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READING
MODERNISM
WITH
MACHINES
DIGITAL
HUMANITIES
AND MODERNIST
LITERATURE
Edited by
SHAWNA ROSS and
JAMES O’SULLIVAN
Reading Modernism with Machines
 Shawna Ross • James O’Sullivan
Editors

Reading Modernism
with Machines
Digital Humanities and Modernist Literature
Editors
Shawna Ross James O’Sullivan
Department of English Humanities Research Institute
Texas A&M University University of Sheffield
Department of English Sheffield, UK
College Station, Texas, USA

ISBN 978-1-137-59568-3    ISBN 978-1-137-59569-0 (eBook)

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-59569-0

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016955951

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016

The author(s) has/have asserted their right(s) to be identified as the author(s) of this work
in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval,
electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now
known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the
publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to
the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made.

Cover illustration: © Cultura Creative (RF)/Alamy Stock Photo

Cover design by Oscar Spigolon

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

The registered company is Macmillan Publishers Ltd.
The registered company address is: The Campus, 4 Crinan Street, London, N1 9XW, United
Kingdom
 Preface

This volume is comprised of essays that are, methodologically, rooted in

the digital, but the significance of this collection is to be found in the
results of the studies—the literary interpretations that are supported, not
dictated, by the machine. In taking such an approach, it is our hope that
this collection represents precisely what digital literary studies should be: a
field in which computers assist in the discovery of new forms of evidence,
evidence which is in turn used to further existing critical arguments, while
shining a light on new, previously unforeseen strands of enquiry worth
pursuing. The method is just that—the method—and while we must strive
to ensure that the techniques of this field remain valid, it is what we derive
from the method, rather than the method itself, that should be, as liter-
ary and cultural scholars, our primary focus. A fascination with method
is important to the development of more robust and sophisticated tech-
niques, but any such research should always be conducted in the service
of those disciplines and activities that constitute the Arts and Humanities.
Saying this, the value of method should not be diminished, and thus,
this collection also serves as a timely demonstration for those scholars who
wish to see the validity of the Digital Humanities. These essays should act
as a template for those seeking to juxtapose computer-assisted techniques
with critical enquiry, particularly in a field such as this, where modernism’s
central tenant, the desire to “make it new,” seems as readily applicable to
the scholar’s method as it does the artifact’s content.
While the Digital Humanities are comprised of various and sometimes
dissonant activities, the methods that have emerged from this community
of praxis are applicable to a multiplicity of literatures. The analysis of most,

v
vi Preface

if not all, literary movements, epochs, genres and styles can be assisted by
a computer. Yet, while these techniques are the progeny of interdisciplin-
ary efforts, and entirely transferable in their application, we should not
lose sight of our own humanistic origins. Many of the Digital Humanities’
existing collections are broad in their focus, covering a variety of disci-
plines. Undoubtedly a product of the field being inherently interdisciplin-
ary and collaborative, while this trend is to be encouraged, there is also a
need for disciplinary focus.
This collection offers an example of such: while there may be some
appeal to a wider set of literary scholars intrigued by recent shifts in the way
that scholarship is conducted, this is a collection about modernist litera-
ture, comprised of contributions by scholars who are humanists first, tech-
nicians second. In being so, it is an example of precisely what the Digital
Humanities promises: a robust interrogation of the literary, informed by
methods which do not replace, but rather, supplement, existing modes of
criticism. And in doing so, it does not render the long-­established prin-
ciples of modernist scholarship obsolete—it merely contributes to making
them new.

James O’Sullivan
 Acknowledgements

The editors would like to acknowledge the pioneering work done by

the Modernist Journals Project (Robert Scholes, Sean Latham, Susan
Smulyan, Jeff Drouin, Clifford Wulfman and Mark Gaipta), the Orlando
Project (particularly Susan Brown), the Modernist Versions Project (par-
ticularly Stephen Ross), and Editing Modernism in Canada (Dean Irvine).
We would also like to thank April James, Ben Doyle, and Peter Cary at
Palgrave Macmillan for their support of this collection, as well as our tire-
less copyeditors.
Portions of Chapter 1 have appeared in Digital studies/Le champ
numérique, vol. 6 (2016).
Shawna would like to thank Andrew for his attentive willingness to talk
in perhaps excruciating detail about this project. She wants to dedicate her
work on this book to her mother, Cynthia Jordan.
James would like to thank Graham Allen and Órla Murphy, University
College Cork, for their continued support and guidance.

vii
 Contents

1 Introduction   1
Shawna Ross

2 ModLabs  15
Dean Irvine

3 Modeling Modernist Dialogism: Close Reading

with Big Data  49
Adam Hammond, Julian Brooke, and Graeme Hirst

4 Mapping Modernism’s Z-axis: A Model for Spatial

Analysis in Modernist Studies  79
Alex Christie and Katie Tanigawa

5 Textbase as Machine: Graphing Feminism

and Modernism with OrlandoVision 109
Kathryn Holland and Jana Smith Elford

6 Remediation and the Development of Modernist

Forms in The Western Home Monthly 135
Hannah McGregor and Nicholas van Orden

ix
x Contents

7 Stylistic Perspective Across Kenneth Fearing’s Poetry:

A Statistical Analysis 165
Wayne E. Arnold

8 In the End Was the Word: A Computational

Approach to T. S. Eliot’s Poetic Diction 185
Adam James Bradley

9 A Macro-Etymological Analysis of James Joyce’s

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man 203
Jonathan Reeve

10 Body Language: Toward an Affective

Formalism of Ulysses 223
Kurt Cavender, Jamey E. Graham, Robert P. Fox Jr.,
Richard Flynn, and Kenyon Cavender

11 “We Twiddle … and Turn into Machines”: Mina Loy,

HTML and the Machining of Information 243
Andrew Pilsch

12 CGI Monstrosities: Modernist Surfaces, the Composite

and the Making of the Human Form 265
Eunsong Kim

Index291
 Notes on the Contributors

Wayne E. Arnold holds a PhD in English (2013) from The University of

Louisiana at Lafayette, USA, and an MA in TESOL (2013) from the same univer-
sity. Additionally, he has earned an MA in English (2007) from Western Kentucky
University and an MBA (2001) from Wright State University. Prior to accepting a
position as Associate Professor of American Studies at The University of Kitakyushu,
Japan, he taught at Kansai Gaidai University, Japan, and Harvard University
Summer Program. Research interests include Henry Miller and Kenneth Fearing.
Adam James Bradley BA (McMaster) MA (Waterloo), is a PhD candidate in both
the departments of English Language and Literature and Systems Design
Engineering at the University of Waterloo. He is interested in the intersections
between technology and traditional literary studies with a focus on early twentieth-­
century poetics. His current work focuses on digital tool design for literary criti-
cism and investigations into how philology can still function within a technological
context. Other interests include modernist literature, classical languages and
ancient rhetoric.
Julian Brooke is a McKenzie Postdoctoral Fellow in the Computing and
Information System Departments at the University of Melbourne, Australia. The
topic of his PhD thesis was computational analysis of lexical style. His published
work in computational linguistics includes papers at major conferences in the field
such as ACL and COLING as well as an article in the flagship journal, Computational
Linguistics. He is co-­creator, with Adam Hammond, of two websites for exploring
modernist ­dialogism: He Do the Police in Different Voices (hedothepolice.org) and
The Brown Stocking (brownstocking.org). He is co-developer, with Adam
Hammond, of GutenTag (projectgutentag.org), a tool for computational text
analysis in the Project Gutenberg corpus.

