Data Visualization: The Castle of Otranto
In a gothic novel where doppelgangers and confusion are absolutely necessary for the novel to achieve its desired effect, I was rather surprised to see the amount of proper names and titles used for the characters. If you add up the full amount of times that the characters are either directly named or referred to by title, it makes up almost five percent of the entire novel. In other words, for every twenty words in the novel, at least one of those is either a character’s name or their title. When I first saw the main word cloud that we came up with on the program and eliminated the articles, I was instantly surprised to see that each and every one of the titles and names in the above chart is used often enough to appear in the word cloud. This could mean that The Castle of Otranto may be more about character identity than I had initially suspected. Of course, with each identity comes the title which is attached to the identity. So, when considering that proper earned title is one of the big questions of the novel, it may not be so shocking after all.
Character Traits
I decided to look
at character traits in Otranto. The most heavily described characters, I found,
were Matilda, Hippolita, and Theodore – words like gentle, amiable, gracious,
virtuous, and noble were used in excess with these three.
The words I found
that described Manfred most were impious and unhappy. Jerome frequently called
Manfred impious, whether referring to his plans or just to Manfred in general,
while Manfred called himself unhappy in most of the references.
Most of the words
I looked at were attributed to Hippolita at least one time, with the exception
of impious. She was often referred to as ‘gracious Lady’, ‘excellent Lady’, ‘virtuous
Lady’, etc. She was the only one whom Manfred referred to in a positive way—he
called other characters presumptuous, audacious, and traitorous, etc, but
Hippolita was always ‘excellent’. She was, in turn, often the only one to
attribute certain words to Manfred—gracious, especially, a word which was
otherwise used for her. She definitely seems to be a one-sided character, but
she was easily the most described in the novel, despite doing pretty much the
least of anyone.
The Supernatural
When examining the first gothic novel, it
seems only appropriate to consider the use of ghosts and spirits in the novel.
Walpole established many of the widely accepted tropes of the gothic genre in The Castle of Otranto from the beginning
of the novel. The plot is driven by the characters’ reactions to the
supernatural happenings in the castle. As prince and ruler of the castle,
Manfred especially is impacted by the prophecy that seems to be coming true
before his eyes when a giant helmet crushes his sole heir, Conrad, on the day
of his wedding. Interestingly, ghosts are only discussed shortly after Conrad’s
untimely death at the beginning of the novel and then not discussed again.
Spirits and spectres are used to describe the supernatural occurrences from
there, but even then the relatively few times each word is used, nine and seven
respectfully, out of the 34,000 words in the entire story proves that it is not
necessarily the sight of the supernatural that creates suspense, but rather the
lingering thought that it could exist, and has some control over the actions of
those who believe in it.
Religion and The church
In The Castle of Otranto, the
Church plays a significant role in the lives of the characters. When I was
reading the novel, I noticed that Jerome was the character that referenced the
word church the most. The word church was used only 28 times while religion was
used only 3 times. I was interested in the way church was used throughout the
novel. The huge dip in the graph between seven and eight in the frequency graph
was very odd in my opinion. I thought since Jerome had a significant role in
the novel, I thought more inferences of the church would be more
prevalent. Also, with the word
religion I was surprised at the lack of it but it was in reference to religion
as a whole and not as an individual entity.
Love and Marriage - Otranto and Sidney Bidulph
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| The Castle of Otranto |
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| Sidney Bidulph |
When the idea of
comparing the uses of “love” and “marriage” in Otranto to the uses in Sidney
Bidulph, I thought about simply seeing which was used more often in each
and how the usage compared as a whole across both novels (meaning how much more
frequently each was used in one novel over the other). I had my suspicions that Sidney Bidulph would have more
uses. I was wrong. Looking at the scales, the relative
frequency of these words is much higher in Otranto. The much more interesting discovery is
the relationships these words have to one another within the novels. On the left, Otranto’s uses of “love” and “marriage” are at inverse proportions –
when the use of one goes upward, the use of the other drops. In Sidney
Bidulph on the right, we see just the opposite and we have a directly
proportionate relationship up until they meet at the very end. Based somewhat on Tuesday’s discussion,
which novel appears to be more about marriages?
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