Executive summary

Why, even in the 21st century, must feminist literature still feel so suffocating, sorrowful, and tragic?

After Han Kang received the Nobel Prize in Literature, I revisited The Vegetarian, which I had first read in high school. It remained a powerful book, full of insights on feminism, spirituality, and the experience of marginalization. But one question lingered: Why must the protagonist, Yeong-hye, be so pitiable?

Feminism continues to evolve across generations. And yet, the women in feminist fiction today are not necessarily living better lives; instead, they seem to face new kinds of suffering. In my English literature courses, I learned that the transition from first-wave to second-wave feminism marked clear literary progress—a shift from women as silenced subjects to women as speaking subjects. Virginia Woolf’s novels exemplify that shift. Her works—though stylistically unique—carried a sense of power and influence, reflecting the feminist movement of her time.

But now, nearly a century later, particularly in Korea, feminist literature seems less about voicing women’s autonomy and more about depicting the structures under which women remain oppressed—only in their 21st-century forms. Han Kang’s The Vegetarian, for example, is often analyzed through an ecofeminist lens (see attached visual), showing how women are dominated by men just as nature is by civilization.

So what has feminism become, after all this time? Has it truly progressed—or merely taken on new names?

With this question in mind, I chose to compare two feminist texts from different points within first-wave feminism to explore what meaningful literary shifts might be found:

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper (1892), a classic early first-wave feminist text Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out (1915), a later work that still belongs to first-wave feminism, but begins to anticipate second-wave concerns

*** ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’:

A woman suffering from illness is confined to a room by her husband and physician, and gradually loses the ability to distinguish between reality and illusion. The story powerfully illustrates the psychological destruction of women under patriarchal control. It is a literary act of exposure—an indictment of the era’s medical and social norms.

*** ‘The Voyage Out’ :

The protagonist Rachel initially appears passive and compliant, but as the narrative unfolds, she begins to think, to love, to confront death, and to seek her own identity. This is a story of female subject formation and subtle rebellion—a novel about interior transformation and tentative solidarity among women.

***A brief historical framing:

-First-wave feminism (late 19th–early 20th century): Focused on political and legal equality—suffrage, education, and property rights.

-Second-wave feminism (1960s–1980s): A cultural movement that revealed the oppression within the private sphere and exposed structural gender-based discrimination.

My Research Question:

How do feminist texts written in the early and late stages of first-wave feminism differ in language, emotion, and their portrayal of female subjectivity?

Conclusion drawn from analysis:

The Yellow Wallpaper reflects the perspective of early first-wave feminism. It is a text of exposure, directly confronting the denial of women’s civic, educational, and medical agency.The Voyage Out, on the other hand, reveals the emergence of interiority, portraying a woman who slowly begins to claim her sense of self. From a late first-wave feminist lens, this novel illustrates the growing desire for personal and intellectual freedom, as well as the possibility of female solidarity.

Thus, the two texts show meaningful differences in tone, language, and the construction of female agency. And this is the shift I wanted to trace—from a literature of indictment to a literature of introspection and search.

Why? Because in today’s feminist literature—especially in Korea—violence against women is often rendered in even more brutal and stylized forms. Han Kang’s The Vegetarian is one such example. And her Nobel Prize win proves that the voice she gives to women in literature still carries deep resonance and weight.

But I am not merely arguing for “greater rights for women.” Rather, I believe we must halt the literary evolution of ever-more-sophisticated portrayals of gendered violence. This argument is tied to a deeper hope: for a future where feminist literature is no longer necessary. It saddens me that the kind of intellectual awakening that readers may have felt during the first-to-second wave transition no longer seems to happen. Feminist literature has not clearly evolved in a more liberating direction—it has only mutated, acquiring new forms like ecofeminism, without delivering new forms of hope.

Worse still, when I read depictions of women in today’s literature—women who want to speak but cannot—I often feel I am staring back at the same silence that haunted the earliest days of feminism.