xi
xii Notes on the Contributors

Kenyon Cavender is a freelance programmer with a BS in Mathematics from

Texas A&M University, USA. He is interested in the application of free and open
source software in both academia and the private sector.
Kurt Cavender is the Andrew Grossbardt Graduate Fellow in the Department of
English at Brandeis University, USA. His work focuses on the historical novel in
twentieth and twenty-first century American literature.
Alex Christie is Assistant Professor in Digital Prototyping at Brock University’s
Centre for Digital Humanities, Canada. He completed his doctorate at the
University of Victoria, where he conducted research on geospatial expression and
scholarly communication for the Modernist Versions Project (MVP) and
Implementing New Knowledge Environments (INKE) in the Electronic Textual
Cultures Lab (ETCL) and the Maker Lab. He developed an open source toolkit
for digital humanities pedagogy with grant funding from the Association for
Computers and the Humanities. He is currently working on a modernist history
of the mechanical production and interpretation of texts before the advent of digi-
tal computing.
Jana Smith Elford is a SSHRC-funded doctoral candidate in the department of
English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta, Canada, where she is also a
Research Associate with the Orlando Project and the Canadian Writing Research
Collaboratory (CWRC). Her research explores the lives and writings of several fin
de siècle feminist reformers using network visualization software. With her collabo-
rators, she helped develop the OrlandoVision prototype, conducting user testing,
making recommendations for changes and drafting documentation. She is cur-
rently involved with the development of HuVis, an RDF visualization tool. Her
research appears in Orlando: Women’s Writing in the British Isles from Beginnings
to the Present (2006), the Victorians Institute Journal Annex, Victorian Review,
and the Journal of Modern Periodicals Studies.
Richard Flynn is a PhD candidate in English Literature at Brandeis University,
USA.
Robert P. Fox Jr. is a PhD candidate in English and American Literature at Tufts
University, USA, who focuses on Renaissance literature with a particular interest in
the intersections of literary and legal culture in Early Modern England. He is a
graduate of Boston College Law School and Harvard College and was a partner at
the Boston law firm of Nutter, McClennen & Fish, LLP specializing in real estate.
Jamey E. Graham teaches Renaissance British Literature at Le Moyne College,
USA. Previously, she taught History and Literature at Harvard University, where
she earned her PhD in Comparative Literature. The author of articles on
Shakespeare and Spenser, she is currently working on a book titled How Character
Became Literary: Virtue and Example in Early Modern Poetics.
 Notes on the Contributors  xiii

Adam Hammond is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English and

Comparative Literature at San Diego State University, USA. He is the author of
Literature in the Digital Age: A Critical Introduction (2016) and co-author, with
Melba Cuddy-Keane and Alexandra Peat, of Modernism: Keywords (2014). He is
co-creator, with Julian Brooke, of two websites for exploring modernist dialogism:
He Do the Police in Different Voices (hedothepolice.org) and The Brown Stocking
(brownstocking.org). He is co-developer, with Julian Brooke, of GutenTag (pro-
jectgutentag.org), a tool for computational text analysis in the Project Gutenberg
corpus.
Graeme Hirst is Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the
University of Toronto, Canada. His research interests cover a range of topics in
applied computational linguistics and natural language processing, including lexi-
cal semantics, the resolution of ambiguity in text, the analysis of authors’ styles in
literature and other text, and the automatic analysis of arguments and discourse
(especially in political and parliamentary texts). Hirst’s present research includes
determining ideology in political texts; detecting markers of Alzheimer’s disease in
language; and the identification of the native language of a second-­language writer
of English. Hirst is the editor of the Synthesis series of books on Human Language
Technologies. He is the author of two monographs: Anaphora in Natural
Language Understanding (1981) and Semantic Interpretation and the Resolution
of Ambiguity (1992).
Kathryn Holland is a Senior Research Associate with the Orlando Project and an
instructor at MacEwan University, Canada. Her research is situated at the intersec-
tion of modernist literary history, feminist studies and digital humanities, with a
focus on the place of the multigenerational family in modernist networks and syn-
chronic approaches to literary history. Her current projects include the essay col-
lection she is co-­editing, Digital Diversity: Writing | Feminism | Culture. Her
writing is published in Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, Modernism/modernity,
Canadian Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, and the Times
Literary Supplement. She earned her doctorate in English literature as a Clarendon
Scholar and SSHRC Doctoral Scholar at the University of Oxford.
Dean Irvine is an associate professor at Dalhousie University, Canada. He is
director of Editing Modernism in Canada and the open-source software and web-
design company, Agile Humanities Agency. His publications include Editing
Modernity: Women and Little Magazine Cultures in Canada, 1916–1956 (2008) as
well as the edited collections The Canadian Modernist Meet (2005), Editing as
Cultural Practice in Canada (2016), co-edited with Smaro Kamboureli, Making
Canada New: Editing, Modernism, and New Media (2016), co-edited with Vanessa
Lent and Bart Vautour, and Translocated Modernisms: Paris and Other Lost
Generations (2016), co-edited with Emily Ballantyne and Marta Dvorak. He is the
director and general editor of the Canadian Literature Collection published by the
University of Ottawa Press.
xiv Notes on the Contributors

Eunsong Kim is a doctoral candidate at the University of California, San Diego,

USA. She works with local and national youth arts organizations like Urban
Gateways to develop and teach critically based digital film programs. She has cre-
ated video content for the Getty Center, the Culture Art and Technology Program
at UCSD and the European Independent Film Festival. Her essays on literature,
digital cultures and art criticism have appeared and are forthcoming in Scapegoat,
Lateral, The New Inquiry, Model View Culture, The Margins, and in the forthcom-
ing book anthologies, Global Poetics, Critical Archival Studies, and Forms of
Education. Her prose has been published in Denver Quarterly, Seattle Review,
Feral Feminisms, Minnesota Review, Iowa Review and Action Yes. She is the co-­
founder of contemptorary, an online arts platform dedicated to women of color
artist and writers.
Hannah McGregor is a researcher and full-time instructor in the Department of
English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta, Canada. Her recently com-
pleted SSHRC postdoctoral fellowship, Modern Magazines Project Canada, is a
collaborative initiative that takes up the call to read magazines as a form of new
media technology that, alongside radio and film, helped to shape the emergent
consumer-publics of the twentieth century. In collaboration with the University of
Alberta Libraries and the Manitoba Legislative Library, McGregor has helped to
facilitate the digitization of the full run of the Winnipeg-based magazine The
Western Home Monthly (1899–1932). Her research takes advantage of this digiti-
zation to explore digital methods for the study of periodicals including topic mod-
eling with MALLET, visualization with R, and interactive timelines. She has
published on this research in English Studies in Canada, the Journal of Modern
Periodical Studies, Archives and Manuscripts, the International Journal of
Canadian Studies, and in the edited collection Editing as Cultural Practice in
Canada (2015).
Nicholas van Orden is a PhD student in the Department of English and Film
Studies at the University of Alberta, Canada. His research focuses on the collision
of digital spaces and fictional forms. He is interested in a range of digital humani-
ties topics and methodologies and works to build DH projects into his under-
graduate classes.
James O’Sullivan is Digital Humanities Research Associate at the University of
Sheffield’s Humanities Research Institute, United Kingdom. His research primar-
ily focuses on electronic literature, though he is also concerned with computa-
tional approaches to criticism. His work has been published or is forthcoming in a
variety of interdisciplinary journals, including Digital Scholarship in the Humanities,
English Studies, Digital Humanities Quarterly, Leonardo, and the International
Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing. His research was shortlisted for the
Fortier Prize in 2014. James is Chair of the DHSI Colloquium at the University of
 Notes on the Contributors  xv

Victoria, and a member of the Association for Computers and the Humanities’
Standing Committee on Affiliates. James is also a published poet, and the founder
of New Binary Press. Further information on James and his work can be found at
josullivan.org.
Andrew Pilsch is Assistant Professor of English at Texas A&M University,
USA. He researches and teaches rhetoric and digital humanities, with ­specific focus
on post-digital ideas of embodiment, online utopianism and forms of digital rhe-
torical engagement. His book on transhumanism and contemporary notions of
utopia, including additional material on Mina Loy’s digital afterlives, is currently
under contract with The University of Minnesota Press. He tweets online at @
oncomouse.
Jonathan Reeve is a graduate student in the Department of English and
Comparative Literature at Columbia University, USA, where he works in compu-
tational literary analysis. He has worked as a web developer for the Modern
Language Association, New York University, and the Greenwich Village Society
for Historic Preservation. His current projects include the Macro-Etymological
Analyzer; Annotags, a protocol for decentralized textual annotation; and Git-Lit,
an initiative to version-control and publish electronic texts from the British Library.
Find his blog at http://jonreeve.com.
Shawna Ross is Assistant Professor of Modern British Literature and the Digital
Humanities at Texas A&M University, USA. She is currently working on a book
manuscript that argues that modernist literature theorized relations of leisure and
labor, participating in the production of a comprehensive public discourse of lei-
sure that challenged the Victorian work ethic and recognized the role of leisure in
transnational economies and politics. Readings of Charles Dickens, G. K.
Chesterton, Henry James, T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster, Katherine Mansfield, Vita
Sackville-West and others are juxtaposed by archive-based studies in the visual his-
tory of the leisure industry. She frequently writes on Henry James and on the digi-
tal humanities, and her work has been published in The Henry James Review, the
Journal of Modern Literature, Digital Humanities Quarterly, and various edited
collections, including Henry James Today (2014), Literary Cartographies (2014),
and Utopianism, Modernism and Literature in the Twentieth Century (2013).
Katie Tanigawa is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Victoria, Canada.
She works on geospatial analyses of modernist texts for the Modernist Versions
Project (MVP) and Implementing New Knowledge Environments (INKE), and she
is the Project Manager for the Map of Early Modern London. Her past work includes
marking up, versioning and visualizing textual differences in extant versions of Joseph
Conrad’s Nostromo. Her current areas of research include r­ epresentations of poverty
in Irish modernist literature and exploring modernist approaches to digital
humanities.
 List of Figures

