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The Expression of Self and Grief in the Nineteenth Century: An Analysis through Distant Readings

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 February 2020

Elizabeth Monzingo  and
Daniel Shanahan
Elizabeth Monzingo
Affiliation:
The Ohio State Universitymonzingo.1@osu.edu
Daniel Shanahan
Affiliation:
The Ohio State Universityshanahan.37@osu.edu
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Abstract

When writing about grief, Peter N. Stearns and Mark Knapp (‘Historical Perspectives on Grief’, in The Emotions: Social, Cultural and Biological Dimensions, ed. Rom Harré and W. Gerrod Parrot (London: Sage Publications, 1996): 138) speculate that ‘[i]n contrast to eighteenth-century songs about death, which were set in the artificial pastoral world of shepherds and written in the third person, Victorian grief songs were personal and immediate’. Inspired by this claim, we investigated the usage of pronouns, as well as topics surrounding grief, in ballads taken from broadsides in the nineteenth century. We found that the use of first-person pronouns increases over the nineteenth century, and that this was not a linear trend; there were sharp increases in the usage of first-person pronouns beginning in 1815, which leveled off in the third quarter of the century. Additionally, we examined the usage of lyrical topics about death, grieving, negatively valenced emotion and sadness, and asked whether such topics correlated with the increased usage of first-person pronouns. We found that there was not a strong correlation with the usage of pronouns and such topics, though there was a small correlation between the usage of such pronouns and sadness and a stronger positive correlation between a focus on the present and positively valenced emotion. These findings suggest that first-person pronouns are not reliable indicators of lyrical topics surrounding grief, or vice-versa. Using personal pronouns as a measure of intimacy, we conclude that songs written in the beginning of the nineteenth century did see a rise in intimacy in song lyrics. However, this increase does not appear to be tied to songs about grief, specifically. Despite the existence of many personal grief songs in the Victorian period, our distant reading reveals linguistic trends and interrelations that challenge the intuition that nineteenth-century grief songs were more personal than earlier ones.

Type
Research Article
Information
Nineteenth-Century Music Review , Volume 18 , Special Issue 1: The Digital Humanities and Nineteenth-Century Music , April 2021 , pp. 83 - 107
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press, 2020

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References

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2 Stearns, Peter N. and Knapp, Mark, ‘Historical Perspectives on Grief’, in The Emotions: Social, Cultural and Biological Dimensions, ed. Harré, Rom and Parrot, W. Gerrod (London: Sage Publications, 1996): 138Google Scholar.

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32 It is important to note that any collection of songs will have its biases. We hope this analysis will inspire additional analyses, so that a more generalizable understanding of the intimate treatment of grief in the nineteenth century may be reached.

33 J.W. Pennebaker, R.J. Booth, R.L. Boyd and M.E. Francis, ‘Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count: LIWC2015’, Pennebaker Conglomerates, 2015, www.LIWC.net.

34 The use of what is known as ‘incremental repetition’ contributes to a deep-structure meaning; in this case, ‘each one has their ills’ and ‘the engine runs on wheels’ do not add information to the beginnings of their lines (‘each one has their troubles’ and ‘but time and tide it will not wait’, respectively), rather they allow the listener time to dwell in the meaning longer in order to wholly feel its impact. See Lyle, Scottish Ballads, 18.

35 See Meyer, Leonard B., Style and Music: Theory, History, and Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996)Google Scholar and Labov, William, Principles of Linguistic Change, Social Factors (Malton, MA: Wiley, 2001)Google Scholar. For a discussion of this in jazz standards, see also Broze, Yuri and Shanahan, Daniel, ‘Diachronic Changes in Jazz Harmony: A Cognitive Perspective’, Music Perception 31/1 (2013): 32–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

36 Note that any corpus study will only provide correlational data. It is commonly understood that a corpus study can, at best, examine correlations in usage and specific events, but it is nearly impossible to draw direct lines of causation, although a number of statistical analyses, such as Path analysis and a number of Bayesian models, attempt to do just that. The most straightforward method for examining a type of change might be to compare multiple models and see which provides the best fit.

37 The average of ‘I’ usage in the eighteenth century was 3.45 pronouns per 100 words, as opposed to only 1.7 in the nineteenth; the average of ‘you’ usage was 1.61 pronouns per 100 words in the eighteenth century as opposed to .76 in the nineteenth.

38 Colour versions of the figures are available in the online version of the article: www.cambridge.org/core/journals/nineteenth-century-music-review.

39 A regression model incorporating these variables accounts for much more variance when predicting the year (adjusted R2=.30). This regression model, with significant predictors indicated, can be seen in Table 3. Interestingly, both positive and negative emotions are significant predictors of year.