If someone asks why we should still analyze texts written over a hundred years ago, my answer is this: The women of the past and the women of today are not separate. They exist on the same continuum. To read ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’, ‘The Voyage Out’, and ‘The Vegetarian’ side by side is to map the evolution of the female voice—a history of how women have tried, again and again, to name their pain.

I hope this project offers a space to reflect on where literature and feminism might go next—and helps us reframe the gender questions of our time with new clarity and urgency.

Data background

The full texts of ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ by Charlotte Perkins Gilman and ‘The Voyage Out’ by Virginia Woolf were retrieved from Project Gutenberg using the gutenbergr package in R.

-The Yellow Wallpaper → eBook No. 1952 -The Voyage Out → eBook No. 144
Research on ‘The Vegetarian’

Chan-kyu Lee & Eun-ji Lee. (2010). A Study of Ecofeminism in the Works of Han Kang – Focusing on The Vegetarian. Journal of Humanities, 46, 43–67.
Online Article Referenced

Yoon-soo Park. “Feminism: From First-Wave to Third-Wave Feminism—A Powerful Current.” Women’s News Korea. https://www.womennews.co.kr/news/articleView.html?idxno=111462

Data loading, cleaning and preprocessing

library(tidyverse)

## ── Attaching core tidyverse packages ──────────────────────── tidyverse 2.0.0 ──
## ✔ dplyr     1.1.4     ✔ readr     2.1.5
## ✔ forcats   1.0.0     ✔ stringr   1.5.1
## ✔ ggplot2   3.5.2     ✔ tibble    3.2.1
## ✔ lubridate 1.9.4     ✔ tidyr     1.3.1
## ✔ purrr     1.0.4     
## ── Conflicts ────────────────────────────────────────── tidyverse_conflicts() ──
## ✖ dplyr::filter() masks stats::filter()
## ✖ dplyr::lag()    masks stats::lag()
## ℹ Use the conflicted package (<http://conflicted.r-lib.org/>) to force all conflicts to become errors

library(tidytext)
library(gutenbergr)

gilman <- gutenberg_download(1952)

## Determining mirror for Project Gutenberg from
## https://www.gutenberg.org/robot/harvest.
## Using mirror http://aleph.gutenberg.org.

gilman

## # A tibble: 841 × 2
##    gutenberg_id text                                                            
##           <int> <chr>                                                           
##  1         1952 "The Yellow Wallpaper"                                          
##  2         1952 ""                                                              
##  3         1952 "By Charlotte Perkins Gilman"                                   
##  4         1952 ""                                                              
##  5         1952 ""                                                              
##  6         1952 "It is very seldom that mere ordinary people like John and myse…
##  7         1952 "ancestral halls for the summer."                               
##  8         1952 ""                                                              
##  9         1952 "A colonial mansion, a hereditary estate, I would say a haunted…
## 10         1952 "and reach the height of romantic felicity—but that would be as…
## # ℹ 831 more rows

tidy_gilman <- gilman %>% 
  unnest_tokens(word, text) %>% 
  anti_join(stop_words) %>% 
  count(word, sort = TRUE)

## Joining with `by = join_by(word)`

tidy_gilman

## # A tibble: 913 × 2
##    word          n
##    <chr>     <int>
##  1 john         43
##  2 don’t        29
##  3 pattern      24
##  4 paper        23
##  5 night        13
##  6 wallpaper    13
##  7 jennie       12
##  8 dear         11
##  9 feel         11
## 10 time         11
## # ℹ 903 more rows

woolf <- gutenberg_download(144)
woolf

## # A tibble: 14,948 × 2
##    gutenberg_id text               
##           <int> <chr>              
##  1          144 "The Voyage Out"   
##  2          144 ""                 
##  3          144 "by Virginia Woolf"
##  4          144 ""                 
##  5          144 ""                 
##  6          144 "Contents"         
##  7          144 ""                 
##  8          144 " CHAPTER I."      
##  9          144 " CHAPTER II."     
## 10          144 " CHAPTER III."    
## # ℹ 14,938 more rows

tidy_woolf <- woolf %>% 
  unnest_tokens(word, text) %>% 
  anti_join(stop_words) %>% 
  count(word, sort = TRUE)

