Analysing structure, gender and religion in the Brothers Grimm

Introduction

Jacob & Wilheim Grimm, better known as the Brothers Grimm, had a massive impact on the literary world and how we view literature. Looking at the stories we all grew up with as children and the stories that continue to prevail it is clear that the brothers had a sizeable influence over what we are exposed to and even more noticeable now as we have entered a period where it seems that a movie version of every known fairy tale must be made. The Grimms were German academics, linguists and of course authors. Between the years of 1812 and 1815 they published two volumes of German folk tales. In the years that followed, until 1857, they published a further five editions of this collection. Eventually the brothers were happy with the structure, content and sequence of the collection. In culmination the body of work contained 201 folktales and 10 children’s legends and was entitled Kinder- und Hausmärchen – Children’s and Household Tales. I believe this body of work has a lot of potential for academic study purely based on the structure of the work. Through the course of this essay I am going to look at a couple of topics pertaining to the Children’s and Household Tales collection. Firstly I am going to look at the structural difference between the 201 folk tales and the 10 folk legends. I will then look at gender weighting between the two groupings and finally discuss religious imagery taking in to consideration my previous points. There is a natural break between the folk tales and the folk legends therefore I will the folk tales independently followed by an independent study of the folk legends and finally a collaborative study of both. I will repeat this method for my analysis of structure, gender and religion respectively.

Methodology

To achieve detailed and accurate results from this study I used a number of tools to support my opinions on structure, gender and religion. These were:

• The software package R and R Studio (Eder et al., 2013).

• Voyant Tools.

R is a software package that caters for statistical computing and graphics. Voyant is a web-based reading and analysis environment for digital texts (Voyant). I used R to assess the structure of the pieces and will go on to use Voyant to assess gender weighting and religion within each respective group.

Structure

 

To begin the study I analysed the folk tales using R. The cluster analysis operates on a method whereby it identifies the 100 most frequent words in a text and clusters texts together by similarity in shared words. The initial cluster analysis I ran was of the 201 folk tales to see which tales clustered together. I did not expect to find anything of significance and indeed I did not. These are the results of the initial cluster analysis of solely folk tales.

 

If I was completing more in depth study of individual folk tales from the collection then the above data would prove useful however I am more concerned with the comparative study between folk tales and folk legends.

Following this I completed a similar cluster analysis on the folk legends. Once again the results were nothing surprising however I noticed that there was a slight divide causing two groups to form. The first group included legends 6,1,4,2 and 9 and the second group included legends 7, 3,10,5 and 8. I did not understand the significance of this divide until further in my study. These are the results of the cluster analysis of the folk legends.

To complete my cluster analysis study of the body of work, I performed a cluster analysis on the entire collection. Below you can see the folk tales in red and the folk legends.

Once again nothing stood out from this cluster analysis. After this result I performed a closer reading of the tales that the legends were clustering towards. What I found was the legends in the lower third of the graph clustered towards tales that contained religious imagery while the legends higher up on the graph freely associated with tales that contained strong magical content. From this point I knew that a more in depth study was needed to identify the difference between folk legends and folk tales as it was clear there was something there.

I then ran the same process but this time utilising a bootstrap consensus instead of a cluster analysis. The bootstrap consensus is a more precise measurement of literature analysis as in takes in to consideration the 1000 most frequent words. I ran a bootstrap consensus on the folk tales with nothing of interest for this particular study. After that I ran a bootstrap consensus of the folk legends and found the following.

My suspicion of the divide was proven correct after a more detailed bootstrap consensus. Once again after a close reading of the legends I found that the use of religious imagery was more prominent in the lower grouping with the higher grouping containing less religious connotations but by comparison to the folk tales contained much more religious content. From this point I ran a bootstrap consensus of the entire collection to view the structural difference between the legends and the tales. These were my findings:

Above the graph shows the legends in green and the tales in red. My suspicions were confirmed. There is a clear divide between the legends and the folk tales ensuring the structure and general language used in either are very different.

