11. Emotional Fingerprints: Nouns Expressing Emotions in Jane Eyre and its Italian Translations

Paola Gaudio

Introduction

Good writers are able to make every novel a unique representation of emotional dynamics, a cognitive roller-coaster of emotional ups and downs, as their empathic readers let the narrator take their hand and lead them across the universe of narrative fiction, which is fraught with emotions of all kinds. If this is possible, it is because writers have a finely-tuned knack for triggering vicarious emotions by using mere words, and they can differentiate very subtly among the vast array of emotions made available by their language.

Charlotte Brontë had a natural talent for story-telling, and her passionate nature ensured that her novels should be imbued with a wide range of emotions.1 It has been almost two centuries now since her novel was first published, and the main reason it is still such an engaging story today is because of the stirring emotions that capture its readers.2 Even though times change and cultures develop in different directions, it seems that we share an inner core of empathy that responds emotionally to the (mis)adventures of others’ lives, even though these go back two hundred (or even two thousand for that matter) years and never really existed beyond the written page. Sometimes emotions can be stirred without even labelling them as such in the narrative, and a love scene can be such even if the word love is not mentioned at all. It is, however, revealing to observe the type and frequency of those that are actually present in a canonical novel such as Jane Eyre and see how these relate to the characters and the plot. High frequency of use is certainly a key indication of the relevance of a certain emotion in the novel. Sometimes, however, what is missing can be equally revealing in terms of themes and narrative style, hence it deserves some attention. The first part of this essay addresses the issue of frequency of emotion-nouns in Jane Eyre and, on the basis of all the data collected, insights are then gained and discussed with regard to the themes of the novel and the depiction of its characters.

As one of the classics of nineteenth-century British literature, Jane Eyre is not published in English only, but in a variety of languages, including Italian. The second part of this study is an attempt to understand whether and to what degree the quantitative pattern of emotion-nouns in the original English text is duplicated in Italian. In order to do this, the consistency in the frequency of Italian emotion-nouns is first analysed across the translations, then compared with the findings from the English original. Lexical correspondences between English and Italian emotion-nouns are thus identified and quantified.

The results of the quantitative analysis of emotion-nouns in individual translations are finally presented in the form of what are called emotional fingerprints, i.e., a visual representation, by means of word clouds, of the emotions characterizing each version of the book.

The following methodological section accounts for the selection method of emotion-nouns in the English original as well as in the translations; it sheds light on the issues deriving from the syntactic asymmetries between English and Italian in relation to this specific research; and it outlines some basic statistical principles applied to process the data and gain insight on the whys and hows of the results obtained.

Methodology

The approach to the study of emotions in both Jane Eyre and its translations is definitely inductive, meaning that the intent of this research is not to implement any specific theory on quantitative or comparative analysis of data, on inter- or intra-linguistic translation, or on the definition of emotions, but rather to observe the specificities of the texts at stake and, from that, apply any type of analysis, statistical or otherwise, that appears to be able to point to patterns and anomalies. Such an approach applies to all sections of this essay, from the discussion of emotions in the source text, to the analysis of the corpora, to the statistical data, and to the creation of emotional fingerprints in the form of word clouds as a means to visually represent the idiosyncrasies of the translations. What I am offering is neither a close reading nor a distant one: it is rather a transversal reading through the eyepiece of emotional lexis across the source text and its translations.

Given the general framework, a few words on how the data was gathered, and on the constraints, limitations, and exceptions that were necessary to lend rigour and coherence to the results, are certainly required. The English source text is the 2006 Penguin edition of Jane Eyre in .txt format. The Italian texts are .txt files of eleven translations, ranging from the anonymous one published back in 1904 to the more recent 2014 translations by Stella Sacchini and by Monica Pareschi.

