Statement of Intent.​

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Two years ago I first encountered Nicholas Crawford's "We'll Always Have Paris," a critical article that discusses why the final act of William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet does not end in triumph for the star-crossed lovers. The couple is forever conjoined with Juliet's betrothed, Paris (at least insofar as characters can be 'forever conjoined' within the confines of text when the reader leaves the play behind). What is interesting, though, about Crawford's analysis is not his recognition of Paris' presence, since that detail is a simple plot fact, but the way in which Crawford recognizes that the text joins Paris, Romeo, and Juliet in their deaths through triangulation. Crawford uses the concept of vermiculation (def. 'worm imagery') to bind the trio's physical bodies. Worms will feed on the three bodies as they decompose, he reminds us. Even more morbidly, Crawford describes the worms as phallic symbols – now Paris is present and penetrative in Romeo and Juliet's death bed.

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Image 1. Earthworm in earth.

 

Coming to Romanticism with this knowledge of the ways in which Renaissance literature can be illuminated (admittedly morbidly) by attention to the process of vermiculation, I immediately began noticing the many references to worms in Romantic writers' literary works, such as those of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, Anna Barbauld, and Charlotte Smith. This project serves as an exploration into the way Romantic-period writers were deploying worms and worm imagery in their literature.

 

Is there any connection in Romantic literature between the occurrence(s) of worm imagery and the rotting of the female body? Are worms still phallic symbols in Romanticism? What can worms illuminate on Romantic period writers' fascination with the sublime and mortality?

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Image 2. Earthworm to size.​

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Through the use of the Digital Humanities (DH) software Voyant, this study seeks to answer the questions above. Voyant is the preferred tool of this study because the software allows the user to take a quantitative rather than qualitative approach to texts. To read all of the texts that are necessary to analyze for a complete analysis of the way(s) in which the word "worm" is used by Romantic writers would be almost impossible (if not impossible) and needlessly time consuming without the advent of DH software capabilities. My hope is that by approaching texts in a quantitative manner in this study, conclusions will be discovered by the software that may completely elude a single human reader.

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This study is indebted to Janelle A. Schwartz's Worm Work: Recasting Romanticism, the only major work on worm imagery in the Romantic-period to this date, but my study departs from Schwartz's book in two key ways:

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1. This study is only interested in a quantitative study of “worms” in texts in the strictest sense of the word “worm.”

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2. Whereas Schwartz focuses on the material, taxonomic qualities of worms, this study examines the re-generative        function as worms as well as worms’ association with death and decay in relation to the human body. Specifically,      this study utilizes the DH software Voyant and computer programming code R to gather quantitative data on the        word “worm” within Romantic literature to prove or disprove a theoretical reading of Romantic writers’ use of              worms as material, Freudian metaphors.

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These are only a few considerations I wish to explore presently.

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