Interpretation of structural results:

It is evident from the combined graphs after running a more comprehensive analysis of the texts that there is a clear divide between the folk legends and the folk tales. This is due to a number of reasons. The legends are religious in content whilst the folk tales are not. This was identified in the 1000 most common words bootstrap consensus. These findings led me to believe that there may be more concrete reasons for the divide. I decided to investigate gender and religious conations from this point.

Gender

 

Using Voyant I decided to investigate gender weighting between folk tales and folk legends. Using the word trend feature I constructed a graph tracking a specific group of words firstly in the folk tales and then I the folk legends. This list contained the words: child, mother, father, woman and man. These were the results from the folk tales.

It is clear there is a more dominant male presence in the folk tales with the words father and in particular man featuring much more than the other words in the graph. To see this data on a visual scale in comparison to the other words in the folk tales I created a word cloud. This is what I found.

It is clear from this word cloud that there is a stronger male presence. The word cloud even showed results which I had not accounted for. For instance the word king features quite heavily, more so than man or father however it is directly male in connotation.

Using the same word list I executed the analysis on the folk legends. This is what I found in the word trend graph:

Here it can be seen that the gender weighting is in direct opposition to that of the folk tales. The words mother but more importantly woman feature more so than any of the male words. This is quite interesting as I suspected a male presence to be more dominant in the folk legends given their religious nature. Once again I constructed a word cloud for the most common words in the folk legends to see if there was any other information I had omitted.

It was clear from this word cloud that nothing of significance had been omitted from the word trend.

Interpretation of Gender Results:

 

Clearly there is a stronger female presence in the folk legends and a stronger male presence in the folk tales. This may have something to do with the fact that there is a larger body of work in the folk tales and there will be some discrepancies. However it should be noted that after this I ran a word trend comparison using the words woman and God to see their use in the folk legends and found the word woman to occur more than God. This I feel is something that should be investigated further as the religious nature of the folk legends almost dictates that there should be a stronger male presence.

Gender

 

Finally I looked at religion and gauged the use of two definitive religious words that occurred in both the folk tales and the folk legends: angel and God. The first graph illustrates the amount of times these words are mentioned in the folk tales whilst the second graph illustrates their occurrence in the folk legends.

 

Comparing these graphs it seems that the rate of each word is not that different. However when taking in to context the size of each body of work the results seem more definitive. The first graph accounts for 201 folk tales showing that God is a prominent feature in some of them, the second graph accounts for 10 folk legends also showing God is a prominent feature in these. It must be noted that the rate of God is higher in the folk legends than the folk tales and given the numerical ‘disadvantage’ the legends hold in their size of work, it shows religion is the centre point for the legends.

Interpretation of Religion:

The findings from my study of religion in the Grimm’s collection proved more valuable than I thought. After I reached these results I went back over the folk tales that featured the word God heavily and found that these were the same folk tales that clustered with the folk legends in my initial cluster analysis of the entire body of work. This accounts for the mixed results I encountered at the start of this research.

Conclusion:

Throughout this research project I have learned quite a few things both in my quantitative study of the Grimm’s collection and closer reading to extract more definite results. In terms of structure it is clear that the legends differ greatly from the folk tales and explains why they have their own section within the Grimm’s collection. With regards to gender weighting I believe I have proved conclusively there is a stronger female presence in the folk legends and a stronger male presence in the folk tales. This may be because the villain is more than usually a stepmother in the folk tales allowing the male characters to be showcased as heroes and celebrated in their gender. Finally the religious balance is clearly stronger in the folk legends than the folk tales. I believe there is much more that can be extracted from this collection however given the time frame I feel this is all I can record at this present moment.

Bibliography

• Eder, Maciej, Mike Kestemont, and Jan Rybicki. “Stylometry with R: A Suite of Tools.”Digital Humanities 2013: Conference Abstracts (2013): 487-89. Assessed on the 16-12-2013
• Voyant (http://voyant-tools.org/) Assessed on the 18-12-2013
• Grimm Brothers Text (http://www.fln.vcu.edu/grimm/grimm_menu.html) Assessed on the 6-12-2013

Algorithm tracks literary emotion in Shakespeare & The Brothers Grimm

ALGORITHM TRACKS LITERARY EMOTION IN SHAKESPEARE, THE BROTHERS GRIMM

Check out Saif Mohammad’s work on the Brothers Grimm. A nice introduction before my essay!