## Joining with `by = join_by(word)`

tidy_woolf

## # A tibble: 9,109 × 2
##    word       n
##    <chr>  <int>
##  1 rachel   524
##  2 people   369
##  3 helen    363
##  4 looked   251
##  5 it’s     249
##  6 time     243
##  7 hirst    229
##  8 hewet    219
##  9 don’t    210
## 10 eyes     200
## # ℹ 9,099 more rows

***Text data analysis

Analysis and Figure 1

Describe and show how you created this figure. Why did you choose this figure type?

=> First, it is important to note that ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ is a short story, while ‘The Voyage Out’ is a full-length novel. For this reason, comparing the raw number of emotional words between the two texts would be meaningless. Instead, I conducted the analysis based on proportions to account for the difference in text length.

I chose the NRC lexicon because a simple positive/negative classification would not allow for a sufficiently multidimensional analysis of feminist literature. The NRC lexicon includes a wider range of emotional categories, making it more appropriate for capturing the nuanced emotional dynamics in both texts.

tidy_gilman <- tidy_gilman %>%
  mutate(book = "The Yellow Wallpaper")
tidy_gilman

## # A tibble: 913 × 3
##    word          n book                
##    <chr>     <int> <chr>               
##  1 john         43 The Yellow Wallpaper
##  2 don’t        29 The Yellow Wallpaper
##  3 pattern      24 The Yellow Wallpaper
##  4 paper        23 The Yellow Wallpaper
##  5 night        13 The Yellow Wallpaper
##  6 wallpaper    13 The Yellow Wallpaper
##  7 jennie       12 The Yellow Wallpaper
##  8 dear         11 The Yellow Wallpaper
##  9 feel         11 The Yellow Wallpaper
## 10 time         11 The Yellow Wallpaper
## # ℹ 903 more rows

tidy_woolf <- tidy_woolf %>%
  mutate(book = "The Voyage Out")
tidy_woolf

## # A tibble: 9,109 × 3
##    word       n book          
##    <chr>  <int> <chr>         
##  1 rachel   524 The Voyage Out
##  2 people   369 The Voyage Out
##  3 helen    363 The Voyage Out
##  4 looked   251 The Voyage Out
##  5 it’s     249 The Voyage Out
##  6 time     243 The Voyage Out
##  7 hirst    229 The Voyage Out
##  8 hewet    219 The Voyage Out
##  9 don’t    210 The Voyage Out
## 10 eyes     200 The Voyage Out
## # ℹ 9,099 more rows

all_books <- bind_rows(tidy_gilman, tidy_woolf)
all_books

## # A tibble: 10,022 × 3
##    word          n book                
##    <chr>     <int> <chr>               
##  1 john         43 The Yellow Wallpaper
##  2 don’t        29 The Yellow Wallpaper
##  3 pattern      24 The Yellow Wallpaper
##  4 paper        23 The Yellow Wallpaper
##  5 night        13 The Yellow Wallpaper
##  6 wallpaper    13 The Yellow Wallpaper
##  7 jennie       12 The Yellow Wallpaper
##  8 dear         11 The Yellow Wallpaper
##  9 feel         11 The Yellow Wallpaper
## 10 time         11 The Yellow Wallpaper
## # ℹ 10,012 more rows

nrc <- get_sentiments("nrc")


nrc_books <- all_books %>%
  inner_join(nrc, by = "word")

## Warning in inner_join(., nrc, by = "word"): Detected an unexpected many-to-many relationship between `x` and `y`.
## ℹ Row 1 of `x` matches multiple rows in `y`.
## ℹ Row 12495 of `y` matches multiple rows in `x`.
## ℹ If a many-to-many relationship is expected, set `relationship =
##   "many-to-many"` to silence this warning.

