From reading The Blue Hour, it is apparent that Pizzichini portrays Jean Rhys as an outsider. As a group we wanted to consider whether Pizzichini’s portrayal was reflected in the language used in The Blue Hour. To explore this theory, the software programmes Voyant and AntConc were used. Turning first to Voyant, it is a programme that highlights the words that are the most frequently used in a particular text, which is uploaded electronically by the user. It is also possible to view graphs that show where a word appears most frequently in a text, and the sentence in which it appears in.
After using the ‘Stop Words List’ to remove pronouns and articles like ‘the’ and ‘she’ from the final results, due to their frequency of use within the text, it was discovered that the most frequent word used in The Blue Hour was ‘Jean’, as illustrated by the word cloud below.
‘Jean’ is used in The Blue Hour 954 times. While this may appear to be quite an obvious finding due to the fact that The Blue Hour is a biography about Jean Rhys, it does help to reinforce the fact that it is a third-person that is not written by Rhys herself, which in turn shows that we are ultimately getting a third-person portrayal, despite the reference to primary sources in the biography.
Other words that provoked interest included the word ‘miss’, which was used 87 times in The Blue Hour. Initially it was speculated that the featuring of ‘miss’ was an indication of the use of the verb ‘miss’ in the text, which would support the idea that Rhys is portrayed as an outsider in The Blue Hour, due to the sense of isolation that such a verb evokes when used in reference to Rhys’ character. However this theory was then disproved when the sections of the text in which ‘miss’ appeared were analysed, and it was shown that ‘miss’ in this case stood for the titles of the unmarried teachers at Perse School for Girls, Cambridge, where Jean attended in 1907 for one year. The word ‘like’ (used 245 times) was also subject to such analysis, through the fact that it was speculated to feature as a verb for depicting Jean’s tastes, but was actually mainly used in the text as a comparative.
Attention then turned to the presence of variations of the verb ‘write’ and the noun ‘writing’ in the word cloud, of which the most frequently used appeared between 73 and 127 times in The Blue Hour. The graph shown below was useful in displaying and comparing where the verb and noun forms featured in the text, however more specific tools than the ones offered on Voyant were required in order to gain a fuller picture of the context in which these words were used. Such tools were available on Laurence Anthony’s application AntConc.
As shown here, AntConc also enables a person to view the words most frequently used in a text. However, it can also provide the user with more context to the use of a particular word by arranging the sentences in which the word is featured in order of the words used before and after the word in question. In regards to the variations of the verb ‘write’ and the noun ‘writing,’ AntConc showed in the ‘Clusters/Ngrams’ tab that while ‘wrote to’ is the most frequently used phrase, ‘wrote about’, ‘write about’, and ‘writes about’ actually collectively appear more frequently throughout The Blue Hour. As a result, the use of these phrases show that there is a lot of references to Rhys or a contemporary writing content.
It was then recommended that the word ‘letter’ and its variations should be analysed in line with these findings. Using the search term ‘letter’ with the wildcard ‘*’, it was found that ‘from’ and ‘to’ were used most frequently with ‘letter.’ This shows that Pizzichini made use of letters written by and to Jean Rhys as a medium of research and reference for The Blue Hour, which is further made clearer by AntConc’s highlighting of the context in which these phrases were used in the ‘Concordance’ tab.
Phrases displayed in these results like ‘She wrote many, voluble letters that were in turn funny, brave and sad.’ and ‘prolific letter-writer’ encourage speculation about whether such descriptions can be taken completely seriously, when considering the fact that only snippets of the letters are featured in The Blue Hour. This in turn fuels speculation about whether the inclusion of these letters contradicts the portrayal of Rhys as an outsider, especially when phrases like ‘She wrote many, voluble letters’ are considered. On the one hand, they perhaps do contradict such a portrayal, as there is an indication that letters acted as both a good medium for Rhys to write, which is what she seemed to enjoy most in life, and also as a key to connecting with others. However, while the featuring of letters shows that Rhys was not wholly isolated in life, they do not wholly prove that she cannot be portrayed as an outsider, as illustrated in some of her letters, particularly those to her daughter, Maryvonne: ‘Sleep is so lovely, better than food or thinking or writing or anything.’ (Pizzichini, 248)
As a way of concluding whether the linguistics of The Blue Hour help to portray Jean Rhys as an outsider, it is useful to return to the first finding of ‘Jean’ being the most frequently used word in The Blue Hour. In addition to Voyant, ‘Jean’ and the variant ‘Jean’s’ (used 169 times) were analysed in AntConc. As can be seen below, the ‘Clusters/Ngrams’ tab showed that Pizzichini uses the past tense far more than the conditional tense, as demonstrated by the 68 total uses of the conditional ‘would’ and ‘could’, in comparison to the 183 total uses of the past ‘was’ and ‘had.’ This finding is noteworthy, as the greater use of the past tense shows that Pizzichini appears to have a good degree of certainty about the information she is disclosing in The Blue Hour, which is derived from primary sources like the letters discussed above, as well as other secondary biographical works. By contrast, a greater use of the conditional tense by Pizzichini would have provided a tone of speculation and caution in regards to the information disclosed in The Blue Hour, and therefore to the overall portrayal of Rhys as an outsider.
Works cited
Anthony, L. (2014). AntConc (Version 3.4.3) [Computer Software]. Tokyo, Japan: Waseda University. Available from http://www.laurenceanthony.net
Pizzichini, Lilian. The Blue Hour: A Portrait of Jean Rhys. London: Bloomsbury, 2009. Print.
Sinclair, Stéfan, Geoffrey Rockwell and the Voyant Tools Team. 2012. Voyant Tools (web application).