Her Hands On Her Hips: Body Language In Children’s Literature

This poster will present our digital reading approach to body language in fiction. We use the web application CLiC – Corpus Linguistics in Context (freely available at clic.bham.ac.uk) and a range of corpus linguistic methods to identify gendered patterns of body language in literature for children. We are particularly interested in how the presentation of body language has changed over time and how the changes we identify reflect socially structured and gendered patterns of behaviour. We therefore work with two different data sets: the ChiLit corpus - a corpus of 19th century children’s literature (4.4 million words) and a corpus of contemporary children’s literature - i.e. texts published after 2000 drawn from the
Oxford Children’s Corpus
(12.9 million words)
.
We use 5-grams (also referred to as ‘clusters’ in the corpus linguistic literature) to identify candidates for body language clusters (cf. Mahlberg, 2013). We specifically select clusters that contain nouns referring to body parts (e.g.
hands, eyes
), bodily functions (e.g.
breath
) or pieces and parts of clothing (e.g.
pockets
). Focusing on 43 clusters we identify trends of diachronic development in body language descriptions.

We both find clusters that seem to no longer play a significant role in contemporary data (e.g.
looked up in his face
) as well as emerging clusters, such as
got to his feet and
or
a hand on his shoulder.
We also compare differences between body language clusters that tend to occur with male or female characters. For this comparison, we draw on the occurrence of personal and possessive pronouns (
he, she, his, him, her
) that serve as an approximation to calculate the overall population of male and female characters in the texts under investigation. In line with other relevant literature confirming gender imbalance in fiction (e.g. Underwood et al., 2018), we only found one typically “female” cluster:
her hands on her hips.
Our findings further show, for instance, that
head
as a body part seems to be typical of clusters that tend to occur more frequently, or even exclusively, with male characters, e.g.
the back of his head
and
his head in his hands
are such “male” clusters in both corpora. Examples like
his head in his hands
have corresponding female clusters (
her head in her hands
) with similar frequencies in the 19th century texts, while in contemporary data the “male” variant is more frequent.

Examples of typically “male” clusters in ChiLit contain the word
pocket
:
his hands in his pockets
and
put it in his pocket.
In the contemporary data, these clusters still do not figure often with female characters, but at least pockets do get mentioned: the cluster
out of his/her pocket and
is an example that is found for both genders. There are two other typically male clusters:
his eyes fixed on the
(both in ChiLit and the contemporary data) and the emerging cluster
the corner of his eye.
Other clusters that include the plural form
eyes
also start off occurring with both male and female characters in ChiLit but then undergo a shift towards ‘maleness’. We found one cluster,
with tears in his/her eyes,
for which a shift from female to more general – less gendered – usage can be identified. Importantly, a detailed analysis reveals how different usages of clusters are linked to changes in social contexts.

This poster will not only show gendered patterns of body language, it also demonstrates how corpus linguistic methods contribute to wider concerns in digital humanities. Corpus linguistic methods link literary and linguistic analysis through the computer-assisted study of patterns in texts. The poster contributes to a broader area of research within corpus stylistics, cf. Ruano San Segundo’s (2018) investigation into gendered patterns of reporting verbs in Charles Dickens or Čermáková and Mahlberg’s (2018) study of gendered speech in Carroll’s
Alice in Wonderland.

Bibliography

Čermáková, A. and Mahlberg, M.
(2018). Translating fictional characters – Alice and the Queen from the Wonderland in English and Czech. In Čermáková, A. and Mahlberg, M. (eds), The Corpus Linguistics Discourse. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 223–254.

Mahlberg, M.
(2013). Corpus Stylistics and Dickens’s Fiction. London: Routledge.

Ruano San Segundo, P.
(2018). An analysis of Charles Dickens’s gender-based use of speech verbs. Gender and Language, 12 (2): 192–217.

Underwood, T., Bamman, D. and Lee, S.
(2018). The transformation of Gender in English language fiction. Cultural Analytics,
http://culturalanalytics.org/2018/02/thetransformation-of-gender-in-english-language-fiction/
(DOI: 10.7910/DVN/TEGMGI)