I have to admit that I had a lot of difficulty with this project, and I think it stems from the fact that I had trouble finding significant meaning in word frequency, at first. I decided to look at The Great Gatsby, but after uploading the text and taking out all of the proper names, nothing really stood out. It was only after I plugged in four more Fitzgerald books (The Beautiful and the Damned, Flappers and Philosophers, This Side of Paradise, and Tales of the Jazz Age) that I came up with something noteworthy. You will notice from the following word cloud that man, men and Mr. are some of the most frequently used words in the collection.
This, of course, led me to take a feminist approach to the interpretation of the data (which is more familiar to an English student than reading graphs and looking at numbers). Woman is not even on the list, although girl is, which points to the infantalization of women in our culture (unless Fitzgerald is literally writing about female children, which we can check by looking at the following table).
I copied all five texts into a single file, so that I could graph the occurrence of these words and look at the raw data. The following graph shows the prevalence of girl over woman or lady.
Finally, we can see how man and men dominate the text overall.
These graphs can’t tell us whether Fitzgerald’s books are feminist or not. What they can tell us is that women seem to be underrepresented in these texts, and I think the overwhelming use of girl instead of woman is very significant to a feminist reading.