Visualisations of the two corpuses
Visualisations of Hawthorne's original novel concretise Wilde's sense that Hawthorne's novel at times plodded rather than demonstrating any strong stylistic verve. Wordclouds demonstrate, as we might expect, that the primary focus of Hawthorne's novel are the characters themselves.
Considering first Volume 1, a wordcloud taking only the top few most frequent words shows that Miriam, Donatello and Hilda feature prominently, and indeed these three dominate Hawthorne's novel. Kenyon features less prominently by name, although the word "sculptor" features at the same incidence (although combined these references leave Kenyon still as the least referred-to main character).
A visualisation of the links between the top few words indicates that Kenyon and sculptor are mostly synonymous, as both pair only with Hilda and the omni-present "said".
Other top keywords include art-objects and their materials—picture and marble—as well as the venue, Rome, and body parts and their descriptors: eyes, old, beautiful, young, hand, little, roman, long. It is interesting that the material, marble, features much more prominently than the faun with which it shares the novel's title, and a word tree of how "marble" features is suggestive of a literal, materialistic use of the word that might contrast with the more frequent metaphorical use to which Wilde might put the word.
Much the same is visible in an extended wordcloud, which also highlights the signifiant repetition of the word "said" throughout Hawthorne's novel, which is indicated even in the small "headline" wordcloud. Here further places come into view—palace, church, steps, world, nature, fountain—as well as a greater number of verbs, mostly of speech, such as exclaimed, speak, and cried, but also others of motion and action like dance, went, wrought, come, and touch.
A wordcloud excluding the word "said" offers a clearer picture after removing Hawthorne's stylistic preference for the plain verb to accompany dialogue.
Considering first Volume 1, a wordcloud taking only the top few most frequent words shows that Miriam, Donatello and Hilda feature prominently, and indeed these three dominate Hawthorne's novel. Kenyon features less prominently by name, although the word "sculptor" features at the same incidence (although combined these references leave Kenyon still as the least referred-to main character).
A visualisation of the links between the top few words indicates that Kenyon and sculptor are mostly synonymous, as both pair only with Hilda and the omni-present "said".
Other top keywords include art-objects and their materials—picture and marble—as well as the venue, Rome, and body parts and their descriptors: eyes, old, beautiful, young, hand, little, roman, long. It is interesting that the material, marble, features much more prominently than the faun with which it shares the novel's title, and a word tree of how "marble" features is suggestive of a literal, materialistic use of the word that might contrast with the more frequent metaphorical use to which Wilde might put the word.
Much the same is visible in an extended wordcloud, which also highlights the signifiant repetition of the word "said" throughout Hawthorne's novel, which is indicated even in the small "headline" wordcloud. Here further places come into view—palace, church, steps, world, nature, fountain—as well as a greater number of verbs, mostly of speech, such as exclaimed, speak, and cried, but also others of motion and action like dance, went, wrought, come, and touch.
A wordcloud excluding the word "said" offers a clearer picture after removing Hawthorne's stylistic preference for the plain verb to accompany dialogue.
Wilde's novel gives approximately equal balance to the Christian names of the four protagonists, as indicated by a wordcloud based on similar criteria.
Comparisons based on individual word usage are also illuminating. Although both novels are named for a Faun, Hawthorne's use of the word differs significantly from Wilde's.
Hawthorne's use of the word "faun" indicates the signifiant influence of the title: "Marble" and "Volume" dominate. Grammatical constructions, such as the determiner "no" and prepositions "in" and "of", as well as punctuation, are strongly present.
By contrast, Wilde's use of the word "faun" shows some of the same titular influences—"The" and "of", although that latter also figures in Hawthorne's tree—and follows Hawthorne in frequently following "faun" with "dwelt", highlighting the geographical nature of the allusion. The occurrence of "miraculously" and "which" are suggestive of the word being used in more diverse constructs, however.
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