Behind Door Number 10101
When asked to analyze any piece of fiction or literature, I was a bit worried, as analyzing literature is something I really enjoy doing, and I did not know how to pick only one work to explore. I decided to first use the most important aspect of the literature I would analyze to pick a suitable work: accessibility. I looked up various topics, including the entire transcript to my favorite movie, Dirty Dancing, as well as song lyrics from every Michael Jackson album. However, the piece of literature that really caught my eye was the full text of Little Women. I downloaded the text as a PDF from this link: https://www.planetebook.com/little-women/, and proceeded to upload it to wordclouds.com. My final product is pictured below.
When editing this image as a wordcloud, I made many deliberate decisions concerning the final product. I first chose a purple gradient for the background, since that color strongly represents independence, a strong theme throughout the novel. The tree shape represents the unity and connection between the sisters. When creating the wordcloud, I had to eliminate many words that I felt were unnecessary, but after playing with the zoom tools for a bit, I was able to generally delete a decent amount of words, and keep the ones I felt were applicable. These words included ever, can, time, man, and fire. “Man” was an interesting word, and one that really caught my eye, since the novel is about women. However, this word is extremely important, as it really encapsulates the gender norms these women were forced into. For example, if Jo was more independent, she was considered “boyish.” All the sisters were required to find an eligible suitor, and that was the “only” way to happiness. Additionally, the words “time” and “ever” were important to me, as they show how little time these women had before they had to relinquish their identities as girls and become women. “Can” was another word that I was intrigued by, as this novel is very focused on what these women could not do, and how little they actually could. “Can” was not a term usually in the word index pertaining to women at this time. Finally, “fire” was a word that described the determined natures of these women, especially my favorite character, Jo. I hope you enjoyed this textual analysis!
#Dgst101