Fig. 3.1 Stylistic change curve over the abridged version

of The Waste Land58
Fig. 4.1 Z-axis map of Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood81
Fig. 4.2 Paris Monumental et Métropolitain map (1932)  82
Fig. 4.3 Detail from map of Paris: Saint-Sulpice 83
Fig. 4.4 XML markup of text and map-based locations 86
Fig. 4.5 XSTL-transformed geo-data of Paris 86
Fig. 4.6 Displacement map of Paris 88
Fig. 4.7 3D map mesh of Paris 89
Fig. 4.8 Warped 3D map mesh of Paris 89
Fig. 4.9 Z-axis map of Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood92
Fig. 4.10 The doctor’s city in Nightwood94
Fig. 4.11 Barnes’s version of the carriage ride in Nightwood96
Fig. 4.12 Rhys’s representation of the Observatoire in Quartet98
Fig. 4.13 Map of Marya’s narrative engagement with Paris in Quartet100
Fig. 4.14 Quartet map showing place Denfert-Rochereau 101
Fig. 4.15 Quartet map showing the Palais de Justice and Santé Prison 102
Fig. 5.1 Flyer for the United Procession of Women suffrage march,
London, 9 February 1907 111
Fig. 5.2 Links screen for Vernon Lee entry in the Orlando Project 114
Fig. 5.3 Life document type definition (subtags not visible) 114
Fig. 5.4 Selection tools on Right, text box at bottom, and
visualization pane in top left115
Fig. 5.5 Initial network graph of the NUWSS 119
Fig. 5.6 Graph of NUWSS focused on Marsden 121
Fig. 5.7 Cluster 1 in OViz graph of Newnham College 123

xvii
xviii List of Figures

Fig. 5.8 Cluster 2 in OViz graph of Newnham College, with view

of Woolf, Harrison and Mirrlees nodes 124
Fig. 6.1 Advertisements, illustrations and pages in each year of the
Western Home Monthly144
Fig. 6.2 “A chat with our readers” in the WHM, July 1919  149
Fig. 6.3 The fall of the phonograph and the rise of radio in WHM
advertisements150
Fig. 6.4 Graph demonstrating sudden increase in fragmentation in
the WHM in 1919 151
Fig. 6.5 A collage of text leaves more space for advertising in
October 1919 issue of the WHM152
Fig. 6.6 Advertisements, illustrations, pages and words (/1000)
in the WHM154
Fig. 6.7 Scatterplot showing distribution of new media topics
in the WHM157
Fig. 6.8 Two-page full-color advertisement for Fada Radios
in the WHM, October 1925 159
Fig. 8.1 Percentage of total words used by century of first usage
by Eliot and the Georgians 193
Fig. 8.2 Georgian poets’ versus T. S. Eliot’s Z-scores for total
usage by century 194
Fig. 8.3 Comparison with Victorian Z-scores for total usage
by century 195
Fig. 8.4 Comparison with Brown News Corpus Z-scores 195
Fig. 8.5 Full table of Z-scores for total usage by century 197
Fig. 8.6 Z-score vocabulary across centuries 199
Fig. 9.1 Latinate words in the Brown News Corpus 207
Fig. 9.2 Hellenic words in the Brown News Corpus 208
Fig. 9.3 L scores for chapters of Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist
as a Young Man209
Fig. 9.4 L scores for sections of Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist
as a Young Man210
Fig. 9.5 H scores for sections of Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist
as a Young Man214
Fig. 10.1 Affective density by episode in Ulysses232
Fig. 11.1 Comparison of printed and HTML block stanzas for
Songs to Joannes258
Fig. 12.1 Pierre-Louis Pierson, “La Frayeur” (1861–67) 271
Fig. 12.2 CGI screenshot of John Adams showing initial shot of
primary actors 276
 List of Figures  xix

Fig. 12.3 The compositing process of CGI animation 277

Fig. 12.4 Constructing extras in John Adams278
Fig. 12.5 Crowd scene of composited extras in John Adams279
Fig. 12.6 Idealized renderings of political figures in John Adams279
Fig. 12.7 Interpolating human actors in a CGI crowd scene
in John Adams280
Fig. 12.8 A final composited scene in John Adams280
 List of Tables

Table 3.1 Stylistic profiles for various characters in The Waste Land62
Table 3.2 Stylistic profiles for discourse types in To the Lighthouse
and “The Dead” 68
Table 3.3 Stylistic profiles for characters in To the Lighthouse
and “The Dead” 70
Table 3.4 Stylistic profiles for various social groups
in To the Lighthouse71
Table 7.1 Means of first-person singular and first-person plural
across Kenneth Fearing’s poetry 171
Table 7.2 Distribution of “you” and “your” across Fearing’s poetry 171
Table 7.3 Means of third-person pronouns across Fearing’s poetry 173
Table 7.4 Consistency percentages across Fearing’s poetry 174
Table 7.5 Type/token percentage across Fearing’s poetry 175
Table 7.6 N-gram distribution across Fearing’s poetry 176
Table 7.7 Mean sentence length across Fearing’s poetry 177
Table 7.8 Punctuation use across Fearing’s poetry 177
Table 10.1 Sentence length by episode in Ulysses231

xxi
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Shawna Ross

In his 1922 constructivist manifesto, László Moholy-Nagy proclaims that

technology is the “reality of this century.” In defining technology as “the
invention, construction and maintenance of the machine” and proclaim-
ing that to be “a user of machines is to be of the spirit of his century,”
Moholy-Nagy characterizes avant-garde modernism in terms uncannily
similar to our own twenty-first century justifications of the timeliness and
significance of digital humanities.1 After all, what unites the disparate proj-
ects of digital pedagogy, data collation and visualization, archive and tool
construction, cultural studies of media and computation, and all of the
other disparate projects under the umbrella term digital humanities (DH),
is the common denominator of the machine known as the computer. If we
accept Moholy-Nagy’s claim that machines create reality—“reality” being,
according to his definition, that which “determines what we can grasp and
what we cannot understand” (299)—then our computational machines
constitute the foundation of our episteme as they did in Moholy-Nagy’s
modernist episteme. In this episteme, technology determines what
emerges as real, as palpable, as capable of producing truths, and what
recedes, unreal, ungraspable and unrepresented. Digital humanists doing