Book Of Days

Director – Marissa Duricko

Playwright – Lanford Wilson

Director’s Synopsis of Piece:

Book of Days is set in a small town dominated by a cheese plant, fundamentalist church, and a community theatre. When the owner of the cheese plant dies mysteriously in a hunting accident, Ruth, his bookkeeper, suspects murder. Cast as Joan of Arc in a local production of George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan, Ruth takes on the attributes of her fictional character and launches into a one-woman campaign to see justice done.

My Interpretation of Book Of Days:

Book of Days begins as a naturalist piece of drama accounting the lives of different people living in a the fictional town of Dublin, Missouri. This piece of comic writing evolves in to a murder mystery causing the audience to question all the characters they are presented with and enforces the question of who to believe. The piece itself calls for a sizable cast of at least twelve and throughout the piece you are introduced to everything from  a cheese plant and a fundamentalist church to community theater in this fictitious society that Lanford Wilson creates. The plot centers around a tornado that marks the death of one of the characters and so begins the mystery as to whether it was a death caused by a natural act or a murder. What I found really interesting about this play is the use of time and how it is played with. In several instances throughout the drama time is re-winded or fast forwarded to different dates to show a progression in the plot or the re telling of an important element of the story. Through this all of the characters are given a thorough back story and the audience feels they have a better insight as to who the culprit could be having knowledge of events and characters prior to the central event. This troublesome aspect of the production was achieved flawlessly by the UCC Dramat production of Book of Days. The production ensured that each of the twelve cast members had multiple costume changes, even if only for the most minute scenes, enforcing the idea of the passing of time. Because each of the characters represent a different person in society their costuming is key to the development of the characters as each character adopts their own style. The costuming shone through as a very strong production element. As well as the costumes, the lighting and set worked intrinsically together reflecting a simple natural  setting  that supported the ‘believability’ of the piece. Very simple yet effective designs. All of the productions elements combining together was a foresight of the strong group work created by the cast. A very hard piece to create as the ensemble carries it as a group. All of the characters were given the attention and support needed so that the production presented a united force to the audience showcasing a lovely example of the marriage between production and performance.

Foxfinder

Director – Maria Manning

Playwright – Dawn King

Director’s Synopsis of Piece:

When William Bloor, a ‘foxfinder’ arrives at the Coveys’ farm, he has only one aim – to use the education he’s been given to seek out and unearth the fox, an animal threatening their very civilisation. However, as investigations proceed, the revelations and events which follow change their lives forever.

My Interpretaion of Foxfinder:

Once again I had not heard of this piece previous to its announcement as part of the Dramat season 2013/2014. I had no expectations going in to this piece and did not know what to expect. The result was quite surprising. This piece verges on theatre of the absurd but is too heavily based in realism that it is quite hard to categorize the piece. The drama contains some very dark coronations and imagery which I was not suspecting prior too or even at the beginning of the performance. The writing steadily builds a trust between the drama and the audience allowing the writing to push more and more absurd messages in tot the laps of the audience members. It was a fine example of cleverly executed and subtle writing that demands quite a lot from the audience even if they are unaware of what id being asked of them. Below is a video where the artistic director of Artists Rep theatre explains the piece a bit more in-depth.

The piece itself, as mentioned in the video above, is a great platform for whatever topic is being discussed in society at presently. Because representation and symbolism are key to the figure of the fox in the piece, the audience can impose any meaning or message to the piece without the dialogue or delivery of the piece ever-changing. The writing is a chameleon of sorts that takes on the body of what is being discussed of the time. This is a sign of a piece of drama that will not age and constantly mantain relevance to the audience.

