This week I've been reading some romances from the beginning of the twentieth century, including Berta Ruck's The Courtship of Rosamund Fayre (1915). In that novel Rosamond, who is working as a secretary, is asked to deputise for her employer, Eleanor Urquhart, who thinks herself too busy to correspond with her cousin and fiancé. This is just about feasible because the cousins have never met, the match is an arranged one, and Eleanor and Rosamond have almost identical handwriting because during their schooldays Eleanor admired Rosamond's handwriting and copied it. Rosamond, however, is uneasy about the deception and she becomes distinctly alarmed by what a visiting
elderly Professor-person had to say to old Mr. Urquhart. [...] It seemed to be all about "literary criticism" and "style" [...]. Suddenly, however, her mind leapt to attention.
The old Dryasdust-man was violently tapping his palm with his forefinger and almost shouting at Mr. Urquhart, who looked intensely irritated, "but, my dear sir, the personal elements of style can never be eliminated! The plagiarist may imitate the writing, the general trend of argument may arrive at the same conclusions, but the unconscious elements of style remain." (219-220)
Of course the fiancé does eventually work out what has been going on, and in fact returned from abroad unexpectedly because something about the "unconscious elements" of Rosamond's style suddenly made him very eager to meet his bride-to-be.
I'm not sure I would know any more than Rosamond does about how to set about doing this type of analysis of literary styles, but Olivia Davis seems to have attempted it in a recent essay on Fifty Shades of Grey. She takes as her model a
study by Talbot (1995) that examined transitivity choices achieved through the distribution of process verbs in selected extracts taken from Mills and Boon romance novels. Talbot’s study found that within the genre, female characters were represented as being in a habitual ‘struggle for self-control’ (Talbot 1995: 83), exhibited by their frequent used of mental process verbs. This was a contrast to the male characters, whose use of material processes depicted them as ‘a powerful person...the epitome of the patriarchal male’ (Talbot 1995: 81), thus reinforcing damaging gender stereotypes.
The study in question is Mary M. Talbot's Fictions at Work: Language and Social Practice in Fiction (1995) in which Talbot analysed one romance novel in depth (Kate Walker's No Gentleman, 1992). It was a Harlequin Romance and here's part of what Talbot had to say about the Harlequin/Mills & Boon hero of the time:
he is invariably tall, lean, white, and ruggedly handsome with an animal magnetism which is quite extraordinary. He turns heads wherever he goes. Always a powerful person, he is generally someone who is used to being obeyed; a bully, in fact, both professionally and personally. And, perhaps it goes without saying, he is always affluent, whether a successful architect or artist or a fully-fledged capitalist. (81)
By coincidence, Walker's heroine was named Anna and Talbot mentions that
she is tormented with (almost) uncontrollable urges of one kind or another. Her mind and body seem to be perpetually in conflict; the basic premise seems to be that women suppress their instincts/true feelings and are thrown into a state of confusion and consternation by a desirable man's attentions. (82)
The similarities between E. L. James's Christian and Ana and Harlequin/Mills & Boon heroes and heroines of this kind have been noted by Jodi McAlister:
Anastasia Steele and Christian Grey are clearly recognisable [...] as archetypes from the world of “Harlequin Presents” category romances: the shy virgin and the emotionally damaged billionaire.
Olivia Davis, though, sticks to analysis of the "unconscious elements of style" and looks in detail at the passage in Fifty Shades which
details the 21-year old, sexually naïve Ana losing her virginity to Grey, [...] an older, more experienced man. [...] Ana has less total verbs than her male counterpart. Grey uses a massive 37 verbs in the extract, implying he is more active, and he literally dominates the text. [...] Within these verbs, Grey also uses more material processes than mental. [...] Ana has a higher percentage of mental processes (65%) than material (35%) [...]. These figures indicate again that gender stereotypes are evident in the text, as this low level of material processes depicts Ana as more passive. Although [...] the narrative is told from Ana’s point of view, which can account for the use of some of the mental processes, Mills rightfully observes that ‘While the male [sexual] experience is represented in terms of the actions he does to her body, the female’s experience is given as her thoughts and feelings, and her body’s independent responses to physical pleasure’ (1995:149) [...]. (79-81)
I find all this interesting, though I can't say I fully understand it: like Jack Elliot's work on romance, which involves training "a computer to spot differences in word-use," it seems a much more scientific, numerical sort of literary criticism than mine.
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Davis, Olivia. "Fifty Shades of Grey: A Liberating Text in the Context of Post-Feminism?" Codex 1.1 (2013): 69-89.
McAlister, Jodi. "Fifty Shades of Genre." Popular Romance Project. 8 Nov. 2012.
Ruck, Berta. The Courtship of Rosamond Fayre. Toronto: William Briggs, 1915.
Talbot, Mary M. Fictions at Work: Language and Social Practice in Fiction. London: Longman, 1995.