By Mohamad Mrad, Alessandro Al Khoury and Maha El Solh
Through the beginning of time the concept of money always existed, even before it was created. First it was in the form of a non-monetary exchange when two people would trade something they own with one another. Then, in the romans period it transmitted to the form of coins that had the emperors face on it. In later times, this metal coin was reshaped to a paper bill and today we are in the process of witnessing a new shape of money, a digital virtual currency called “crypto”. Who cares about the shape of money as long it is doing what it has always done. Nevertheless, what do you think money does? Or did? buy you groceries? Furniture? Women? Social status? The concept of money had been established before the beginning of written history but how was that concept viewed before our present time.
In this blog we shall analyze the concept of money & power in the works of Charles Dickens’s “Great Expectations”, Jane Austen’s “Pride & Prejudice” and Edith Wharton’s “The House of Mirth”. All of these novels are written in the 18th and 19th century. CLIC and VOYANT are two digital humanity tool designed to help users analyze texts by displaying word frequency lists, frequency distribution plots and much more. With the help of these two tools we will answer these following questions that support our theme.
What are the kinds of power that money grants to people in the 19th century?
What is the influence of money on the morality and mentality of people?
Is money described as good or bad throughout the corpus?
In order to answer the first question, we opened CLIC, accessed the concordance category and ended up with the following results.
At first, Analysis on “Great Expectations” yielded with expectable results, money offers education and survival.
However, with some more digging into the long word lists of CLIC. We learned was that money was associated with greatness in a family:
Thus, we may infer that money offers social status too.
The following quote also indicates that money is not only associated with liberty but also with the ability to become a gentleman at the time.
This inference is further reinforced when we shifted to “Pride and Prejudice”:
The next quotes offer further support and expresses that money is not only a necessity to live well, but to just live all in all.
Now, to introduce “The House of Mirth” into the flow, we had to employ the Voyant tool since the novel isn’t available on CLIC. The Cirrus Cloud function gave us the following results. We note that money is repeated 113 times and is on the top left corner of the cloud. Indeed, the main character Lily seeks marriage in order to secure herself financially and access the upper class. Thus, money gives power to men who possess it concerning marriage which already shows us that money plays a major role in the story.
What is the influence of money on the morality and mentality of people?
“Great expectations” emphasize the fact that money corrupts people. In a way, we could say that money pushes people away from living a simple and nice childhood (‘boyhood’ in the quote).
In addition, the following quote hits the mark regarding money’s effect on people: “She seemed much older than I, of course, being a girl, and beautiful and self-possessed; and she was as scornful of me as if she had been one-and-twenty, and a queen.” Here, the main character, Pip walks with Estella, a girl raised by a rich woman. The quote strongly shows how Estella’s possession of money makes her carry herself with Pip. This proves how money corrupts people to the point that they believe money is superior to human relations, one of the main things that constitute our humanity. Despite this, we were surprised that when Pip got suddenly rich, he started acting in the same way…
“Pride and Prejudice” is even more precise. Jane Austen indirectly asserts that needing money and seeking it is similar to suffering:
And this suffering harms the mind and the morality and forces people to act in ways that are wrong. It makes them put money as an essential component of their lives:
The following quote also illustrates how sometimes money can determine whether marriage will proceed or not:
However, “Pride and Prejudice” pushes us further in, it shows how money can force women to make marriage the central purpose of their life (fifth quote).
Indeed, during this period, women were regarded as dependent entirely on men to survive and why was it so? Because of money. Therefore, another way in which riches corrupts human mentality is that it becomes the scale by which to measure the success of a marriage. And we all know that marriage should be built on other foundations, much more noble than wealth. This graph from Voyant (slideshow) gave us more novels than we asked it for, but it still shows that the word “man” is the most repeated in “Pride and Prejudice” compared to Austen’s other popular works. This increased usage of the word reflects in a way the superiority that is granted to men solely by the possession of money.
Next, we will take a look at how money compels, especially women to seek marriage in order to preserve their social status. This is mainly seen in “The House of Mirth”. On the other hand, Lily sees poor people as inferior. This is another way by which money corrupts people. The word “pigs” appears 3 times throughout the novel. In fact, Lily says that poor people are “living like pigs”.
A third aspect of how money corrupt Lily’s morality is that her desire for it makes her a slave to money. In the novel, she engages in gambling which leads to her accumulating many debts.
Thus, with all that information gathered, we may also answer our third question.
Is money described as good or bad throughout the corpus?
At this point, I believe the reader can easily deduce that money is depicted as a bad thing. Although money offers some benefits as previously mentioned it creates disequilibrium between people which lead to the classification of people (social classes) which in itself is debasing to humanity. Even worse, it corrupts people and can turn good people like Pip into snob and condescending people.
Our experience using CLiC and Voyant has been remarkable. Analyzing all texts with CLIC and Voyant was easy. We could immediately get results for word counts at the “CLIC” of a button. Nonetheless, we thought that CLIC was more effective than Voyant in providing context for the words we searched for. For example, if we looked for the word ‘’money’’ on CLIC, it gave us directly a few words that appeared prior to and after “money” so that we could get the context of the word. While Voyant had other options for phrases, we found the Cirrus cloud function of Voyant very useful to our analysis for comparing word counts in general.
At first, it was a bit difficult to get accommodated with the features of both tools since they were many, but later we got used to it and the process became much smoother. We believe that the features that we have exposed in this blog may be enough for us to complete our digital humanities project. Nonetheless, we might refer more thoroughly to some tools to make our analysis more precise (maybe use more graphs from Voyant in the final project).
One of the main advantages of distant reading is that it provides us with a vast array of results in a matter of minutes. In addition, it helps us in evaluating our results objectively. In close reading, by contrast, the reader might refer to his judgement and subjectivity. On the other hand, referring to tools such as Voyant and CLIC may not provide us with a complete picture of a certain novel. Indeed, these tools give us a general idea of the main themes, the settings and the main characters of the novel. However, some readers might be interested in some precise details of the novel. In this case, a distant reading approach might not be the best solution.
MAHA'S WORLD 