S. Ross ( )
Department of English, Texas A&M University, College Station, USA

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 1

S. Ross, J. O’Sullivan (eds.), Reading Modernism with Machines,
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-59569-0_1
2 S. ROSS

research in modernism are thus truly reading modernism with machines:

more than simply means to an end, our machines underwrite the reality
of our scholarship. Their processes and outputs influence what emerges as
knowable and what counts as proof, bending modernist texts and mod-
ernism itself toward our contemporary machinic episteme. Of course, it
is no more willfully anachronistic than any school of literary criticism—so
long as we do not silently attribute to modernism itself our own contem-
porary revolutionary digital rhetorics of the new.
This is the danger of our work, this all-too-satisfying equation of mod-
ernists’ fascinated celebrations and critiques of their technological present
with our own. The best work in digital humanities addresses this spurious
resemblance by reflecting both on the conditions of its own production
and on the world-making (and world-limiting) powers of our machines.
Consider, for example, the reflexivity of certain DH schools of thought
(such as critical code studies and minimal computing) and certain DH
thinkers (particularly Johanna Drucker’s critique of techno-positivism and
Alan Liu’s mandate that digital humanists engage in cultural criticism).2
With modernist studies’ similar emphasis on the reflexivity, poetics and cul-
tural criticism, it could still seem possible to stretch the modernist episteme
of the machine comfortably over ourselves, making, temporally, a very big
tent indeed. It would undoubtedly be a tent particularly flattering to mod-
ernists. But Moholy-Nagy’s twentieth-century optimistic fervor cannot
quite be our own, though his insight into the constitution of an episteme by
the machine can be—with the addendum that a succession of technological
presents has superseded the putatively universal machinic episteme posited
by the modernist avant garde. We cannot claim, as he does, “There is no
tradition in technology, no consciousness of class or standing. Everybody
can be the machine’s master or its slave” (300). We can, now, point to such
a tradition, the elaboration of which demonstrates the distance between
our particular machinic episteme and the modernist machinic episteme.
More alarmingly, Moholy-Nagy’s uncritical invocation of the master/slave
relationship, which he seems to applaud for its apparently utopian poten-
tial, could itself be interrogated as a troubling, dystopian reinscription of
imperial forms of cultural and economic production. The critical work of
postcolonial and feminist digital humanities—critical in every sense of the
term, as Jesse Stommel writes of critical digital pedagogy3—has been engag-
ing in such interrogations. When these interrogations are done in the field
of modernism, they certainly point to parallels between modernism and the
Digital Humanities, but they are parallels not at all desirable.
 INTRODUCTION 3

A CALL FOR FIELD-SPECIFIC DIGITAL HUMANITIES

This principle applies to other DH subfields as well. Any proposed paral-
lel between any literary period and the contemporary digital culture and
scholarship needs to be specified (is this stylistic, political, material, rhe-
torical, methodological or philosophical?), qualified (acknowledging gaps,
errors or hyperbole), and historicized (accounting for both material and
discursive change). This is not to deny, outright, any contemporary recur-
rences of certain avant-garde rhetorics and representational strategies.
Such arguments have been persuasively cast at least since 1989 with the
publication of Richard Lanham’s “The Electronic Word,” which posits
that modernism and humanities computing share the avant-garde rheto-
ric he calls “experimental humanism.”4 More recently, Jessica Pressman’s
Digital Modernism observes recurrence of modernist representational
strategies in contemporary electronic literature, and Stephen Ross and
Jentery Sayers trace “productive convergences” between modernism and
the Digital Humanities (625). 5 My own work has participated in the digi-
tal revival of modernist avant-garde forms,6 although I have also argued
that this neomodernism results from the shared methodology a modernist
scholar brings to bear on modernism and on the Digital Humanities rather
than from inherent resemblances between digital humanities methods and
modernist literature.7
By dwelling on this impulse to draw parallels, I mean not to reject these
arguments wholesale but to affirm that they are only successful when they
are informed by and grounded in field-specific literary criticism. This is
true even when those arguments reject or revise the assumptions common
to that critical field. It is to affirm that within disciplinary traditions lay a
rich, vetted and productive method of avoiding the continually renewed
claims that DH is undertheorized.8 Certainly, other ways of debunking
those claims exist: Natalia Cecire points to the greater significance of mea-
suring the ethical implications of choosing certain models for DH, and
Steven E. Jones notes that “those outside DH often underestimate the
theoretical sophistication of many in computing” (10).9 Jean Bauer argues
that work already undertaken is inherently theoretical, and Chris Forster,
in responding to Bauer, deconstructs the “slippery grammatical place” of
the term theory to reveal the fundamental incoherence of demands to be
theoretical.10 All of these defenses provide a solid defense against these
claims, but our disciplines offer another way out.
4 S. ROSS

This way does not require another volume of debates or definitions but
instead an explicit grounding within individual academic fields that have
individually wrestled with theory since it became legible as a scholarly
value. Institutionally, traditional disciplines may exist (to put it mildly)
in tension with newer DH initiatives and practitioners, but this tension
neither precludes the enrichment of DH by disciplinary knowledges nor
nullifies our obligation to learn and apply them. Admittedly, some vari-
eties of DH may require more creativity in identifying their theoretical
forebears (critical makers may have to turn to art and architecture), but in
the case of digital literary studies, such indebtedness seems so obvious as
to require no special acknowledgement. Yet it does need saying. As Brian
Croxall observes in his Call for Papers for the Association of Computers
and Humanities-sponsored panel at MLA 2014, “what is sometimes for-
gotten is that the output of digital analysis is not itself the goal; rather,
such analysis is a means to an end, and that end is the interpretation of a
text or corpus (understood widely).” Croxall’s panel was intended to “re-
establish this understanding and conversation, defamiliarizing the conver-
sation about the digital and making it re-familiar.”11 Both of us answered
Croxall’s CFP, and our presentations at MLA 2014 both argued that this
interpretation, this focus on the literary ends rather than (only) the digi-
tal means, requires invoking, engaging with and ultimately contributing
to discipline-specific arguments. This roundtable was in fact the starting
point for Reading Modernism with Machines, which similarly asked con-
tributors “to focus not on their methods but instead on the interpretations
they have reached as result of their digital praxis,” as Croxall phrased it.
The chapters in this volume therefore use digital methods to inter-
vene critically in conversations current in modernist studies, foreground-
ing the interpretive significance of their results rather than devote the
larger portion of their argumentation to technical excursuses or meth-
odological summaries. This significance does not reference the statistical
variety—though of course that is also necessary—but the literary-critical
variety. Doing so avoids “the fetish of technology” that Hal Foster argues
were typical of “machinic modernisms” of Futurism and Vorticism (and
of Moholy-Nagy), under which “a machinic style was held out as the
lure of a technological future to which people were asked, indeed com-
pelled, to accede,” treating technology as “a force in its own right and/
or an emblem of ‘the modern spirit’” (7).12 A properly modernist digital
humanities will not fall into the traps that F. T. Marinetti and Wyndham
Lewis fell into, but will instead use disciplinary norms to avoid fetishizing
 INTRODUCTION 5

technology—whether that is the technology of the modernists or the con-

temporary technology of the Digital Humanities—and will reflect on the
distance between our two machinic epistemes. As Foster warns of avant-
garde machinic modernisms, the task of modernist digital humanities is
not “to extrapolate the human toward the inorganic-technological” or
“to trope the inorganic-technological as the epitome of the human” (15),
but to identify when, how and why that happens, whether interpreting it
as a trend in our object of study or observing it in other works of scholar-
ship. This requires combining digital and traditional methods judiciously,
allowing a space to reflect critically on the aesthetic, political and philo-
sophical ramifications of the ever-changing definitions and dependencies
that connect humans, technology and the humanities.
Teasing out these relations requires not a new platform or tool but
renewed, sustained engagement in field-specific conversations. It requires
raising awareness within these individual literary fields, advocating for dig-
ital work by making explicit connections between these ongoing debates
and by winning over scholars who do not identify as digital humanists or
who show resistance or hostility to it. It requires creating formal and infor-
mal contexts for DH-minded scholars in the same field to work with one
another, encouraging conversations over social media and list-servs, dur-
ing regional and national conferences, between faculty and students at the
same institution or graduate students at different institutions. It requires
addressing the canon—the canon that exists and the canon that does not
exist. Making new contributions to the literary analysis of canonical works
will help to ensure continued buy-in from the particular discipline; we do,
indeed, always need another interpretation of Ulysses or Mrs. Dalloway.
At the same time, though, DH is well suited to interrogating the canon,
analyzing its origin and tracing its effects. Most importantly, it is, due
to increased opportunities for electronic publishing, especially well suited
to expanding the canon. It requires taking an inventory of the methods
common to the individual field and comparing these to DH methods in
order to devise tailor-made DH processes appropriate to a specific field.
Devising these will in turn require returning to questions of style, to aes-
thetics and revisiting the period’s or field’s non-fiction, manifestoes, artist
statements and contemporaneous reviews and criticism—particularly with
an eye toward book history, media and technology. Over time, a flex-
ible collective identity, something close to a brand that is always close to
disbanding, should emerge. And it should employ a different style and
tone for each audience: inward toward other disciplinary DH specialists,
6 S. ROSS

