Fleshing Out Models of Gender in English-Language Novels (1850 – 2000)

Abstract

Distant readers have used predictive modelling to study the strength of the relationship between characterization and binary notions of gender. This essay builds on that research, shedding light on several historical trends concerning anatomical description and its relationship to gender. Some of the evidence suggests that bodily language has long played a larger role in configuring fictional women than it did for fictional men. Other evidence implies that bodily characteristics were increasingly bifurcated along a gender binary, reflecting how characters are more and more physically sorted along a feminine-masculine axis. Taken altogether, this essay unpacks a suggestive correlation: a growing aspect of characterization was increasingly imbricated in heteronormative discourses. By weighing the discrepancies between the evidence presented in this essay, and that of its predecessors, this essay will ultimately suggest that disaggregating statistical models can unfold patterns of literary change that would otherwise remain suppressed.