Hamlet Machine

Director – Tony McCleane-Fay

Playwright – Heiner Müller

Director’s Synopsis of Piece:

Never was there a tale of more woe than that of Hamlet and Ophelia… their violent, ill-fated and abusive relationship forms the backbone of Hamletmachine.  Set in Elsinore, a place of purgatory, the play is an abstract and fragmented appropriation of Hamlet, taking the familiar and creating a free-fall down the rabbit hole into a non sequitur suspension of duplicated Hamlets and Ophelias with a Gertrude and Claudius thrown in for extra conflict and sexual tension.

My Interpretation of HamletMachine:

This piece is the only one in my repertoire which was not performed within the context of UCC Dramat. This piece was performed by second year students of the Drama & theatre Studies Course University College Cork. This, taking the other pieces I am interpreting into consideration, was the darkest piece of theatre and demanded the most from its audience. In saying that I found the piece to demand the right amount from its audience and did not apologise for what it put forward. The structure of the piece was quite interesting. The first twenty five/thirty minutes were a summarised version of Hamlet with the stage directions of the charcters being announced by a narrator. The general tone of the piece at this point is light hearted. Even with the amount of death in Hamlet it was done in such a comedic way with the bodies of the ‘dead’ characters staying in the space until eventually there was hardly any space left. At the end point of this the true core of Hamletmachine begins. The piece places itself back in modern day with the help of multimedia: projections of day to day society, political slogans, sexual imagery, disfigured images etc. Immediatly the tone of the piece turns much darker and the audience is uncertain where the piece is going to go. What ensues is a barrage of messages and metaphors ranging from feminism and domestic abuse to gender swapping and suicide. The piece is non apologetic,no topic is fully discussed before moving on to the next. I found the production elements to be a physical representation of the piece.See the you tube slideshow below to view production shots.

The production elements were strikingly beautiful and dark mirroring the dialogue and subject matter of the drama. Several striking moments of beauty were created throughout the performance forcing the audience to surrender to the piece and fully emerge themselves in what was happening in that moment. The nature of the piece is suited to a large group of actors to allow more versatility and change within the piece. All of the actors carried forward the characters they played in the summarized version of Hamlet to the ‘Machine’ part of  piece creating the question of “what if?”. All of the cast played a multitude of roles causing the audience to associate more with what the character was saying rather than actor played a role. Overall the production is one that sticks with you long after you leave the theater and most definitely provides food for thought.

Goose Chase

Director – Margaret Perry

Playwright – Margaret Perry

Director’s Synopsis of Piece:

Goose Chase is a tale of boy-meets-girl told by a talking magpie. What if you discovered your life story had already been written for you? This is a story about stories, the stories we tell and the ones we live – the stories that are chosen for us and the stories we choose for ourselves. Typical and Lovely are a boy and a girl who meet when they’re 8 and a half years old. As they grow up, their lives intertwine – they don’t need anyone else, which is just as well, since there doesn’t seem to be anyone else around for them to talk to. They also begin to notice something strange – a talking magpie the size of a human man who seems to be following them. Things gradually become clear as their story unravels and Lovely has a choice to make.

My Interpretation of Goose Chase:

This for me was one of the most enjoyable productions I have seen in a long time. So many things about this production were spot on for me. Firstly the writing was incredibly innovative and witty that you could not help but notice the orignal writing style of Margaret Perry. The plot is a classic boy meets girl romance turned on its head. The piece invites the audience to watch, then opens up a conversation with the and finally joins the reality of the piece and the reality of the audience together completely shattering any previously mentioned ‘fourth wall’. I enjoy theatre of the absurd more especially when it defamiliarizes the familiar and that is exactly what this piece does. In terms of design aspect it is clear that the independent designers of lighting,sound,costume,make and set communicated a lot and discussed their designs in detail. The lighting achieved natural states when needed but equally was able to create a surrealist atmosphere when called for. The set was a very simple V intersection red-brick wall with a street lamp and two bushes, quite a simple design but done extremely well. The costumes were nothing short of professional standard. The ‘natural’ characters were dressed appropriate for the age they were supposed to be depicting and very casual however the true brilliance of the costume and make up design came to light when the audience was introduced to the narrator of the piece – a human sizes magpie. I was amazed at the detail of the costume and will not begin to describe it as I would not do it justice. Check out the

