Style and the Scribbling Women: An Empirical Analysis of Nineteenth-Century American Fiction

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Derogation of 19th-century women novelists was often the immediate response to their works. While modern feminist scholarship has repudiated this view of "scribbling women", finding much of value in both substance and style in this body of literature, many critics and academics remain uninformed and continue to present an almost totally male canon as representative of meritorious writing of this period. The present work undertakes an empirical test of stereotypical notions about women's and men's 19th-century fiction, utilising the computer to examine 80,000 words of text from passages randomly chosen in 20 novels each by women and men. This material is analysed for occurrences of various aspects of writing style, such as similes, parallel structures, rhetorical devices and certain adverbs and adjectives, as well as for sentence length and complexity. That these non-impressionist findings show no overwhelming gender differences should finally put to rest traditional negative stereotypes about 19th-century women writers. The author of an empirical analysis of 20th-century fiction by men and women, Professor Hiatt uses these previous findings for a comparison of 20th-century and 19th-century materials. The 20th-century analysis showed greater linguistic and stylistic disparities between men's and women's writing. A comparison with the 19th-century materials indicates that diachronic shifts have occurred much more broadly and drastically in fiction by male authors. Carefully documented and written, this study should be valuable for researchers and students of women's studies, 19th- century American literature, linguistics, stylistics, and computer applications in the humanities.

Author Bio

MARY P. HIATT is Professor Emerita and former Chair of the English Department at Baruch College, the City University of New York. A specialist in language and style and in nineteenth-century women writers, her articles on these and related subjects have appeared in such journals as College Composition and Communication, English Journal, Journal of Evolutionary Psychology, Language and Style, Shakespeare Studies, and Style. Her books include The Way Women Write: Sex and Style in Contemporary Prose (1977), and Artful Balance: The Parallel Structures of Style (1975).