nrc_books

## # A tibble: 5,429 × 4
##    word         n book                 sentiment   
##    <chr>    <int> <chr>                <chr>       
##  1 john        43 The Yellow Wallpaper disgust     
##  2 john        43 The Yellow Wallpaper negative    
##  3 dear        11 The Yellow Wallpaper positive    
##  4 time        11 The Yellow Wallpaper anticipation
##  5 creeping     9 The Yellow Wallpaper anticipation
##  6 creep        8 The Yellow Wallpaper negative    
##  7 nervous      8 The Yellow Wallpaper anticipation
##  8 nervous      8 The Yellow Wallpaper fear        
##  9 nervous      8 The Yellow Wallpaper negative    
## 10 bad          7 The Yellow Wallpaper anger       
## # ℹ 5,419 more rows

emotion_proportion <- nrc_books %>%
  count(book, sentiment) %>%
  group_by(book) %>%
  mutate(proportion = n / sum(n)) %>%
  ungroup()



library(scales)

## 
## 다음의 패키지를 부착합니다: 'scales'

## The following object is masked from 'package:purrr':
## 
##     discard

## The following object is masked from 'package:readr':
## 
##     col_factor

library(ggplot2)
emotion_plot <- ggplot(emotion_proportion, aes(x = book, y = proportion, fill = book)) +
  geom_col(show.legend = TRUE, position = "dodge") +
  facet_wrap(~ sentiment, scales = "free_y") +
  scale_y_continuous(labels = percent_format(accuracy = 1)) +
  labs(title = "Comparison of Emotion Proportions by Emotion Type", x = NULL, y = "Emotion Word Proportion") +
  theme_minimal() +
  theme(
    strip.text = element_text(face = "bold"),
    axis.text.x = element_blank(),
    axis.ticks.x = element_blank()
  )
emotion_plot

Why this graph?

I chose this faceted bar chart to clearly visualize the proportional differences in emotion categories between the two texts. Since The Yellow Wallpaper is a short story and The Voyage Out is a full-length novel, comparing raw word counts would have been misleading. By displaying the emotion categories as percentages within faceted panels, the chart allows for side-by-side comparison across ten NRC sentiment categories, while still accounting for overall text length. This layout also highlights subtle yet meaningful differences—such as the higher proportions of trust and anticipation in The Voyage Out, or the elevated negative sentiment in The Yellow Wallpaper—which would be harder to detect in a single grouped barplot or table.

Analysis Result 1

Although ‘The Voyage Out’ does show a higher proportional frequency of anger, fear, and sadness words compared to ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’, the difference is not particularly large. Still, given the research question, it is worth considering why such negative sentiments appear slightly more frequently in the later first-wave feminist novel than in the earlier one.

Late first-wave feminism, unlike its earlier phase which focused primarily on legal and civic rights for women, began to emphasize liberation in the private sphere as well. It aimed not only to position women as equals to men, but also to recognize them as complex and emotionally layered individuals.

In this context, the relatively higher frequency of the three negative sentiments (anger, fear, and sadness) in ‘The Voyage Out’ might reflect a more developed representation of female interiority—emotional complexity, self-awareness, and psychological depth. After all, emotional growth that accompanies a journey of self-discovery cannot consist of purely positive feelings.

In terms of overall sentiment categories, ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ displayed a higher proportion of negative words, while ‘The Voyage Out’ showed higher proportions of trust and anticipation. This suggests that ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’, which depicts a woman collapsing under mental oppression, is characterized by a predominance of negative emotional language. In contrast, ‘The Voyage Out’, which portrays a woman navigating chaos while striving to grow and explore, is understandably associated with a greater use of words tied to hope and belief.