The focus being emotions, namely an over-reaching, all-encompassing category, the object of study is narrowed down to the lexical items expressing emotions and belonging in the syntactic category of nouns, whether singular or plural. As a consequence, it should be noted that, because of this, the figures underestimate emotions expressed by other parts of speech (adjectives, adverbs, and verbs). Thus, in the case of love, only the noun is considered, but not any of its derivatives loved, loving, lovingly, loveless, unloving, lovely, etc. The same applies to other words such as fear, hope or wish, and their derivative forms (fearful, fearless, fearlessly, etc.). Even though there is a quantitative underestimation of emotions as expressed by other parts of speech, the peculiarity of nouns is that, whilst verbs describe what someone does,3 adverbs indicate how something is done, and adjectives are descriptive by nature, nouns are either subjects or objects of any statement, they either originate the predicate or complete it: in other words, they constitute the fulcrum of any utterance by naming what topic is being discussed, evoked, analysed, commented upon, or dealt with — either by the characters themselves or by the fictional narrator — and this is precisely why a noun-focused analysis cannot be overlooked. There is another reason for narrowing down the field of research to nouns only, and it has to do with the comparability — or lack thereof — of syntactic roles between languages. Even excluding all derivatives, in English the word love can still be a noun or a verb; not so in Italian, where there are two different words: the noun amore, and the verb amare. Sorpresa, in contrast, can be both a verb and a noun, just like its English equivalent surprise. Yet, there is no correspondence between the syntactic roles of these verb-forms in the two languages: surprise is either present indicative, imperative, or exhortative in English; but in Italian, the verb-form sorpresa is a female singular past participle, also used as adjective. Similarly, sorprese and surprises, in addition to being plural nouns, can also be verbs in the third person singular: in Italian, sorprese is a past tense (lei mi sorprese, ‘she surprised me’), in English it is a present (‘she surprises me’). Like the singular sorpresa, its plural sorprese can be past participle and adjective too — not so in English.

Syntactic ambiguity applies to words which can be nouns, verbs, or adjectives:4 love and loves, doubt and doubts, regret and regrets, etc. these can all be either nouns or verbs — which is actually a common phenomenon. Therefore disambiguation is necessary. More in detail, plural nouns can be homonymous with a past participle or a second person singular of the verb in Italian; in English, they can be homonymous with a third person singular of the present indicative. Sometimes — not always — the ambiguity is symmetric and occurs in both languages: desideri and desires, tormenti and torments can all be either plural nouns or verbs (respectively, second person singular of the verbs desiderare and tormentare in Italian; third person singular of the verbs to desire and to torment in English).

For the corpora to be genuinely comparable, syntactic roles must not be mixed up. Following these adjustments, and since the scope of this study comprises exclusively nouns, each token should — ideally — have its equivalent in the translations. This latter claim however, is not at all a given since — as will be extensively shown — there are substantial variations in the translations, with certain emotion-nouns popping up a lot more often than in the original or disappearing altogether.

As to what constitutes an emotion and what not, the plethora of taxonomies of emotions varies greatly in the scientific world, depending on the aim of the classification and the perspective from which they are considered (psychological, cognitive, neurological, anthropological, etc.).5 Things are complicated even further by the relationship between emotion and reading, which implies a different way of experiencing emotion, and which is based on empathy.6 The aim of this essay is not, however, to recreate any taxonomy of emotions, neither it is to describe the dynamics at play between text and emotional reactions on the part of the readers. Since the approach is inductive, emotion theories such as Paul E. Griffiths’s7 and Antonio Damasio’s⁸ have only worked as general guidelines in the initial approach to the source text. The inductive process that led to identifying the spectrum of emotion-nouns used by Charlotte Brontë in Jane Eyre took place by analysing the word-frequency list of the novel in English. The nouns that were thus recognized as expressing emotions in English have then paved the way to the identification of emotion-nouns in the Italian translations, whose word lists were also individually examined.

