Empirical Analysis, Gender Assumptions, and the Language of Narration in Eighteenth-Century British Fiction

Abstract

This study attempts first to determine whether quantitative and empirical methods can indicate differences in the language of male and female narrators in eighteenth-century British fiction and second to suggest some preliminary conclusions about gender assumptions arising from this investigation. A principal components analysis using word frequencies as variables (the Burrows technique) demonstrates that male and female narrators in Daniel Defoe's major novels can be differentiated according to the language that they use. Preliminary analyses of a sample of other eighteenth-century novels suggest that the differences of vocabulary frequencies in Defoe's fiction may hold true in the language of narrators created by other eighteenth-century writers as well: female narrators created by male writers use certain items of vocabulary at a rate significantly different than those items are used by male narrators created by male writers or by any narrators created by female writers. More specifically, female narrators use the language of contingency (as evidenced by the word if) more frequently than other narrators; they are more self-referential than other narrators, using I, me, and my at a significantly greater rate than other narrators; and they use a language of social engagement with he, she, her, and him appearing much more frequently than in the language of other narrators. If these results are substantiated by further analyses, there would seem to be empirical evidence for the claim that eighteenth-century male writers held certain assumptions about the language used by women or, at least, that these male writers believed that readers would more readily accept as female narrators who used language in a certain way. Such evidence could give an empirical base to our understanding of some gender assumptions in eighteenth-century England.