First-wave feminist literature often portrayed women as objects rather than subjects—treated unequally and seen as passive tools within a male-dominated society. In that light, ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ reflects the early stage of feminist thought. By comparison, ‘The Voyage Out’, written a few decades later, presents a woman as a more nuanced, individual subject, which makes the emotional and psychological layers in the text especially compelling.

Analysis and Figure 2

Describe and show how you created this figure. Why did you choose this figure type?

=> The frequency of subject pronouns used by the author is also significant in feminist literature. Who is placed in the subject position—and which characters the protagonist frequently interacts with—offers insight into narrative power and agency. To examine this, I created word clouds to visualize the most frequently mentioned characters and related terms in each text. By doing so, I aimed to analyze the two representative works of first-wave feminist literature from a deeper perspective, focusing on how each constructs relationships and subjectivity through language.

library(gutenbergr)
library(tidytext)
library(tidyverse)
library(dplyr)
library(wordcloud)

## 필요한 패키지를 로딩중입니다: RColorBrewer

gilman <- gutenberg_download(1952)


gilman %>%
  unnest_tokens(word, text) %>%
  anti_join(stop_words, by = "word") %>%
  count(word, sort = TRUE) %>%
  with(wordcloud(word, n, max.words = 100, scale = c(4, 0.5)))

woolf <- gutenberg_download(144)

woolf %>%
  unnest_tokens(word, text) %>%
  anti_join(stop_words, by = "word") %>%
  count(word, sort = TRUE) %>%
  with(wordcloud(word, n, max.words = 100, scale = c(4, 0.5)))

Analysis Result 2

The Yellow Wallpaper

Characters The most prominent word in the word cloud is “John.” As the protagonist’s husband and a symbol of patriarchal authority, the size of this word reflects the dominance of male power and influence in the text. Tragically, the name of the female narrator and protagonist, who suffers from postpartum depression and is confined to a room, never appears in the story. That absence is precisely why her name is not visible in the word cloud—a powerful example of the “nameless woman” in feminist literature. This aligns with the social context of early first-wave feminism, where women’s rights were severely limited. Interestingly, the name “Jennie”—John’s sister and an embodiment of the “ideal woman” under patriarchy—appears in relatively large font. The fact that a passive, compliant female character is more linguistically visible than the protagonist herself is a telling and ironic detail.

Setting & Spatial Imagery Frequently recurring spatial terms include: wallpaper, paper, yellow, pattern, window, nursery, bed, room. In literary symbolism, the color “yellow” often signifies paralysis and death. As both the title of the story and a word that appears repeatedly, it represents the paralyzed condition of women’s rights—the woman as a “dead presence”—and reflects the origins of feminist consciousness in early feminist literature. Words like window and room also symbolize the confined physical and psychological space of the female character.

Interestingly, in later feminist literature—especially as Virginia Woolf emphasized—the “room” transforms from a symbol of oppression into one of privacy and intellectual freedom. Thus, the persistent appearance of “room” as an oppressive site in this word cloud clearly situates The Yellow Wallpaper within the framework of early first-wave feminist literature.

Psychological State Words related to the narrator’s mental and emotional condition include: nervous, creep, tired, sleep, mind, feel, angry. These reflect the woman’s growing instability and mental collapse. Additionally, words like sleep and tired underscore her helplessness and loss of agency.

don’t The contraction “don’t” appears prominently in the word cloud. This may symbolically reflect restriction, suppression, and the overwhelming number of prohibitions placed upon the female subject.

The Voyage Out

Characters The most frequently appearing name is “Rachel” and “Helen.” First, it can be interpreted that the name of the main female character appears most often as revealing its existence, which corresponds to the late first-generation feminist values. And for Helen, in the story, Helen acts as a feminist guide and source of awakening for the protagonist, Rachel. She represents a more autonomous and relational female figure, distinct from those in early first-wave feminist texts. That such a character’s name appears most prominently is a striking result.