Etymologically, an emotion stirs something inside and, for the purposes of this study, it can be defined as whatever arises instinctively or spontaneously in the perceiver’s consciousness following a stimulus. Such stimulus can range from an actual event to a mere mental image. An emotion is not the same as a physical sensation (feebleness, coldness, etc.), even though the two are closely related as emotions always involve some physical response like increased heart-beat or dilated pupils; and it is not a behaviour either (kindness, rudeness, etc.) even though behaviours are often either causes or consequences of an emotional response. Within this general framework, any noun which could arguably be considered some type of emotion was included in the selection. The word emotion itself has also been included in the research for obvious reasons of self-reference, along with its near-synonyms passion, sentiment, sensation, and feeling. It goes without saying that these words do not express any specific emotion themselves. However, their relevance stems from the purpose they serve of indicating that the semantic field of the portion of text in which they occur revolves indeed around emotions.

A broad parameter for the quantitative selection of the emotional lexis for the contrastive analysis is that, for a noun to be taken into consideration, it needs to have a frequency equal to or higher than ten occurrences, either in the source text or in one of the translations. There is one exception to this rule and it concerns the word misery, which was included because of its peculiarity, and which will be analysed in the section ‘English–Italian equivalents and outliers’. Such inclusion does not skew the analysis, because the emphasis of the contrastive analysis is not so much on the quantitative identification of emotional-nouns in the novel — which is dealt with in the next section — but on the differences and similarities between source text and target texts: thus, the addition of one more case simply makes the enquiry a little more extensive.

Once the data were gathered, statistics provided the tools necessary to gain insights on the results. At the basis of the statistical analysis there is the fundamental notion of the normal curve, which is a bell-shaped, symmetric curve representing a great part of natural and societal phenomena. The assumption is that, in the infinite world of possibilities offered by translation, the different translations of a word are normally distributed (i.e., their distribution follows the normal curve). The word hate, for example, is likely to be translated as odio by the vast majority of Italian translators and on most occasions. Some, however, will now and then translate it with disprezzo (contempt), repulsione (repulsion) or maybe omit it altogether, with frequencies which decrease as the target word becomes more and more unusual. In this research, the standard deviation (SD) measures the variability of the translations for each emotion-noun: if the standard deviation is low, there is greater consistency in how a word is translated, if it is high, there is little consistency in its translations. Z-scores represent the frequency of a certain value (in this case, the number of occurrences of an emotion-noun) expressed into standard deviations. The more a z-score is closer to zero, the more it approaches the mean, i.e., the more similar its frequency is to the average frequency of that same noun across the translations. Most values fall within the interval ±1 SD (i.e., their z-score is between –1 and +1). Values that fall outside this interval are considered outliers, if the values lie outside the interval ±2 SD, they are extreme outliers.

One more statistic that will be used is the standard error (SE), which is another measure of dispersion. In fact, in the analysis that follows, the standard error is a measure of dispersion of the distribution of standard deviations. In other words, the standard error tells us whether the variability observed per each emotion-noun in the eleven translations is normal or not. Since the standard error is basically just a type of standard deviation, the same rules apply, therefore values that fall outside the interval ±1 SE will be considered outliers; and those that fall outside the interval ±2 SE will be considered extreme outliers.

Hence, the present research shows which emotion-nouns are used with similar frequencies across the translations and which are not. The mean frequency of every Italian emotion-noun is then compared to the frequency of its usual equivalent in the English source text. This allows us to determine whether and to what extent there actually exists a correspondence between English and Italian emotion-nouns in Jane Eyre. Lastly, since z-scores measure how typical or unusual the frequency of an emotion-noun is, they will be the reference values used to recreate the emotional fingerprints of each translation in the final section.

Emotions in Jane Eyre

The list of nouns expressing emotions in the original English version of Jane Eyre is provided in Table 1. As can be seen at a glance, love ranks first (81 occurrences), pleasure second (78), hope third (57), doubt (52) fourth, and fear fifth (47). Overall, there are at least 78 types of emotions and an average of 30.3 tokens per chapter. The list, however, is not exhaustive, since it contains only the most frequent emotions (>10) and a selection of the lesser used ones, and does not account for those which occur only once, like apprehension, disdain, envy, foreboding, tedium, trepidation, etc. The number of nouns expressing emotions in Jane Eyre is therefore noteworthy, especially with regard to the sheer linguistic variety of the emotions Charlotte Brontë mentions in her narrative.