across to disciplinary specialists who do not identify with DH and outward

to the broader DH community.
The kind of field-specific work outlined in these propositions has just
begun to emerge, with publications such as Comparative Textual Media
in new media studies,13 Digital Rhetoric for rhetoric and composition,14
Early Modern Studies after the Digital Turn15 and Shakespeare’s Language
and Digital Media16 for the early modern period, and Virtual Victorians
for Victorian literary and cultural studies.17 Like Reading Modernism with
Machines, these collections similarly examine the relationships between
machinic epistemes—for example, “The virtual Victorian era that is
emerging from our algorithmic searches, our digital editions and tools,
and our data visualizations necessarily reflects that era’s own navigation
of changing media and information technology”18—without oversimplify-
ing. Making Canada New: Editing, Modernism, and New Media, edited by
Dean Irvine, Vanessa Lent and Bart Vautour,19 does so through its laser-
sharp focus and its reflexive analyses of the processes of digital editing.
Reading Modernism with Machines is meant to participate in and advance
this flowering of discipline-specific work in the Digital Humanities. In
this collection, we attempt to provide a context for a “modernists only”
conversation, present new analyses of canonical works, use DH methods
to revise and expand the modernist canon, reflect on the intimacies and
distances between our two machinic epistemes, test new digital methods
of analyzing modernist texts and examine the limitations of certain DH
strategies for understanding modernism.
In the context of modernism, this attention to discipline-specific
approaches toward literary interpretation arrives almost belatedly, consid-
ering the past twenty years of exciting modernist digital archives, from
the maturation of early initiatives (such as the Modernist Journals Project,
Modernist Versions Project and Editing Modernism in Canada) to the
flowering of second-generation initiatives (such as Linked Modernisms,
the Modernist Commons and the Open Modernisms Anthology). On the
other hand, it is because of these twenty years of modernist digital humani-
ties initiatives that Reading Modernism with Machines can attempt to iso-
late a relatively coherent, specifically modernist set of approaches, while
leaving room to evaluate (especially to critique) our characteristic digital
methods. Our contributors’ professional experiences with modernist digi-
tal initiatives ensure that the collection not only takes stock of what digital
modernism has looked like and has enabled over the past twenty years, but
also projects new methods of interacting with these resources and suggests
 INTRODUCTION 7

what kind of modernist digital resources are still needed. Taken as a whole,
these essays serve as a barometer for future forms of modernist digital
humanities. They foreshadow more critical labor: work done to identify
problems in the “big data” we generate about modernism while neverthe-
less continuing to experiment in quantitative methodologies. This work
will likely reconsider and expand the canon, develop feminist digital mod-
ernisms and postcolonial digital modernisms, and consider the importance
of pedagogy and student labor. Following trends in modernist criticism,
it will also likely visualize transnational or global networks of modernism
and engage with book history (particularly regarding copyright and pub-
lication history) and new media studies.

FIELD-SPECIFIC DIGITAL HUMANITIES IN ACTION:

CHAPTER SUMMARIES
Appropriately, then, Reading Modernism with Machines opens with
Chap. 2, Dean Irvine’s “ModLabs,” which makes great strides in this latter
project by adapting the methods of new media studies to the specific con-
text of modernist literature and culture. Irvine recontextualizes twentieth-
century laboratory environments—from Bell Labs to the Stanford Literary
Lab—as sites of modernist creation and critique. Identifying a core con-
cept, the “modular,” that links this century of laboratories, Irvine histori-
cizes, and thereby demythologizes, current work in the Digital Humanities
that appears to be sui generis. Irvine’s corresponding remediation of the
modernist avant garde links modernism and digital cultures methodologi-
cally, revealing commonalities through histories of laboratory practice. In
doing so, Irvine not only reveals the modernist practices surviving in digi-
tal laboratories and DH centers (including a compelling reading of Bruno
Latour and Steve Woolgar’s Laboratory Life), but also advances a useful
critique of labor practices inside these labs.
One motif in Irvine’s contribution—a rejection of the oversimplified
perspective that pits distant reading against close reading—swells into the
dominant strain with Chap. 3, “Modeling Modernist Dialogism: Close
Reading with Big Data,” by Adam Hammond, Julian Brooke and Graeme
Hirst. This essay flexibly combines an impressive range of texts, seamlessly
incorporating modernist criticism, DH theory, modernist literature and
the data they produced into two different projects—one designed to auto-
detect the many speaker transitions in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and the
other designed to identify free indirect discourse in texts by Virginia Woolf
8 S. ROSS

and James Joyce. Reflecting on the “hybrid approach” they developed to

combine close and distant reading methods, Hammond, Brooke and Hirst
link these two projects under the rubric of “dialogism,” managing both to
leverage the power of big data and to deliver a sophisticated revision of the
dialogic theories of Mikhail Bakhtin and Erich Auerbach.
Chapter 4, Alex Christie and Katie Tanigawa’s “Mapping Modernism’s
Z-axis: A Model for Spatial Analysis in Modernist Studies,” completes a
classic DH methodological trifecta by adding digital mapping to Irvine’s
cultural studies analysis and Hammond, Brooke and Hirst’s big data col-
lection. Christie and Tanigawa’s pioneering work on the “z-axis” methods
of mapping literary texts, developed collaboratively as an arm of the Maker
Lab in the Humanities at the University of Victoria, distorts historical
maps according to the frequency and depth of the text’s engagement with
a particular locale. By highlighting the discrepancies, exaggerations and
elisions that differentiate a modernist text’s spatiality from that produced
by contemporaneous maps, Christie’s map of Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood
and Tanigawa’s map of Jean Rhys’s Quartet avoid a spuriously objective
approach, instead introducing anti-realist style of mapping. This subjective
geography enables Christie and Tanigawa to develop innovative queer and
feminist readings of these modernist novels and to posit new connections
among gender, sexuality and space in modernist literature.
Chapter 5, Kathryn Holland and Jana Smith Elford’s “Textbase as
Machine: Graphing Feminism and Modernism with OrlandoVision,” con-
tinues this emphasis on using digital humanities tools to advance feminist
approaches to modernism. Rather than visualize primary texts, however,
they visualize modernist feminist scholarship by analyzing the scholarly arti-
cles comprising the digital resource Orlando. A case study on suffrage societ-
ies sheds new light on Dora Marsden’s crucial mediation of feminist politics
through her editorship of The Freewoman, while a case study on Newnham
College, Cambridge, recovers the college’s centrality as a site of modern-
ist production, weaving a rich cultural and intellectual history that, among
its other insights, reveals an important new context for Virginia Woolf’s
A Room of One’s Own. Beyond reconstructing feminist networks in mod-
ernism, their analysis makes explicit the networks implicitly created by the
Orlando database’s metadata, showing how digital resources and archives
themselves, not simply their contents, constitute fertile subjects for research.
Chapter 6, Hannah McGregor and Nicholas van Orden’s “Remediation
and the Development of Modernist Forms in The Western Home Monthly,”
continues this focus on digital archives. Their analysis advances theories
 INTRODUCTION 9

of mediation by interrogating it as not only an operation performed by

the digital archive on its objects of representation, but also as a mecha-
nism at work in the layout of early twentieth-century magazines, and as
a specifically modernist technique. Focusing on a middlebrow Canadian
magazine, McGregor and van Orden pivot between close and distant read-
ing to question long-standing assumptions about the differences between
middlebrow periodicals and modernist little magazines. Their findings
therefore substantiate recent scholarship reconsidering the middlebrow,
and as McGregor and van Orden engage substantively with recent devel-
opments in new media studies—particularly through a fascinating discus-
sion of the remediation of the phonograph and radio in The Western Home
Monthly—they forge a new method that combines strategies from new
media studies and modernist studies.
In Chap. 7, Wayne Arnold’s “Stylistic Perspective Across Kenneth
Fearing’s Poetry: A Statistical Analysis,” also adjusts the modernist canon
by reappraising neglected Canadian literature. Best known today for his
1946 novel The Big Clock, Fearing presents a fascinating test case for sty-
lometry because, as Arnold explains, critics have cited a lack of stylistic
change or development to explain the decline of his reputation as a poet.
Arnold tests this claim by statistically analyzing 142 poems to establish
usage patterns for words that, in other digital methods, are often thrown
out as stop words or simply not retained as useful data. This includes pro-
nouns, question marks and repetition, all of which Arnold traces to verify
the existence of a stylistic change in Fearing’s oeuvre. Arnold’s chapter
therefore demonstrates the play of scale invoked by DH—scanning hun-
dreds of poems for variations in words of two or three letters—enables
significant interventions in understanding the course of a poet’s career.
Chapter 8, Adam James Bradley’s “In the End Was the Word: A
Computational Approach to T. S. Eliot’s Poetic Diction,” similarly focuses
on the large-scale analysis of small-scale choices made by a single poet, but
unlike Arnold’s contribution, Bradley’s chapter explores Eliot’s penchant
for exotic, archaic or self-coined terms. With the precision and patience of
a linguist, Bradley outlines the precautions, extensive research and subtle
reasoning necessary for preparing poetic data for submission to compu-
tational processes. By running comparisons of Eliot’s diction with the
Oxford English Dictionary and with contemporaneous journalism, Bradley
tests the accuracy of Eliot’s and Ezra Pound’s claims about modern poetic
diction and of modernist scholars’ generalizations about Georgian poetry
(and its differences from Victorian poetry and from high modernist
10 S. ROSS

