{"id":9121,"date":"2018-02-20T09:45:55","date_gmt":"2018-02-20T07:45:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/openasia.org\/en\/?p=9121"},"modified":"2018-02-20T10:38:54","modified_gmt":"2018-02-20T08:38:54","slug":"women-better-represented-in-victorian-novels-than-modern-finds-study","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/openasia.org\/en\/2018\/02\/women-better-represented-in-victorian-novels-than-modern-finds-study\/","title":{"rendered":"Women better represented in Victorian novels than modern, finds study"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Guardian<\/a>\u00a0– Analysis finds proportion of female authors and characters fell after 19th century, with male authors remaining \u2018remarkably resistant\u2019 to writing women.<\/p>\n

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Women<\/a>\u00a0in novels have tended to \u201cfeel\u201d, while men \u201cget\u201d; women smile or laugh, while men grin or chuckle. An analysis of more than 100,000 novels spanning more than 200 years shows how gendered even seemingly innocuous words can be \u2013 as well as revealing an unexpected decline in the proportion of female novelists from the mid-19th to the mid-20th century.<\/p>\n

Academics from the universities of Illinois and California at Berkeley used an algorithm to examine 104,000 works of fiction dating from 1780 to 2007, drawn mostly from HathiTrust Digital Library. The algorithm identified both author and character genders. The academics expected to see an increase in the prominence of female characters in literature across the two centuries. Instead, \u201cfrom the 19th century through the early 1960s we see a story of steady decline,\u201d write Ted Underwood, David Bamman and Sabrina Lee in their paper The Transformation of Gender in English-Language Fiction, which has just been published\u00a0in the Journal of Cultural Analytics<\/a>.<\/p>\n

As well as the drop in the number of characters who are women or girls, they also found \u201ca fairly stunning decline\u201d in the number of books written by women in the first half of the 20th century, writing that \u201cthe proportion of fiction actually written by women \u2026 drops by half (from roughly 50% of titles to roughly 25%) as we move from 1850 to 1950.\u201d<\/p>\n

The academics were so surprised by these findings, \u201cin the very period when we might expect to see the effects of first-wave feminism\u201d, that they initially suspected an error in their methods. They ran further tests, and found they tallied.<\/p>\n

\u201cWomen go from representing almost half the authors of fiction to barely a quarter. If this trend is real, it is an important fact about literary history that ought to be foregrounded even, say, in anthology introductions. But the story has not been widely publicised,\u201d they write. \u201cIt appears that scholars of each period are able to see the possibility that female authorship was declining in their own period. But no one has been willing to advance the dismal suggestion that the whole story from 1800 to 1960 was a story of decline.\u201d<\/p>\n

The academics speculate that one reason for the drop of female authors, which reversed around 1970, could be the \u201cgentrification\u201d of the novel. In the mid-19th century, novel-writing was not a \u201chigh-status career\u201d, but as it increasingly became so, it became more desirable to male writers. They also point out that while representation of women in fiction declined over the period, other categories of writing such as non-fiction saw \u201can enormous expansion\u201d of female writers. \u201cIt is not hard to see how expanding opportunities on this scale might have lured women away from the novel,\u201d they write.<\/p>\n

The decline in women writing is part of the reason for the drop in women characters. According to the academics\u2019 analysis, in books by men, women occupy on average just a quarter to a third of the character-space. In books by women, \u201cthe division is much closer to equal\u201d. The analysis finds: \u201cThis gap between the genders is depressingly stable across 200 years.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kate Mosse, the bestselling historical novelist and founder of the Women\u2019s prize for fiction, said that she was not surprised by the results. \u201cWhen we were setting up the prize, we discovered that when a book by a woman won a prize, it was more likely to have a male protagonist,\u201d she said. \u201cThis huge piece of research backs that up.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mosse pointed to \u201ca sea change from the Enlightenment through to Victorian values, so women are freer in the time of Jane Austen or Mary Shelley or Ann Radcliffe, but then Victorian values \u2013 the idea of the angel in the home \u2013 take over. And then criticism becomes a discipline. It\u2019s a male discipline, and it\u2019s therefore not surprising to me that women as writers lose their positions, because it\u2019s men writing about male writers, and it starts to inch out women. You see this in history, and in music \u2013 it\u2019s equal, and then when criticism starts to become important, women\u2019s contributions are undervalued.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\"Author<\/picture><\/div>
\u00a0<\/span>\u2018When criticism starts to become important, women\u2019s contributions are undervalued\u2019 \u2026 Kate Mosse. Photograph: Andy Hall for the Observer<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Analysing the 104,000 novels in the HathiTrust archive, and looking at vocabulary ascribed to characters, the researchers found that earlier volumes contained gendered language. In early 19th-century novels, men were more likely to have \u201chouses\u201d and \u201ccountries\u201d, while women had \u201cprivate chambers\u201d, \u201capartments\u201d, or \u201crooms\u201d. By the late 20th century, however, \u201chouse\u201d had become more associated with women characters. Words such as \u201cheart\u201d, \u201ctears\u201d, \u201csighs\u201d, \u201csmiles\u201d, and \u201cspirits\u201d, were \u201cgendered feminine\u201d in the 19th century, the algorithm revealed, with \u201conly a few subjective nouns ascribed more often to men; the primary one is\u00a0passion<\/em>,<\/em>\u00a0which is sometimes a 19th-century euphemism for lust\u201d.<\/p>\n

While both fictional men and fictional women were equally likely to \u201cread\u201d, men have historically been more likely to have \u201cgot\u201d things, and women more likely to have \u201cfelt\u201d. By the mid-20th century, words for mirth such as \u201csmile\u201d and \u201claugh\u201d were more likely to be applied to female characters, while \u201cmid-century men, apparently, can only grin and chuckle\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis gendering of mirth peaks in the years before and after the second world war, and Raymond Chandler is a typical expression of its consequences for men. His male characters have a habit of grinning in an uneasy, laconic way. \u2018He grinned. His teeth had a freckled look,\u2019 in Red Wind. \u2018He grinned. His dentist was tired of waiting for him,\u2019 in The Pencil. Chandler\u2019s grins are commonly followed by a cynical chaser about the character\u2019s appearance, to make clear that masculine humour is a thin veneer stretched over menace,\u201d the academics write.<\/p>\n

Overall, the researchers found that gender divisions between characters have \u201cbecome less sharply marked\u201d over the last two centuries, with \u201cvery different language\u201d used for men and women in 19th-century novels compared to the present, when \u201cthe actions and attributes of characters are less clearly sorted into gender categories\u201d.<\/p>\n

They reiterate, however, that this blurring of the boundaries of gender as fiction moves into the 20th century \u201cdoesn\u2019t seem to have been associated with greater emphasis on women as characters. On the contrary, their prominence declines across the same period.\u201d And \u201cmen remain \u2013 on average, as a group \u2013 remarkably resistant to giving women more than a third of the character-space in their stories.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Analysis finds proportion of female authors and characters fell after 19th century, with male authors remaining \u2018remarkably resistant\u2019 to writing women.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14,"featured_media":9122,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[90,91,88,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9121","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-editor-selection","category-new-book","category-slider","category-world"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/openasia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9121","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/openasia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/openasia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openasia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/14"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openasia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9121"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/openasia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9121\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9130,"href":"https:\/\/openasia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9121\/revisions\/9130"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openasia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9122"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/openasia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9121"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openasia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9121"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openasia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9121"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}