Interestingly, the noun “people” also appears frequently.From the perspective of the transition from early to late first-wave feminism, this suggests a shift toward defining womanhood in relation to others—discovering the self through social and interpersonal dynamics. Although the novel is written in third person, it occasionally uses stream-of-consciousness narration, allowing characters’ inner thoughts to emerge. The presence of I’m in relatively large font may reflect how characters engage in self-reflective inner monologue, which aligns with the feminist redefinition of woman as a complex individual rather than a passive object.

Language of Consciousness Verbs like ‘thinking, mind, suppose, feel, talk, exclaimed, remarked’ suggest active mental engagement and interpersonal communication. These words show how characters interact with their inner worlds—fitting the late first-wave feminist image of a woman as a thinking subject.

World, People, Life The frequent use of ‘people, world, life’ supports the interpretation that the novel explores how the protagonist Rachel exists as an individual constantly in relation to the surrounding social world.

Gaze and Vision The words ‘eyes’ and ‘looked’ are also notable. In traditional literature, the act of “seeing” or “gazing” was often reserved for men—implying authority and power. Romantic poets, for example, used verbs like see, gaze, and behold as markers of masculine vision and judgment. (Indeed, in previous literary research, I studied how William Wordsworth’s male gaze objectified female figures through prolonged observation.)

From this perspective, the act of looking was historically gendered—something granted to men, and denied to women. Therefore, the frequency of these terms in The Voyage Out suggests a feminist reappropriation of vision, with women themselves becoming observers and active perceivers. This shift marks a significant moment in feminist literary history.

Analysis and Figure 3

Describe and show how you created this figure. Why did you choose this figure type? => I chose a co-occurrence network because I wanted to visualize not only which words appear frequently in the text, but also how they are interconnected. Unlike a simple frequency chart, this network map reveals the structural relationships between key terms — showing how often they co-occur and which words function as semantic hubs. For instance, in The Yellow Wallpaper, the centrality of “John” and its links to emotionally charged words like “tired”, “nervous”, and “wallpaper” reflects the protagonist’s psychological entrapment in a patriarchal and medicalized system. This figure type thus allows for a deeper exploration of thematic patterns beyond mere word count.

library(gutenbergr)
library(tidytext)
library(dplyr)
library(widyr)
library(tidygraph)

## 
## 다음의 패키지를 부착합니다: 'tidygraph'

## The following object is masked from 'package:stats':
## 
##     filter

library(ggraph)
library(ggplot2)
library(tibble)

gilman <- gutenberg_download(1952) %>%
  mutate(text = ifelse(is.na(text), "", text),
         paragraph_id = cumsum(text == ""))

stop_words_extended <- bind_rows(
  stop_words,
  tibble(word = c("don’t", "can’t", "didn’t", "i’m", "it’s", "you’re", "he’s", "she’s", "we’re"),
         lexicon = "custom")
)

tidy_gilman <- gilman %>%
  unnest_tokens(word, text) %>%
  anti_join(stop_words_extended, by = "word")

gilman_pair <- tidy_gilman %>%
  pairwise_count(item = word, feature = paragraph_id, sort = TRUE) %>%
  filter(n >= 3) 

graph_gilman <- gilman_pair %>%
  as_tbl_graph(directed = FALSE) %>%
  mutate(
    centrality = centrality_degree(),
    group = as.factor(group_infomap())
  )

set.seed(1234)
graph_plot1 <- ggraph(graph_gilman, layout = "fr") +
  geom_edge_link(color = "gray50", alpha = 0.5) +
  geom_node_point(aes(size = centrality, color = group), show.legend = FALSE) +
  scale_size(range = c(4, 12)) +
  geom_node_text(aes(label = name), repel = TRUE, size = 5) +
  theme_graph() +
  labs(title = "Semantic Co-occurrence Network : The Yellow Wallpaper")
graph_plot1