poetry). The results, which are, unsurprisingly, mixed—some truisms are

confirmed, others disconfirmed—should be required reading for anyone
engaging with Eliot’s criticism, particularly “Tradition and the Individual
Talent” and “The Metaphysical Poets.”
Equally as attentive to the nuances of diction and etymology, Chap. 9,
Jonathan Reeve’s “A Macro-Etymological Analysis of James Joyce’s The
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” also sheds new light on high mod-
ernism through macroanalysis. Reeve’s deep familiarity with and engage-
ment with contemporary criticism of Joyce, along with his focused close
readings of significant passages in Portrait, demonstrates how comfortably
digital and analog forms of reading can be interwoven. Though Reeve
primarily uses his statistical results to confirm the scholarly consensus
regarding Stephen’s characterization, his individual discussions of each ety-
mological origin in the narrative—the changing proportions of Latinate,
Germanic, Hellenic, Celtic and unidentified words—unearth new facets
of Stephen’s religion, sexuality and politics. For Joyceans, Reeve’s hypoth-
eses regarding Joyce’s attitude toward Irish nationalism will be of especial
interest, while the more general audience can attend to Reeve’s broader
thesis that macro-etymological analysis reveals that etymology and narra-
tive structure are fundamentally related.
Chapter 10, “Body Language: Toward an Affective Formalism of
Ulysses,” by Kurt Cavender, Jamey E. Graham, Robert P. Fox, Jr., Richard
Flynn and Kenyon Cavender, similarly tackles Joycean style, while also
intervening in critical conversations about sentiment analysis (in DH) and
affect theory (in literary theory). Critiquing machine sentiment analy-
sis for their hard-wired conceptual slippages, Cavender’s team builds a
“bodily lexicon” from Ulysses itself to compensate for the shortcomings of
existing sentiment lexicons, then close read passages in the text suggested
by results from their custom program, Affectcrawler. These close read-
ings are solid examples of DH analysis successfully incorporating literary
theory, yielding an ingenious theory accounting for Bloom’s centrality in
the text and a comparison of modernist and Victorian affect (by running
a comparison with George Eliot’s Middlemarch). Perhaps most excitingly,
they generate a reading of disability in the “Calypso” episode, demon-
strating the unintuitive power of using algorithms to explore bodies in
modernism.
Bodies also matter in Andrew Pilsch’s Chap. 11, “‘We Twiddle …
and Turn into Machines’: Mina Loy, HTML and the Machining of
Information.” Pilsch explains the difficulties he encountered while coding
 INTRODUCTION 11

poems such as “Parturition” (Loy’s physically intense poem about child-

birth) for inclusion in his archive, Mina Loy Online. Linking Loy’s power-
ful representations of modern bodies under the stresses of sex, childbirth,
industrial labor and world war to her critique of androcentric futurism,
Pilsch establishes the significance of Loy’s idiosyncratic typography as a
mode of feminist embodiment. Insistent on the duty of digital archives
to preserve the precise typography of modernist poetry, Pilsch uses the
resistance of HTML against Loy’s typography as a context for comparing
Karl Marx’s and Alan Turing’s different concepts of the machine and for
unpacking the history of hypertext. Arguing that the theory of textuality
inhering in HTML is regressive, non-modernist and anti-feminist, Pilsch
ends by advocating the creation of a more fluid, fragmented and feminist
markup language.
A similarly strong critique of contemporary digital culture motivates our
final Chap. 12, Eunsong Kim’s “CGI Monstrosities: Modernist Surfaces,
the Composite and the Making of the Human.” Also like Pilsch, Kim uses
the modernist methods of critique that motivate the other essays in order
to pursue the political ramifications of modernist concepts inhering in our
contemporary machinic episteme. Kim identifies the perpetuation of mod-
ern philosophies of positivism in criticism on contemporary film editing,
then adapts modernist methods to provide an alternate reading of CGI
(Computer Generated Imagery). Deconstructing the visual techniques
used in CGI animation for the HBO series John Adams and the South
Korean horror film The Host, Kim reveals the same colonial tropes that are
at also at work in literary modernism. CGI’s compositing of the human
body, its erasure of labor through editing, its collapse of three-dimensional
figures into two dimensions, and its neocolonial logic that produces mon-
strous others and monstrous crises while ignoring the monstrosity of its
own methodical nanoscopic processes—all of these paradoxes inhering in
the fabrication of the human body by algorithms, Kim shows, are the end-
point of a process begun in modernism.
Unlike the other essays, Kim’s essay does not read a modernist text, but
rather teaches us how to read Reading Modernism with Machines; it anato-
mizes the procedures of digital representation to remind us that each com-
putational transformation of a text, whether through the creation of an
archive or tool or through data analysis or visualization, crystallizes each
decision made by a scholar into a representational given. These givens are
too often invisible, ignored or suppressed, all in the name of strengthening
our arguments—yet it is only by including our disciplinary knowledges at
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
The Project Gutenberg eBook of Advice to a
wife and mother in two parts
 This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United
States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away
or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License
included with this ebook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you
are not located in the United States, you will have to check the
laws of the country where you are located before using this
eBook.

Title: Advice to a wife and mother in two parts

Embracing advice to a wife, and advice to a mother

Author: Pye Henry Chavasse

Release date: October 15, 2023 [eBook #71887]

Language: English

Original publication: Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co, 1881

Credits: Richard Tonsing, MFR, and the Online Distributed

Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file
was produced from images generously made available
by The Internet Archive)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ADVICE TO

A WIFE AND MOTHER IN TWO PARTS ***
Transcriber's Note:
New original cover art included with this eBook is
granted to the public domain.
 ADVICE
TO A

WIFE AND MOTHER.

IN TWO PARTS.
EMBRACING

ADVICE TO A WIFE,
AND

ADVICE TO A MOTHER.

BY
PYE HENRY CHAVASSE.

SEVENTEENTH EDITION.

PHILADELPHIA:
J. B. LIPPINCOTT & CO.
1881.
 ADVICE TO A WIFE
ON THE
MANAGEMENT OF HER OWN HEALTH,
AND ON THE
TREATMENT OF SOME OF THE COMPLAINTS
INCIDENTAL TO
PREGNANCY, LABOR, AND SUCKLING;
WITH AN
INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER ESPECIALLY ADDRESSED TO A YOUNG
WIFE.

BY

PYE HENRY CHAVASSE,

FELLOW OF THE ROYAL COLLEGE OF SURGEONS OF ENGLAND; FELLOW
OF THE OBSTETRICAL SOCIETY OF LONDON; FORMERLY PRESIDENT OF
QUEEN’S COLLEGE MEDICO-CHIRURGICAL SOCIETY, BIRMINGHAM;
AUTHOR OF “ADVICE TO A MOTHER ON THE MANAGEMENT OF HER
CHILDREN.”

“Thy wife shall be as the fruitful vine upon the walls of thine house.”

SEVENTEENTH EDITION.

PHILADELPHIA:
J. B. LIPPINCOTT & CO.