Look Back In Anger

Director – Rowan Finken

Playwright – John Osborne

Director’s Synopsis of Piece:

‘Angry young man’ Jimmy Porter lives with his wife Alison and friend Cliff in their one room apartment in an industrial town.  They spend their Sundays reading the papers and ironing. Jimmy torments Alison with her upper-class background and Cliff with his working class ignorance. The Porter’s relationship is crumbling while Cliff tries to keep everything on an even keel. Things get a whole lot worse with the arrival of Alison’s best friend, Helena Charles, who advises her to leave this volatile relationship. This results in a test of everyone’s loyalty.

My Interpretation of Look Back In Anger:

I will admit that I had never heard of this piece before and from speaking to a few of my peers, who would interested in theatre, neither had they. However upon researching the piece I found it to have quite a reputation. The drama was the beginning of a new type of theatre when it debuted in 1956, the kitchen-sink drama (the then new wave of realistic drama depicting the family lives  of working‐class characters, on stage and in broadcast plays). this style of theatre is not to everyone’s taste and honestly I did not know what my reaction would be. The UCC Dramat production staging was different to what I had seen before. There was no standing set, just furniture, depicting a one room apartment where the drama in its entirety takes place. As soon as I sat in the audience and observed the staging I knew the writing would have to be strong as the production could not rely on flashy production elements. Lighting,sound,costume and make-up  remained uniform and well matched with the neutral and muted tone of the set design. All production elements combined to support the writing of the drama as oppose to stand out. I was quite impressed with this as I tried to dissect the production elements afterwards and found that each of the individual designs almost blended together. This is a positive as it was easy to recognise that all of the individual designers had the same vision in mind. In terms of the writing, I found the piece to be a bit heavy and wordy in places but within the context of the character delivering these verbose lines along with the time ion which the piece was wrote it made perfect sense. The performances I found to be throughly enjoyable. This piece of theatre calls for a performance of the everyday and mundane and maintaining that consistent energy for two hours and fifteen minutes does take quite a lot of stamina. Overall I found the piece to be quite enjoyable and quite a peculiar choice for student theatre. I felt the piece caused a dialogue between the audience and the subject matter of the drama and by the end of the piece there doesn’t seem to be conflict just life represented on stage. After I saw the UCC Dramat production I researched it some more and came across this Guardian Article explaining the significance of the piece and it’s place in British theatre history. Below you will see a YouTube video showing one of the many monologues by the central character of the piece, Jimmy Porter.

Frame of Mind

After much thought and deliberation I have decided on the subject matter for Literary Links. As the seminar is titled “Textualities: Text, Technology and Digital Cultures” and it is described to ‘introduce students to a range of critical concepts concerning the text and new media’, I have decided to keep within the ethos of the seminar and record something of personal interest to me. For the next couple of weeks I am going to review and deliver my interpretation of theater productions. These will range from productions done by University College Cork’s own student drama society, as well as professional production companies that will perform in Cork on  tour. The dramas will range from pieces which I am familiar with, pieces I have not read and finally pieces which are completely original therefore I will have no opportunity to have an insight of what they entail before viewing them,. The reason i have decided to undertake this as my research concept is because I believe the interpretation behind an individual text is quite important. For instance an original piece, written and directed by a fellow UCC student will showcase in the Granary theater next week. I have no prior knowledge of the piece and when I reflect on it and write my interpretation on it, it will be the only virtual text relating to the piece.Ergo my interpretation of the piece will be, for an indefinite amount of time, the only online resource of the drama and the only voice of the piece. I think this concept is very interesting and one I am looking forward to investigating over the coming weeks. In each ‘review’ I will take in to account how the director has described the piece on the UCC Granary Theatre website and take their interpreation/synopsis in to account. Thus in keeping with the title of this blog, I shall be the the literary link between stage and computer screen. The work begins now.

The Beginning

And so I begin. Through Texualites: Text, Technology & Digital Cultures I hope to provide some insight in to what I have an interest in, both  in a personal and academic context. Let’s see if I’m up to the job. I’ll keep you posted.