Genre and its Proper Place
Mapping Spatiality in 19th Century Literature
Motivations: an Anecdote
On October 14th, 1912, an angry crowd, spitting and shouting, gathered as they berated and threatened a man on the Milwaukee streets. The mob was prepared to kill him on the spot, while only moments before they’d been gathered to hear “an electric battery of inexhaustible energy” speak. The speaker was Theodore Roosevelt; the attacked man was the person who had just shot him.
This historical moment, however, has not grown famous for the fact that an attempt was made on the former President’s life. Instead, the reason this anecdote has grown to a folk tale is due to what Roosevelt did next: he finished his speech. With a hole in his chest, Roosevelt pushed through to deliver the words he’d intended to be heard. The faithfully gathered crowd had gotten more than they’d bargained for.
“It takes more than that to kill a bull moose” — Theodore Roosevelt upon being shot
What is most remarkable in anecdotes like these, and when people talk of Teddy Roosevelt or many historical figures for that matter, is the sheer presence of the speaker. That “electric” air people so often experienced around Theodore Roosevelt is a constant theme in people’s descriptions of the man, but where does that quality come from? What aspects of interpersonal communication can generate such seemingly metaphysical qualities of a woman, or a man’s character? And what happens to these qualities as we move from verbal to written language?
Any public speaking coach or drama teacher will tell you that one of the most significant aspects of a speaker’s presence is how that person occupies space, or the ways in which he or she relates to and experiences the space around his or her self. Filling the room until the walls threatened to burst, Theodore Roosevelt was larger-than-life. In contrast, other speakers can be much more withdrawn. Thus, the idea we’ll primarily be interested in is this: what are the ways in which the author of text occupies space? Or, if we think of a literary work as presenting itself—being its own author, so to speak—what are the ways in which a literary text can relate to space?
Of course, this question possesses some inherent ambiguity. Two specific interpretations of the question immediately come to mind. The first interpretation asks, how does a text establish a spatial presence, what aspects and formal elements of the work contribute to its spatial sense? The second question asks, what are the styles and types of spatial-textual relationships we experience in different works?
We’ll explore these questions through an examination of a few specific works, organized around the category of genre, specifically the 19th century schools of local color writing, or American regionalism, and transcendentalist literature. By examining these texts, we’ll test out a course first approximation to a methodology for exploring the sense of space that a work creates, and we’ll derive some insight about how genre relates to sense of space.
How does a text occupy space?
To reiterate the questions we've raised:
How does a text establish a spatial presence? What aspects and formal elements of the text contribute to its spatial sense?
What are the styles and types of spatial-textual relationships we experience in different works?
One could imagine myriad ways in which a piece of literature could occupy space. Some of these relationships would necessarily be historical, others could be a function of the medium of the work, or in what form a person reads it—indeed, taken to its greatest length, we could even consider how the reader participates in determining how the work occupies space by choosing where and how to read it; however, such questions are beyond the scope of this essay. Indeed, we’ll be interested primarily in the textual elements of spatial relationships.
Nearly every work has some relationship to space, simply via the fact that stories occur in a setting. Thus, we can begin to explore how a text occupies space by examining how it creates space. In particular, a coarse understanding of how a text creates space begins with the most obvious way in which texts establish environment: by naming specific locations.
With this in mind, we begin by examining the maps of locations mentioned in the text and in so doing, shall attempt to (somewhat) answer the questions we have raised.
Genre and Spatial Relationships
I began this project intent upon examining how access and freedom to travel might reflect itself in an authors work. In particular, I meant to compare the locations mentioned in the works of men and women from the 19th century. While perhaps a more refined statistical analysis could have drawn something out, the data showed no remarkable trends or differences to my naked eyes; however, I noticed a different and a perhaps more obvious—perhaps more astonishing—pattern. The largest determinant of how the maps looked was not the gender but the genre.
Interestingly, the only exception between this disconnect between place and the biography of the author was Emily Dickinson, which we’ll later discuss in greater detail. In any event, noticing this among the maps I had compiled, I decided to choose two 19th century literary movements, and compare their senses of place. What follows is what I found.
Local Color Writing: A Spatial Relationship
When one thinks of literature establishing a sense of space, a movement that may immediately come to mind is that of local color writing. Works in this style often tried to capture the essence of a particular historical moment in a specific region. At the start of her career, Kate Chopin was a prominent local color writer and published the collection of short stories, Bayou Folk depicting Creole culture in Louisiana, where she lived.
The locations in the story mostly localize around the U.S., with a fair few in Europe—as is characteristic of almost all the maps of American literature from this time period that I have seen. In comparison to the maps of other texts, the locations in Chopin’s Bayou Folk are more retracted and focused around specific loci. These spatial characteristics are hallmarks of the locations mentioned in Chopin’s early work. While not all local color writers are as contracted in their spatial sense as Chopin is, her work perfectly demonstrates a characteristic of this local color writing: clusters.
