Voyant Project

Mar - 16 2015 | By

Discussion of Jane Austen

When viewing the works of Jane Austen, readers often look at the romantic aspects of the stories. Austen’s novels follow strong women who meet various characters and develop into stronger characters. However, Austen wrote her stories in the early nineteenth century when women were expected to make advantageous marriages that better their station in life. Each of the characters in the three novels that I selected focus on women characters who eventually meet the men that they marry.

In Pride and Prejudice both sisters, Elizabeth and Jane Bennet meet rich men that they marry by the end of the novel. It was mentioned throughout the novel that women were expected to marry for money rather than love, despite how the two characters feel.

The novel Sense and Sensibility shows the Dashwood sisters who both fall in love with various characters of different financial status. There are also women characters in this novel who base success on wealth and social status. In the end, both sisters marry the men that they love, rather than men that have a higher financial standing.
The final novel Emma is different from the other two because the main character is a wealthy woman and does not have to worry about having a beneficial marriage in order to raise her social status. The character Emma is focused more on finding advantageous marriages for the women around her, rather than herself.

With the expectations of women in this time period, I thought that it would be interesting to see how different words were used in these books that related to not only the financial status of characters, but also how emotions play into the stories. Are there moments when emotions like love and happiness that occur along with the idea of marriage? I feel that the romantic aspects of the novels still keeps the societal expectations of the era in mind. By looking at these charts, I want to consider the choices made in selecting the language in the novels.

This first chart observes all of the novels together and the terms, “love”, “marriage”, “happy”, “poor”, and “rich”. I was curious about the amount of focus given to these specific terms. The novels involve more than these themes, but I think that the fact that all three novels have a strong focus on love and marriage shows that even though the characters and social statuses of the women are different, they share similar thoughts and considerations when it comes to marriage.

To gain a larger focus on all three novels, I also decided to use the same terms for each individual novel in order to see how often these terms are used. I also wanted to see if there is a steady rhythm of the word usage or if certain novels had a stronger focus on the marriage and status themes than others.

Pride and Prejudice

Sense and Sensibility

Emma

I noticed in my research that certain words were used differently in each text. The main example that I found was that the word “poor” was used in Emma more to describe pity or as a term of endearment rather than a social status. This use makes me consider how words can be the same in different novels, but mean an entire different thing based on the context. This Voyant project makes want to look deeper into not only word usage and themes in texts, but also how the context changes based on the story and characters.

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