian authors convey much more
than just an emotional moment that advances the plot.
In the same manner in which Victorian mourning rituals
became formal indicators of the status and worthiness
of a deceased person, authors adopted patterns serving
as markers to the reader about how to feel about the deceased
character. Like mourning practices, such fictionalized
scenes were expected to fit a formula, designed to generate sympathetic feelings in the reader. Deathbed
scenes solicit an affective response by meeting the
readers’ expectations for a “good death” and enveloping
these scenes with a certain bittersweet pathos. The formal
and methodical practices of Victorian mourning thus
manifested in deathbed scenes of the period. In these
deathbed scenes, there is a code within the language that
aims to elicit an affective response in the reader.
In my worki, I use a combination of close and distant
reading lenses to uncover the low-level patterns in vocabulary
that equate to the higher-level formation of
deathbed scenes as a literary topos, a framework within
which authors can utilize certain linguistic and thematic
patterns to manipulate the emotions of readers. I am
building upon Franco Moretti’s conceptions of a “quantitative
approach to literature” (4), which I find productively
compatible with Garrett Stewart’s structuralist interpretation
regarding the “style of the death sentence,”
in which he argues that death scenes use specialized rhetoric
(figures of speech and grammatical devices), which
“can be sorted out if not strictly codified” (7).
I begin by employing WordHoard, a “philological tool”
designed to precipitate “the close reading and scholarly
analysis of deeply tagged texts” (http://wordhoard.northwestern.
edu) to build lexicons of my workset of sixteen
deathbed scenes. These lists form the beginning of the
ways that micro-patterns parallel larger thematic patterns
in the texts. For example, the Victorian ideal of the
“good death” is apparent in the vocabulary: “good,”
“better,” and “great” all appear in the top twenty adjectives.
There is a physical materiality in the list of nouns,
which includes specific parts of the body: the “hand,” the
“face,” the “heart,” and the “eye.” Finally, in both the
list of nouns and the lists of verb, words that reflect an
interest in last looks and words stand out: “word,”
“speak,” “tell,” “look,” “see,” “say,” and “hear.”
Figure A. Words that are Over-Represented in Victorian
Deathbed Scenes Compared to Testbed
The raw count of a word is not always the best measure
of its significance, however, so I also employ Dunning’s
Log Likelihood Ratio to provide a measurement
of which words were over-represented and which were
under-represented in the deathbed scenes compared to
my testbed set of eighty mid-Victorian novels. I thus
was able to obtain a statistical measure of words that are
significant in deathbed scenes. I then input the full list of
significant words into a Wordle wordcloud visualization
(see Fig A).ii By using Dunning’s log likelihood ratio, I
was able to produce visualizations not just of the most
common words, but of the words that are most salient in
deathbed scenes.
The words that are over-represented in deathbed scenes
correspond to the thematic patterns of deathbed scenes
identified above. Words that set the scene are scattered
across the visualization, hinting at descriptions of the
bed, the room, the pillow, the chamber, and even the
hospital. Words corresponding to illness also are prominent,
including “fever,” “sick,” “nurse,” “doctor,” and
“sick-room.” Moreover, the word cloud is a reminder
of how death is a domestic affair. Not only is there an
emphasis on that most domestic of spaces, the bedroom,
but the vocabulary emphasizes intimate relationships—
“mamma,” “papa,” “darling,” and “child.” This latter
word also crosses over into demonstrating a concern
with innocence and diminutiveness, especially when
read with to the related “baby” and “little.” The visualization
also reflects the thematic importance of last
words and touches—the “lips” that “speak,” “whisper,”
or “kiss,” the “last” “farewell,” the final “breath.” Emotions
run high in these scenes, which are filled with
“sob[s],” “tear[s],” and “cry[ing].” The language captured
in the word cloud also appears somewhat elevated,
with the prominent “thou,” the lofty and interestingly
negative “nought,” and the somewhat perplexing presences
of both “madame” and “madam.” Finally, we
again see evidence here in the vocabulary of the deathbed
scene of the idea of a “good death”—the loved ones
are sent to “heaven” having obtained “forgiveness” or
having learned to “forgive.” They have earned “mercy”
and are “happy” in their final moments.