In many of the local color works, while locations may be smattered across the globe, one tends to find a dense pocket of closely placed areas mentioned in the text. In the red box above, there are nine separate locations mentioned in the text, whereas in any other box of similar size drawn upon the map there would be at most two.
France, of course, was important to most of Chopin’s work due to the connection with the Creole culture that she often depicted; however, even though France may at first look like it possess a cluster similarly to Louisiana, this is not the case upon a closer examination.
At a similar scale to the one from which we examined Louisiana, it becomes apparent that while France is certainly mentioned in the text, the locations do not group around a single source. Thus, the cluster above Louisiana really is a characteristic of it’s being the setting of the local color pieces.
One would most likely suspect that a density of locations would be mentioned in a piece of local color writing around the setting of the text; however, an interesting turn in Chopin’s life reveals just how close to genre this clustering characteristic may be tied. In her later career, Chopin, an admire of the realism of authors like Guy de Maupassant, irked at being boxed into the role of a local color writer and sought to move away from the genre. She wanted to be taken seriously as a realist author. The Awakening, in consequence, was less of a local color piece than her other works.
From far away, the map of The Awakening looks similar to that of Bayou Folk, which makes sense seeing how we’d expect the places that Chopin discusses to be tied to where she’s been and the culture in which she lived; however, upon closer examination, the cluster of places in Louisiana has disappeared.
In fact, there are none of the densely packed clusters of places that characterize other works by Chopin. Thus, in contrast to collections like Bayou Folk, The Awakening has a more diffuse, less focused sense of space. Unlike the local color writing, which establishes an intimate close-knit environment, The Awakening is detached, decentralized from any one location—even though Kate Chopin wrote both kinds of stories. Thus, it is in many ways the genre more so than the author that is determining how the texts occupy and establish space.
To point towards the ubiquity of these clusters in local color writing, we can take a quick look at two more authors, this time from the North, whose work falls under the purview of regionalism: Sarah Orne Jewett and Harriet Beecher Stowe.
In most of Sarah Orne Jewett’s works, locations are often more sparse. When they do appear, it tends to be over England and New England, mainly. Often, she mentions too few locations for a cluster to form; however, in A Country Doctor and Selected Stories and Sketches, she mentions many more places than usual.
Characteristic of the circles in which she wrote, Jewett tends mostly to mention North American and European places; however, her maps tend to be slightly more expansive than those of Chopin. Again, we see clusters form around the region in which Jewett lived.
And again, while a fair number of locations are mentioned from Europe, they do not tend to cluster as do the locations around where the story is set.
Lastly, while not all of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s work was local color writing, she still wrote some prominent pieces in the style. Examining the maps of locations in Oldtown Fireside Stories, the same pattern of a cluster formation occurs:
Thus, while local color writing from this time period could have either restricted senses of space, or more expansive ones, the locations would tend to characteristically cluster over one specific area, the setting of the piece. We’ll see that this paradigm is drastically different from that stemming from another genre: transcendentalist writing.
Omnipresence of the Transcendentalists
As alluded to earlier, the map of locations mentioned in Emily Dickinson’s poetry looks fairly different from those of the authors we've seen so far.
Dickinson’s poetry has no clustered locations, but more than that, the distribution of locations seems diffuse and without any kind of center. It is very detached from the natural and political landscape, and seems almost like a random speckling of dots. This kind of detachment from the landscape, this diffuse and almost abstract sense of space is what one might expect from a person who does not have the ability to travel. Emily Dickinson was an inveterate introvert and towards the end of her life, very much a recluse, and its hard not to wonder if that is what we’re seeing play out here in her poetry. Perhaps the abstract and detached sense of space has to do with being cut off from her immediate environment.
However, while the detachment and sparsity of place in Dickinson’s poetry might very well be a function of the conditions of her life, the expansiveness seems more to do with her genre. Looking at Henry David Thoreau’s Excursions and Poems, places are both abundant and expansive.
From Thoreau’s home of Massachusetts, to China, to Polynesia, he makes mention of places from nearly every region on earth—and in good number too. While the focus still remains upon America and Europe, we now see continents like Africa, Australia, and South America being brought into his work.
Interestingly, and unlike the other transcendental authors we’ll look at, Thoreau’s locations do cluster around where he lives more than any where else; however, he mentions such a hyper-abundance of places that the contrast in density within the cluster and without it is not nearly so great as with the local color writers. One might also conjecture that perhaps this clustering around the Massachusetts area could also be related to Thoreau’s experiences as a naturalist.
And again, as we have seen before, no such clustering of places appears to the same extent over Europe, but remains only over where the author, Thoreau, lived.
