Year 1
This radar chart visualizes the relative frequency and conceptual weight of the terms Race, Class, and Woman across our primary Year 1 corpus. By mapping these terms as axes on a single plane, we can observe the "conceptual fingerprints" of each author. This visualization serves as a digital instrument to track how the "intellectual constitution of modernity" mutates as it moves between industrial, domestic, and slave narratives.
The Industrial Axis (Class): The chart reveals a high-frequency "pull" toward the Class axis in the works of Henry James, Rebecca Harding Davis, and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward. In these texts, "Class" serves as the primary structural principles organizing social possibility. The extreme spike in A Portrait of a Lady and Margaret Howth indicates that for these authors, transatlantic identity is processed primarily through social hierarchy and the "logic of the dollar."
The Racial Displacement (Race): A significant divergence is visible in the narratives of Harriet Jacobs and Frederick Douglass. Here, the "Class" axis is noticeably retracted in favor of the Race axis. This visual shift confirms our hypothesis: in the transatlantic slave narrative, race functions as a totalizing category that often absorbs or "masks" traditional class distinctions, acting as the fundamental "conceptual anchor" for the subject's legal and moral existence.
The Gendered Agency (Woman): The Woman axis reaches its maximum extension in Phelps Ward’s The Silent Partner. This spike illustrates the transition from the "silent" or "romantic" woman of the earlier 19th-century tradition (as seen in the more balanced, specimens-based approach of James) to an "active partner" in industrial modernity. The chart captures the exact moment where gender becomes a vocal, rather than silent, conceptual category.
The overlapping areas of the chart represent the shared transatlantic imaginary. Where the shapes diverge, we see the "mutations" of the period:
Industrial focalization prioritizes the Class axis.
Abolitionist focalization reorganizes the apparatus around the Race axis.
Modern feminist focalization expands the Gender axis into the professional and legal spheres.
Together, these shapes map the "panopticism" of the 19th-century master and the various linguistic strategies used by authors to subvert, define, or escape it.