1881.
 TO

MY BIRMINGHAM PATIENTS,
MANY OF WHOM I HAVE ATTENDED FOR A PERIOD OF
UPWARDS OF THIRTY YEARS; SOME OF WHOM, HAVING
USHERED INTO THE WORLD, I AFTERWARD ATTENDED IN
THEIR OWN CONFINEMENTS; AND FROM ALL OF WHOM I
HAVE RECEIVED SO MUCH CONFIDENCE, COURTESY, AND
KINDNESS,

This little Volume is Dedicated,

BY THEIR SINCERE FRIEND,

PYE HENRY CHAVASSE

Priory House, Old Square,

Birmingham.
 PREFACE.

The sale of copies of this book is now to be reckoned by its tens of

thousands! The last, the Seventh Edition, comprising five thousand
copies, has been rapidly exhausted; a new Edition, the Eighth, is
now urgently called for; and as the sale of the work is so enormous,
and so extending, my worthy Publishers have deemed it advisable to
publish of this edition at once seven thousand copies,—thus making
of the two last editions alone twelve thousand copies; the two last
editions being, in fact, equal to twelve ordinary editions! Moreover,
this book has made me troops of friends, thus proving how much
such a work was needed, and how thoroughly my humble efforts
have been appreciated.
I have, in the Introductory Chapter especially addressed to a
Young Wife, had some plain and unpalatable truths to tell; but it is
absolutely necessary for a surgeon to probe a serious and deep-
seated wound to the bottom before he can perform a cure; he is
sometimes compelled to give pain before he can cure pain; he is
frequently obliged to administer bitter medicine before sweet health
can be restored. I have not shrunk from my duty; I have not uttered
an “uncertain sound:” but have, without fear or favor, boldly spoken
out, and have proclaimed what I have deemed to be the truth; the
vital importance of my subject must excuse my plain-speaking and
earnestness. When a person is on the edge of a precipice, and is
ready at any moment to topple over, the words of warning must not
be in the tones of a whisper, bland and gentle, but in the voice of
thunder, bold and decisive. I have had to discourse on matters of the
greatest moment to the well-being of wives; and have, therefore, in
order not to be misapprehended, had to call things by their right
names—the subject being of far too much importance to write in a
namby-pamby style, or to use any other language than that of the
plainest English.
 The Introductory Chapter is, I trust, greatly improved; many of the
quotations are either curtailed, or are altogether suppressed, in order
to make room, without materially increasing the size of the book, for
much new and important matter. The remaining pages have all been
carefully revised and corrected, and made more clear, and additional
advice, where needed, has been supplied. I therefore hope that this
edition will be still more worthy of its great and extending success,
and be the humble instrument of sowing broadcast through our land
advice most necessary for wives to know; and at the same time be the
means of dispelling prejudices which, in the lying-in room, are even,
in this our day, most rife and injurious.
Barren wives! delicate wives! unhealthy wives! are the order of the
day—are become institutions of the country—are so common as not
to be considered strange, but to be, as a matter of course, as part and
parcel of our everyday life! Should such things be? I emphatically say
No! But then a thorough change, a complete reformation, must take
place in the life and habits of a wife. It is no use blinking the
question; the truth, the whole truth, must come out, and the sooner
it is told the better. Oh! it is sad that the glorious mission of a wife
should, as it often does, end so ingloriously! Broken health, neglected
duties, a childless home, blighted hopes, misery, and discontent.
What an awful catalogue of the consequences of luxury, of
stimulants, of fashion, of ignorance, and of indolence—the five
principal wife and babe destroyers! Sure I am that the foregoing
melancholy results may, in the generality of cases, by timely and
judicious treatment, be prevented.
This is an age of stimulants—’tis the curse of the day; wine, in
excess, instead of being an element of strength, is one of weakness;
instead of encouraging fecundity, is one of its greatest preventives. A
lady who drinks daily five or six glasses of wine, is invariably weak,
low, hysterical, and “nervous,”—complaining that she can neither
eat, nor sleep, nor take exercise; she is totally unfit for the duties and
responsibilities of either wife or mother. I shall endeavor in the
following pages to prove the truth of these bold assertions.
Many young married ladies now drink as much wine in a day as
their grandmothers did in a week; and which I verily believe is one
cause of so few children, and of so much barrenness among them. It
is no use: the subject is too important to allow false delicacy to stand
in the way of this announcement; the truth must be told; the ulcer
which is eating into the vitals of society must be probed; the danger,
the folly, the wickedness of the system must be laid bare; the battle
must be fought; and as no medical man has come forward to begin
the conflict, I myself boldly throw down the gauntlet, and will, to the
best of my strength and ability, do battle in the cause.
It is the abuse and not the use of wine that I am contending
against. I am not advocating teetotal principles—certainly not. The
one system is as absurd and as wrong as the other; extremes, either
way, are most injurious to the constitution both of man and woman.
The advice of St. Paul is glorious advice: “Use a little wine for thy
stomach’s sake and thine often infirmities;” and again, when he says,
“be temperate in all things.” These are my sentiments, and which I
have, in the following pages, so earnestly contended for.
A lady who “eats without refreshment, and slumbers without
repose,” is deeply to be pitied, even though she be as rich as Crœsus,
or as beautiful as Venus! Nothing can compensate for the want of
either sleep or appetite; life without proper appetite and without
refreshing sleep will soon become a wearisome burden too heavy to
bear. It is high time, when there are so many of the Young Wives of
England, alas! too many, who daily “eat without refreshment,” and
who nightly “slumber without repose,” that the subject was
thoroughly looked into, and that proper means were suggested to
abate the calamity. One of the principal objects of this book is to
throw light upon the subject, and to counsel measures to remedy the
evil.
The large number of barren wives in England has, in these pages,
had my careful and earnest consideration. I have endeavored, to the
best of my ability, to point out, as far as the wives themselves are
concerned, many of the causes, and have advised remedies to abate
the same. It is quite time, when the health among the wives of the
higher classes is so much below par, and when children among them
are so few, that the causes should be thoroughly inquired into, and
that the treatment should be extensively made known. The subject is
of immense, indeed I might even say, of national importance, and
demands deep and earnest thought and careful investigation, as the
strength and sinews of a nation depend mainly upon the number and
healthfulness of her children.
 Barren land can generally, with care and skill, be made fertile; an
unfruitful vine can frequently, by an experienced gardener, be
converted into a fruit-bearing one; a childless wife can often, by
judicious treatment, be made a child-bearing one. Few things in this
world are impossible: “where there is a will there is generally a way;”
but if there be a will, it must be a determined and a persevering will;
if there be a way, the way, however rough and rugged, must be
trodden,—the rough and rugged path will, as she advances onward,
become smooth and pleasant.
It is not the poor woman, who works hard and who lives hard, that
is usually barren—certainly not: she has generally an abundance of
children; but it is the rich lady—the one who is indolent, who lives
luxuriously, and fares sumptuously every day—who leads a
fashionable, and therefore an unnatural life—who turns night into
day, who at night breathes suffocatingly hot rooms, who lives in a
whirl of excitement, who retires not to rest until the small hours of
the morning,—such a one is the one that is frequently barren; and
well she might be,—it would be most strange if she were not so. One
of the objects of this book will be to point out these causes, and to
suggest remedies for the same, and thus to stem the torrent, and in
some measure to do away with the curse of barrenness which in
England, at the present time, so fearfully prevails.
I have undertaken a responsible task, but have thrown my whole
energy and ability into it; I therefore have no excuse to make that I
have not thought earnestly and well upon the subject, or that I have
written unadvisedly; my thoughts and studies have for years been
directed to these matters. I earnestly hope, then, that I have not
written in vain, but that the seeds now sown will, in due time, bring
forth much fruit.
Although my two books—Advice to a Wife and Advice to a Mother
—are published as separate works, they might, in point of fact, be
considered as one volume—one only being the continuation of the
other. Advice to a Wife, treating on a mother’s own health, being, as
it were, a preparation for Advice to a Mother on the management of
her children’s health; it is quite necessary that the mother herself
should be healthy to have healthy children; and if she have healthy
offspring, it is equally important that she should be made thoroughly
acquainted how to keep them in health. The object of Advice to a
Wife and Advice to a Mother is for that end; indeed, the acquisition
and the preservation of sound health, of mother and of child, have, in
both my books, been my earnest endeavor, my constant theme, the
beginning and the ending, the sum and the substance of my
discourse, on which all else beside hinges.
I again resign this book into the hands of my fair readers, hoping
that it may be of profit and of service to them during the whole
period of their wifehood; and especially during the most interesting
part of their lives—in their hour of anguish and of trial; and that it
may be the humble means of making a barren woman “to be a joyful
mother of children.”
PYE HENRY CHAVASSE

Priory House, Old Square,

Birmingham.
 CONTENTS.