While a close reader may be able to get a sense of which
words are used more often in sentimental scenes, the
Dunning’s Log Likelihood ratio enabled me to discover
information that a scholar would never be able to obtain
without these technologies: that which is absent. What
the word cloud does not include is almost as informative
as what it does. Given the prominence of mourning
in Victorian culture, there is almost no trace of the formal
trappings of mourning in this snapshot of deathbed
scenes. While the words “coffin,” “archdeacon,” and
“grave” appear, the visualization shows that the topos is much more concerned with describing the death than
with detailing the mourning. The authors, it seems, rely
less on the pomp and ritual of ceremony to convey a
sense of the character’s worth. A description of the moment
is sufficient to convey the “good death;” the burial
and the mourning – the public moments in the church
and graveyard – are largely absent. While this seems
to contradict my earlier hypothesis that deathbed scenes
are reflections of Victorian mourning practices, the act
of writing itself creates the public moment of grief otherwise
missing from the narrative. Authors brought the
intimate moment of death to the public eye, effectively
drawing the reader and creating a community of mourners.
It is the relationship between the reader and the
character that serves as proof of the character’s “worth.”
This makes the list and visualization of the words that
are under-represented in deathbed scenes even more
striking (see Fig B). One of the most under-represented
words is “holy,” and it is followed by “church,” “saint,”
“faith,” “believe” and “truth.” It seems the Victorian
deathbed scene is more concerned with relationships,
marked by words such as “forgiveness,” “mercy,” “forgive,”
and “comfort” than with personal convictions and
declarations of faith. The deathbed scene is a moment in
which the dying person connects one final time with living.
As such, there is an emphasis on embodiment in the
over-represented words: “cheek,” “breast,” “hand,” and
“face.” These moments are presented less as “holy” than
they are as deeply, profoundly, human moments.
Figure B. Words that are Under-Represented in Victorian
Deathbed Scenes Compared to Testbed
Besides the surprising lack of emphasis on holiness
and faith, the word cloud reveals and highlights other
words that don’t represent the essence of the Victorian
deathbed scene. Words that have to do with business
and class (“money,” “power,” “business,” “lord,” and
“gentleman”) don’t belong at the deathbed. There’s also
a trend toward generalities, including general groups
of “people”: “person,” “woman,” and “girl.” Even
though “family,” “daughter,” and “father” make the
list of under-represented words, they are more generic
terms when compared to the more familiar “mammas”
and “papas.” Tellingly, words of uncertainty also appear
prominent in the visualization of under-used words in
deathbed scenes, including “suppose,” “perhaps,” and
“doubt.” The deathbed scene, by nature a scene of resolution,
leaves no room for incertitude. Altogether, the
words that are not used, the “negatives,” serve as a sort
of shadow to the “positives,” giving dimension to the
themes and patterns that stood out in the first visualization.
The increased scope, scale and speed of text analysis
take me beyond my preconceived notions about the
texts, revealing trends visible only with the perspective
of distance. Rather than representing the end result
of the experiment, the data from my experiments
inspired more sharply focused readings of the texts. A
visualization like the Wordle image of under- and overrepresented
words should not, and really cannot, stand
as evidence in proving a hypothesis. The visualization
is simply not empirical in nature. In a way, word clouds,
as visual representations of criticism, can be seen as art
useful in representing other modes of art. And, as with
any instance of artistic representation, they remain open
to interpretation. Distant reading can only be a viable
methodology for literary study if it is used in this way:
as a new lens for examining the text and as a means to
inspire interpretations and readings based on the new
perspective.
Notes
iThe project is also one of the “use cases” that drives
development for the MONK Project (http://monkproject.
org).
iiPlease see http://wordle.net
References
Kuchich, John. “Death Worship among Victorians: The
Old Curiosity Shop.” PMLA 95.1 (Jan 1980): 58-72.
Moretti, Franco. Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models
for a Literary Theory. New York: Verso, 2005.
Stewart, Garrett. Death Sentences: Styles of Dying in
Victorian Fiction. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard UP: 1984.
WordHoard. Northwestern University, 2008. <http://
wordhoard.northwestern.edu>.
Wordle. Jonathan Feinberg, dev. <http://www.wordle.
net>.