## Warning in grid.Call(C_stringMetric, as.graphicsAnnot(x$label)): 윈도우즈
## 폰트데이터베이스에서 찾을 수 없는 폰트페밀리입니다

## Warning in grid.Call(C_textBounds, as.graphicsAnnot(x$label), x$x, x$y, :
## 윈도우즈 폰트데이터베이스에서 찾을 수 없는 폰트페밀리입니다

## Warning in grid.Call.graphics(C_text, as.graphicsAnnot(x$label), x$x, x$y, :
## 윈도우즈 폰트데이터베이스에서 찾을 수 없는 폰트페밀리입니다

woolf <- gutenberg_download(144) %>%
  mutate(text = ifelse(is.na(text), "", text),
         paragraph_id = cumsum(text == ""))

stop_words_extended <- bind_rows(
  stop_words,
  tibble(word = c("don’t", "can’t", "didn’t", "i’m", "it’s", "you’re", "he’s", "she’s", "we’re",
                  "mrs", "mr", "miss", "st", "rachel", "helen", "hewet", "terence"),
         lexicon = "custom")
)

tidy_woolf <- woolf %>%
  unnest_tokens(word, text) %>%
  anti_join(stop_words_extended, by = "word")


woolf_pair <- tidy_woolf %>%
  pairwise_count(item = word, feature = paragraph_id, sort = TRUE) %>%
  filter(n >= 20)


graph_woolf <- woolf_pair %>%
  as_tbl_graph(directed = FALSE) %>%
  mutate(
    centrality = centrality_degree(),
    group = as.factor(group_infomap())
  )


set.seed(1234)
graph_plot2 <- ggraph(graph_woolf, layout = "fr") +
  geom_edge_link(color = "gray50", alpha = 0.5) +
  geom_node_point(aes(size = centrality, color = group), show.legend = FALSE) +
  scale_size(range = c(4, 12)) +
  geom_node_text(aes(label = name), repel = TRUE, size = 5) +
  theme_graph() +
  labs(title = "Semantic Co-occurrence Network: The Voyage Out")
graph_plot2

## Warning in grid.Call(C_textBounds, as.graphicsAnnot(x$label), x$x, x$y, :
## 윈도우즈 폰트데이터베이스에서 찾을 수 없는 폰트페밀리입니다

## Warning in grid.Call.graphics(C_text, as.graphicsAnnot(x$label), x$x, x$y, :
## 윈도우즈 폰트데이터베이스에서 찾을 수 없는 폰트페밀리입니다

Why you designed it the way you did.

=> To filter out meaningless connections, I applied a custom stopword list to refine the semantic network. I also continuously adjusted the width, height, and resolution of the generated image to best fit the title length and overall readability, which led me to the final settings used above.

For the pairwise_count, I set the minimum co-occurrence frequency to 3 for The Yellow Wallpaper since it is a short story — a lower threshold was necessary to generate a meaningful network. In contrast, The Voyage Out is a full-length novel, so I set the threshold to 20 or higher to avoid an overly cluttered network.

I used the link color “gray50” as it offered the clearest and most visually comfortable result.

Analysis Result 3

The Yellow Wallpaper

As expected, John’s centrality is very high, and the words associated with him—wallpaper, tired, and Jennie—symbolize the intense patriarchal system surrounding the female protagonist and Jennie. The word pattern stands out, and its connection to woman is particularly intriguing. In this story, pattern refers to the strange and indecipherable designs the protagonist perceives on the yellow wallpaper while trapped in the room. From an early first-wave feminist perspective, this chaotic and confusing pattern can be interpreted as a symbol of the protagonist’s repressive situation, reflective of how women were severely constrained during that era.

The Voyage Out

Similarly, people has very high centrality, and the various “human elements” connected to it align with a late first-wave feminist perspective. The clustering of words such as love, round, life, mind, and world supports this interpretation. Furthermore, the grouping of eyes, looked, and women gains added significance when considered alongside the previous word cloud analysis.

Why Does Feminist Literature Still Reside in Pain? : A Textual Analysis of ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ and ‘The Voyage Out’

Im Ga Hyeon

2025_06_12