Thus, we've seen that the Transcendentalists’ sense of space, in contrast to the local color writers’ which is contracted, focused and clustered, is expansive and world-spanning. Global and cosmopolitan, the transcendentalists speak almost to the earth itself more than any particular place on it, or perhaps it is as if they are channeling the voice of the world. Nowhere is this world-voice more apparent, then in the work of Walt Whitman. Perhaps as he sounds “his barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world”, Whitman is shouting with this expansive and all encompassing voice of the transcendentalist (Song of Myself 1310).
Not only does Whitman mention places from every corner of the earth, but within the densest groupings of locations, so many places are mentioned that it is really impossible to distinguish any kind of source or particularly distinguished cluster of places. Of course, as is to be expected, most of the locations center around Europe and the United States,
but the sheer immensity of the space that the collection of poems occupies is a thing of awe. In fact, Whitman mentions over 80 places in “Salute Au Monde” alone, and more than 190 locations throughout the work as a whole.
An appropriate way to understand these maps, and a fitting one for those familiar with Whitman’s work, is that he truly is, like Theodore Roosevelt, a voice that fills the room right up to the walls. With his booming, powerful, and all encompassing poetic voice, Whitman takes the expansive and universal nature of the transcendentalist ideal to the extreme and consequently the sense of space he establishes—like his poetry itself—is larger-than-life.
Conclusions, Next Steps, and New Directions
By our examination of various authors in these two genres, it has become apparent that certain interesting characteristics can emerge from the patterns of how locations are mentioned in different texts, and thus how the texts both establish and occupy an environment. In the end, it seems that genre matters as much, if not more, than the author of a work in determining the aspects of how these locations are strewn about the globe. In particular, certain traits of the text seem to be reflected in the spatial structure it establishes, and there is an interesting interplay between the two. In particular, we uncovered that local color writings often have a contracted and focused sense of space about some central locus, while transcendental writings occupy space in a way that is more expansive, universal, and detached from an point or region in particular.
Of course, due to resource constraints and the fact that this work constitutes only an initial exploration, the methodologies utilized, while promising to bear some fruits, were coarse and leave much room for improvement. Thus, I’d like to conclude, for those interested in continuing the work, by listing out some possible areas to improve upon it:
- Weighting the Locations: Not all locations are mentioned the same number of times in the text, so one could imagine trying to account for the different prevalences of the locations and weighting the pins on the maps accordingly.
- Automated Clustering: While interesting to explore qualitatively, one could make rigorous the idea of a cluster of points using a clustering algorithm such as DBSCAN. This quanitification of the idea of a cluster would then open up the potential to process many more texts, and perhaps to use unsupervised machine learning techniques on clusters of locations to analyze characteristics of different genres.
- Detailed Humanistic Analysis: A more in-depth humanistic approach which really examines the spatial sense of different texts in relation to biographical details of the authors or critical analysis of the works could also provide some keen insight and reveal more about the connection between these statistical aspects and the more traditionally literary aspects of the work.
- Better Programmatic Tools: Lastly, a person more experienced in natural language processing could modify the script used to generate the maps, making it more accurate and able to pick up more kinds of locations with fewer red herrings.
Appendix A: Tools and Methodology
In the field of natural language processing, named-entity recognition is the problem of identifying whether a word is a named-entity (i.e. when a word is a name of something), and then classifying named-entities into either persons, organizations, locations, or other kinds of named-entities. Since named entity-recognition is a well-studied problem, there are a few programmatic tools openly available to conduct it.
In this paper, we were interested in locations, and so I created a python script which used python bindings to the Stanford NER Tagger, a piece of software for named-entity recognition, to tag all the locations in the text and then make a call to a Google API which gave the latitude and longitude coordinates of the identified locations. These locations and coordinates were placed into a KML file, which then could be opened by Google Earth. The code, the maps, and the texts used in this project, and many more maps of books, are all available here. In order to open most of the map files, you’ll need to make sure that you have Google Earth downloaded.
For full disclosure, the script used in this project works decently well, but sometimes mistakes non-locations for locations, similarly whenever there is ambiguity about a location (i.e., two places with the same name), it either might not find the correct one or might just not plot the location. Because of this difficulty, I lightly checked the output from the script and removed some extraneous or erroneous locations. Similarly, the maps might be missing some of the locations from the texts.
Lastly, this website by Chris O’Sullivan was used to convert the KML files to the map images seen in this paper. To view KML files as maps similar to the ones seen in this paper, simply copy the KML file’s text from one of the files at this link and paste the text into O’Sullivan’s website.
Appendix B: Further Reading / Other Resources
Information on the Transcendental Movement
Local Color Writing and Regionalism
A Scholarly Exploration of the Relationship between Space and Literature