Emotion-noun	Freq.	Emotion-noun	Freq.
love	81	anguish	10
pleasure	78	disgust	10
hope	57	melancholy	10
doubt	52	jealousy	9
fear	47	anxiety	8
wish	35	impatience	8
pain	33	misery	8
affection	30	anger	7
passion	30	hate	7
delight	27	regret	7
solitude	25	woe	7
pride	24	concern	6
happiness	23	ire	6
pity	23	loneliness	6
courage	22	sadness	6
suffering	22	satisfaction	6
sympathy	22	scorn	6
joy	21	tenderness	6
excitement	18	repentance	4
emotion	17	wrath	4
grief	17	aversion	5
surprise	17	contempt	5
terror	17	distress	5
despair	16	indignation	5
shame	16	desperation	4
sorrow	16	hesitation	4
desire	14	agitation	3
fury	14	compassion	3
enjoyment	13	humiliation	3
horror	13	longing	3
curiosity	12	rage	3
disappointment	12	restlessness	3
dread	12	yearning	3
agony	11	bewilderment	2
gratitude	11	bitterness	2
mercy	11	fun	2
relief	11	torment	2
remorse	11	wretchedness	2
wonder	11
admiration	10

TOT Types:	78
TOT Tokens:	1,152
Mean:	14.8
SD:	15.4
Mean per chapter:	30.3
Word Count:9	58,598
Emotion-nouns %:	1.96

Table 1: Emotion-nouns in Jane Eyre

As to the ranking of individual emotions, love trumps them all — as any respectable Victorian female Bildungsroman is expected to do.

Pleasure is a bit more problematic. The first instinct would be to disregard it altogether because of its recurrent use in today’s everyday language, which often has little to do with actual emotions and refers rather to fixed expressions like ‘it’s a pleasure to meet you’ — which are commonly uttered even when the underlying emotion is closer to indifference or nuisance rather than true pleasure. However, on reading the various instances of pleasure in the novel, and given the extremely high frequency of the word itself, it cannot be altogether dismissed — at least not without first wondering whether or not it plays some significant role in Jane Eyre.

It does. Many instances of the word occur in relation to Rochester and refer either to his dissolute lifestyle prior to proposing to Jane, or to the pleasure both Rochester and Jane find in sharing each other’s company. In all such cases it is evident that the word carries with it sensual rather than spiritual overtones. Still, the novel does not point to purely hedonistic quests, and those Jane Eyre narrates have also to do with small, everyday pleasures that derive, for example, from her enjoying Miss Temple’s company in an otherwise hostile environment, from experiencing genuine sisterhood for the first time, or from running in the wind:

[Miss Temple] kissed me, and still keeping me at her side […] where I was well contented to stand, for I derived a child’s pleasure from the contemplation of her face.10

There was a reviving pleasure in this intercourse, of a kind now tasted by me for the first time — the pleasure arising from perfect congeniality of tastes, sentiments, and principles.11

It was not without a certain wild pleasure I ran before the wind, delivering my trouble of mind to the measureless air-torrent thundering through space.12

Even when sensual in nature, the pleasures Jane craves are very much delimited by her sense of modesty, her rationality, and her greater intent to be an independent, self-respecting woman. She is in fact well aware of the dangers posed by the unrestrained pleasures Rochester himself succumbed to, that ‘heartless, sensual pleasure — such as dulls intellect and blights feeling’.13 And when he claims that, ‘since happiness is irrevocably denied me, I have a right to get pleasure out of life: and I will get it, cost what it may’, Jane’s reply is: ‘then you will degenerate still more, sir’.14

However, within the limits imposed extra-diegetically by Victorian values, and intra-diegetically by Jane’s very nature, she herself gleefully and unhesitatingly appreciates the pleasures life can give, the ‘so many pure and sweet sources of pleasure’15 she is granted daily at Moor House, for example, or the short-lived pleasure of the conqueror’s solitude she enjoyed when she stood up to Mrs Reed in chapter 2. Along the same lines, when St John proposes, she refuses to succumb to a life devoid of pleasures and filled with miseries only, because ‘God did not give her [her life] to throw away’.16

Jane Eyre is thus a hedonistic quest to the extent that pleasure and love are the ultimate goals of any human being — unless it is St John, of course. His endgame is misery, to the point that not only does he willingly endure it — not unlike Helen Burns — but he actively pursues it. Yet even to him, in his eyes, suffering — and its siblings: endurance, perseverance, and restraint — become indeed pleasures, for it is them that allow him to actually enjoy life, giving it the meaning he craves and, ultimately, to be reunited with his beloved Jesus Christ.

