Conclusion and Report on the Influence That Hemingway's Four Wives Had on His Writing and Writing Style
Copying and pasting entire books, creating spreadsheets to view and calculate, and drawing inferences from the data all helped me to prove that Hemingway's wives had no, or a least a very insignificant, effect on his writing style. Subject matter was not what was to be tested in this project, purely style and the raw words were. I wanted to find out if that with each new wife Hemingway married, his way of writing changed as well. Through Voyant, my question was answered.
By analyzing The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and Across the River and Into the Trees, I figured that I would be able to easily map out any style changes that occurred in Hemingway's writing throughout the years and marriages. However the numbers that came back were very surprising even to me.
Copying and pasting entire books, creating spreadsheets to view and calculate, and drawing inferences from the data all helped me to prove that Hemingway's wives had no, or a least a very insignificant, effect on his writing style. Subject matter was not what was to be tested in this project, purely style and the raw words were. I wanted to find out if that with each new wife Hemingway married, his way of writing changed as well. Through Voyant, my question was answered.
By analyzing The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and Across the River and Into the Trees, I figured that I would be able to easily map out any style changes that occurred in Hemingway's writing throughout the years and marriages. However the numbers that came back were very surprising even to me.
I feel like that one of the most shocking things that came up during my research was that the word "said" was used with such uniformity throughout all four of Hemingway's novels. Appearing with a frequency ranging from only 0.013 to 0.015 (rounded), the word said had an unmatched uniformity. No other words or even similar set of words appeared this type of consistency in all four of the books. What this means I do not fully understand but this is sturdy evidence for the argument that Hemingway's style did not change with his marriages.
The next conclusion I drew was that after said the words which appeared most frequently in the top list of words counts were always male subjects. Now this appears not to be the case in A Farewell to Arms but the statement could not be anymore truer in this case as well. "Catherine" appears in the work 283 times and is a woman's name, also the only subject in the list, so one would think that she is the most important character and causes the statement that I wrote earlier to be false. However, by using the "English (Taporware)" in the Stop Words List in Voyant to filter out the insignificant words (stated before here), the software also filtered out the word "I." Now this cannot seem to change anything but the "I" that was written so many times in the novel, 3,365 times to be exact, refers to the narrator Frederic Henry, a male and the husband to the Catherine mentioned above. So after the mistake of filtering out "I" in A Farewell to Arms was fixed, I was able to prove that after the verb "said" that male subjects are the next most written about things in Hemingway's four books, something none of the four wives changed.
In conclusion, though Ernest Hemingway's wives could have and probably did have great influences on his life, they did not have a seeable effect on his writing. By analyzing four of his major works with the help of Voyant, I was able to come to the conclusion that Hemingway's style and word choice stayed concrete through his writing career. The stories changed, but the words he chose and the main themes of his novels stayed the same. Hemingway used the word "said" with so much consistency and uniformity throughout these four books that even I was surprised that this did not change much. Also, his focus on male subjects remained constant. One can draw his or her own thoughts about how or if Hemingway changed his writing style during his career; however, looking back at the numbers, it is clear that he stayed solid in the words he used and how he used them.
The next conclusion I drew was that after said the words which appeared most frequently in the top list of words counts were always male subjects. Now this appears not to be the case in A Farewell to Arms but the statement could not be anymore truer in this case as well. "Catherine" appears in the work 283 times and is a woman's name, also the only subject in the list, so one would think that she is the most important character and causes the statement that I wrote earlier to be false. However, by using the "English (Taporware)" in the Stop Words List in Voyant to filter out the insignificant words (stated before here), the software also filtered out the word "I." Now this cannot seem to change anything but the "I" that was written so many times in the novel, 3,365 times to be exact, refers to the narrator Frederic Henry, a male and the husband to the Catherine mentioned above. So after the mistake of filtering out "I" in A Farewell to Arms was fixed, I was able to prove that after the verb "said" that male subjects are the next most written about things in Hemingway's four books, something none of the four wives changed.
In conclusion, though Ernest Hemingway's wives could have and probably did have great influences on his life, they did not have a seeable effect on his writing. By analyzing four of his major works with the help of Voyant, I was able to come to the conclusion that Hemingway's style and word choice stayed concrete through his writing career. The stories changed, but the words he chose and the main themes of his novels stayed the same. Hemingway used the word "said" with so much consistency and uniformity throughout these four books that even I was surprised that this did not change much. Also, his focus on male subjects remained constant. One can draw his or her own thoughts about how or if Hemingway changed his writing style during his career; however, looking back at the numbers, it is clear that he stayed solid in the words he used and how he used them.