PAGES
Dedication iii
Preface to Eighth Edition v–x
Introductory Chapter 13–102

PART I.
On Menstruation 103–116

PART II.
On Pregnancy 117–198

PART III.
On Labor 199–254

PART IV.
On Suckling 255–300

Index 301–309
 Advice to a Wife.

A good wife is Heaven’s last, best gift to man—his angel and minister of graces
innumerable—his gem of many virtues—his casket of jewels. Her voice is sweet
music, her smiles his brightest day, her kiss the guardian of his innocence, her
arms the pale of his safety, the balm of his health, the balsam of his life; her
industry his surest wealth, her economy his safest steward, her lips his faithful
counselors, her bosom the softest pillow of his cares, and her prayers the ablest
advocate of Heaven’s blessings on his head.—Jeremy Taylor.

Of earthly goods, the best is a good Wife;

A bad, the bitterest curse of human life.—Simonides.
 INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER.

1. It may be well—before I enter on the subjects of menstruation, of

pregnancy, of labor, and suckling—to offer a few preliminary
observations, especially addressed to a Young Wife.
2. My subject is health—the care, the restoration, and the
preservation of health—one of the most glorious subjects that can be
brought before a human being, and one that should engross much of
our time and of our attention, and one that cannot be secured unless
it be properly attended to. The human frame is, as every one knows,
constantly liable to be out of order; it would be strange, indeed, if a
beautiful and complex instrument like the human body were not
occasionally out of tune:
“Strange that a harp with a thousand strings
Should keep in tune so long.”

3. The advice I am about to offer to my fair reader is of the greatest

importance, and demands her deepest attention. How many wives
are there with broken health, with feeble constitutions, and with
childless homes! Their number is legion! It is painful to contemplate
that, in our country, there are far more unhealthy than healthy
wives! There must surely be numerous causes for such a state of
things! A woman, born with every perfection, to be full of bodily
infirmities! It was ordained by the Almighty that wives should be
fruitful and multiply! Surely there must be something wrong in the
present system if they do not do so!
4. It will, in the following pages, be my object to point out many of
the causes of so much ill health among wives; ill health that
sometimes leads to barrenness; and to suggest remedies both for the
prevention and for the cure of such causes.
5. It is an astounding and lamentable fact, that one out of eight—
that twelve and a half per cent. of all the wives of England are barren,
are childless! A large majority of this twelve and a half per cent.
might be made fruitful, if a more judicious plan of procedure than is
at present pursued were adopted.
6. My anxious endeavors, in the following pages, will be to point
out remedies for the evil, and to lay down rules—rules which, I hope,
my fair reader will strenuously follow.
7. My theme, then, is Health—the Health of Wives—and the object
I shall constantly have in view will be the best means both of
preserving it and of restoring it when lost. By making a wife strong,
she will not only, in the majority of cases, be made fruitful, but
capable of bringing healthy children into the world. This latter
inducement is of great importance; for puny children are not only an
anxiety to their parents, but a misery to themselves, and a trouble to
all around! Besides, it is the children of England that are to be her
future men and women—her glory and her greatness! How desirable
it is, then, that her children should be hardy and strong!
8. A wife may be likened to a fruit tree, a child to its fruit. We all
know that it is as impossible to have fine fruit from an unhealthy tree
as to have a fine child from an unhealthy mother. In the one case, the
tree either does not bear fruit at all—is barren—or it bears
undersized, tasteless fruit,—fruit which often either immaturely
drops from the tree, or, if plucked from the tree, is useless; in the
other case, the wife either does not bear children—she is barren—or
she has frequent miscarriages—“untimely fruit”—or she bears puny,
sickly children, who often either drop into an early grave, or, if they
live, probably drag out a miserable existence. You may as well expect
“to gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles,” as healthy children
from unhealthy parents!
9. Unhealthy parents, then, as a matter of course have unhealthy
children; this is as truly the case as the night follows the day, and
should deter both man and woman so circumstanced from marrying.
There are numerous other complaints besides scrofula and insanity
inherited and propagated by parents. It is a fearful responsibility,
both to men and women, if they be not healthy, to marry. The result
must, as a matter of course, be misery!
10. If a wife is to be healthy and strong, she must use the means—
she must sow before she can reap; health will not come by merely
wishing for it! The means are not always at first agreeable; but, like
many other things, habit makes them so. Early rising, for instance, is
not agreeable to the lazy, and to one fond of her bed; but it is
essentially necessary to sound health. Exercise is not agreeable to the
indolent; but no woman can be really strong without it. Thorough
ablution of the whole body is distasteful and troublesome to one not
accustomed to much washing—to one laboring under a kind of
hydrophobia; but there is no perfect health without the daily
cleansing of the whole skin.
11. But all these processes entail trouble. True: is anything in this
world to be done without trouble? and is not the acquisition of
precious health worth trouble? Yes, it is worth more than all our
other acquisitions put together! Life without health is a burden; life
with health is a joy and gladness! Up, then, and arouse yourself, and
be doing! No time is to be lost if you wish to be well, to be a mother,
and to be a mother of healthy children. The misfortune of it is, many
ladies are more than half asleep, and are not aroused to danger till
danger stares them in the face; they are not cognizant of ill health
slowly creeping upon them, until, in too many cases, the time is gone
by for relief, and ill health has become confirmed—has become a part
and parcel of themselves; they do not lock the stable until the steed
be stolen; they do not use the means until the means are of no avail:
“Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie,
Which we ascribe to Heaven: the fated sky
Gives us free scope; only doth backward pull
Our slow designs, when we ourselves are dull.”[1]

12. Idleness is the mother of many diseases; she breeds them,

feeds them, and fosters them, and is, moreover, a great enemy to
fecundity. Idleness makes people miserable. I have heard a young
girl—surrounded with every luxury—bemoan her lot, and complain
that she was most unhappy in consequence of not having anything to
do, and who wished that she had been a servant, so that she might
have been obliged to work for her living. Idleness is certainly the
hardest work in the world.
13. It frequently happens that a lady, surrounded with every luxury
and every comfort, drags out a miserable existence; she cannot say
that she ever, even for a single day, really feels well and strong. This
is not to live—
 “For life is not to live, but to be well.”[2]

14. If a person be in perfect health, the very act of living is itself

thorough enjoyment, the greatest this world can ever bestow. How
needful it therefore is that all necessary instruction should be
imparted to every Young Wife, and that proper means should, in
every way, be used to insure health!
15. The judicious spending of the first year of married life is of the
greatest importance in the making and in the strengthening of a
wife’s constitution, and in preparing her for having a family. How
sad it is, then, that it is the first twelve months that is, as a rule,
especially chosen to mar and ruin her own health, and to make her
childless! The present fashionable system of spending the first few
months of married life in a round of visiting, of late hours, and in
close and heated rooms, calls loudly for a change. How many
valuable lives have been sacrificed to such a custom! How many
miscarriages, premature births, and still-born children, have resulted
therefrom! How many homes have been made childless—desolate—
by it! Time it is that common sense should take the place of such
folly! The present system is abominable, is rotten at the core, and is
fraught with the greatest danger to human life and human
happiness. How often a lady is, during the first year of her wifehood,
gadding out night after night,—one evening to a dinner party, the
next night to private theatricals, the third to an evening party, the
fourth to the theater, the fifth to a ball, the sixth to a concert, until in
some cases every night except Sunday night is consumed in this way,
—coming home frequently in the small hours of the morning,
through damp or fog, or rain or snow, feverish, flushed, and excited
—too tired until the morning to sleep, when she should be up, out,
and about. When the morning dawns she falls into a heavy,
unrefreshing slumber, and wakes not until noon, tired, and unfit for
the duties of the day! Night after night—gas, crowded rooms,
carbonic acid gas, late hours, wine, and excitement are her portion.
As long as such a plan is adopted the preacher preacheth but in vain.
Night after night, week after week, month after month, this game is
carried on, until at length either an illness or broken health
supervenes. Surely these are not the best means to insure health and
a family and healthy progeny! The fact is, a wife nowadays is too
artificial; she lives on excitement; it is like drinking no wine but