Hence, considering the occurrence of individual emotions, it is love and pleasure that stand out the most, followed by hope, doubt, fear, and wish.

Things change a little if we pool together synonyms or near-synonyms (e.g., pain and suffering, despair and desperation), as well as lexical labels that refer to some common underlying emotion, even though there may be different nuances involved (e.g., terror is fear felt to the utmost degree; affection is a bland type of love, etc.). The more complex an emotion is, the more it shares traits with other emotions: jealousy, for example, which in the array stands for an independent category — like courage, curiosity, and pride — might easily be perceived as inherent in love and desire. This is why other similar groupings could certainly be created on the basis of perceived contiguity between emotions. The groupings suggested here are represented in Figure 14, and they are labelled by the most frequent emotion within the sub-set:

• pleasure, happiness, joy, excitement, enjoyment, delight, relief, satisfaction, fun;
• love, affection, tenderness, gratitude, admiration;
• pain, suffering, grief, sorrow, agony, anguish, woe, misery, distress, torment;
• hope, wish, desire, longing, yearning;
• fear, terror, horror, dread, anxiety, concern, aversion, disgust;
• fury, anger, rage, ire, wrath, hate, scorn, contempt, indignation, bitterness;
• pity, mercy, sympathy, compassion;
• passion, emotion;
• shame, remorse, regret, repentance, humiliation;
• solitude, loneliness;
• melancholy, sadness, wretchedness, disappointment;
• surprise, wonder;
• doubt, hesitation, bewilderment;
• despair, desperation;
• impatience, restlessness, agitation.

Fig. 14 Grouped emotions

A further differentiation is suggested by colour: positive emotions are represented in pink, negative emotions in black, mixed emotions in green. Like in any fairy tale, in Jane Eyre too, good triumphs over evil, as positive emotions grouped under the label pleasure are by far the most frequent ones, followed by love and competing closely with a long tail of negative and mixed emotions, making the battle even more engaging. If we pool all positive emotions (in pink, 449 occurrences) and all negative ones (in black, 439 occurrences), their frequency is roughly the same, with positive emotions exceeding the negative by only 10 points. It is even more interesting to notice that negative emotions are scattered among a greater variety of nouns (40 nouns in 8 groupings), whereas the range of nouns expressing positive emotions is much more limited (19 in 3 groupings). Even so, both pleasure and love still trump all other groupings — with an inversion if compared to the individual frequencies of Table 1.

Love ranks second then, and it is in good company, because its existential synonym — pain — ranks third by just a few occurrences. In Italian, love (amore) actually rhymes with pain (dolore), and they do tend to go hand in hand, as the latter swiftly replaces the former if its object is made unavailable for whatever reason. If love and pain belong in the realm of reality — albeit fictional — hope and fear are their parallels in the realm of possibility. Hope that difficulties will be surmounted eventually and that love, in whatever form, will conquer all; and fear that the positive emotions might be taken away and replaced by everlasting negative ones.

The words hope, wish, desire, longing, and yearning have been pooled together because they all indicate a void to be filled: from Jane’s perspective it may be sexual desire for Rochester, but also a melancholic longing for the affection of a loving family, the material wish for food and shelter when she had neither, an intense desire for liberty or, were this not to be granted, at least for a new servitude:

I desired liberty; for liberty I gasped; for liberty I uttered a prayer; it seemed scattered on the wind then faintly blowing. I abandoned it and framed a humbler supplication. For change, stimulus. That petition, too, seemed swept off into vague space. ‘Then,’ I cried, half desperate, ‘grant me at least a new servitude!’.17

This desire to fill some existential void is naturally not peculiar to Jane, since it characterizes any existential quest — in fiction no less than in real life — and clearly affects other characters as well, from Helen’s desire to forgive and accept, to John Reed’s unquenchable thirst for vice, Eliza’s wish for quiet and order, St John’s visionary mission, and Rochester’s predicament since before he met Jane (i.e., the difficulty he repeatedly experienced in his quest to find a soulmate able to fill his need for companionship in order to avert his deep-seated solitude). Even Bessie and Miss Temple are ultimately defined by their desire to have a family of their own, and finally embrace the love this entails.

Jane Eyre is therefore primarily a novel about pleasure, love, pain, hope, and fear, but it also concerns doubt, solitude, fury, pride, courage, and an amazing plurality of further emotions, whether considered individually or grouped as in Figure 14. These kinds of emotion are not at all dissimilar from those usually experienced, to varying degrees, in any ordinary life: their peculiarity in Jane Eyre lies in the unique entanglement provided by the plot and by the narrative skills of its author.

Fig. 15 Frequency of ‘emotion’ and its near-synonyms

As for the word emotion itself and its near-synonyms feeling, sensation, passion, and sentiment, they occur 193 times altogether (Figure 15) i.e., an average of 5 times per chapter and, together with the tokens in Table 1, they amount to 2.2 % of the total word-count (function words excluded).

That the noun feeling should be the one used the most is not surprising given its overarching meaning. A different matter is the word passion. Hidden in its high frequency lurks a potentially disruptive challenge affecting the Victorian values of modesty and restraint. Even though not an emotion itself, passion works as an intensifier of emotions. If felt with passion — which etymologically derives from the Latin patior, to suffer, and thus indicates that the intensity of what is felt is such that it actually becomes painful — any emotion becomes excessive, uncompromising, difficult if not impossible to control — much less to suppress — and thus poses a genuine threat to the established order.

Emotion-Nouns in the Italian Translations

In an ideal — slightly boring — universe, each word would have its equivalent in any other language: the occurrences of, say, love would repeat themselves with the same frequency in all translations, in all languages — and the same would be true of any other noun, verb, adjective, etc. In an infinite number of translations, the distribution of occurrences of the equivalents of love would be normal, its variability extremely low (i.e., small standard deviation) and due to the occasional random error. The real world is of course a little more complicated. So it happens that such hypothetical equivalence tends to go awry. Not always, though. In the prismatic variability of translation, constants can still be identified.

These occur when the measure of variability of translation-equivalents is below average. From a statistical point of view, every distribution of values (in this case, the occurrence of emotion-nouns in Italian) varies to a certain degree from its mean. One of the possible measures of such variability is the standard deviation and its related z-score statistic. The observed minimum and maximum range of the standard deviation in the data gathered here is 0.8 and 20. The higher the standard deviation, the more the distribution varies (i.e., the frequency of the same emotion-noun varies across the translations); the lower the standard deviation, the less variable the distribution (i.e., there is more consistency in the frequency of the same emotion-noun in the translations). As to z-scores, these measure how far the variability of a certain value is from the average. In the following tables, z-scores refer to the standard error (SE), i.e., they indicate whether the standard deviation of a particular emotion-noun is higher (z-score >0) or lower (z-score<0) than the average standard deviation (z-score=0). High SE z-scores indicate that there is little or no consistency in the frequency with which an emotion-noun occurs across all translations; low SE z-scores indicate consistency, and SE z-scores equal to or close to zero indicate that the variability of that emotion-noun is around average.

The nouns in the table below therefore represent, in decreasing order, emotions whose frequency is most consistent across the translations,18 with rimorso (remorse) ranking first. It will be noticed that the mean frequency of some of them is rather low: hence, by virtue of the scarcity of occurrences, their consistency is only partially significant. Of greater interest are those words whose mean frequency is relatively high, such as felicità (happiness, 37 occurrences on average), disperazione (despair/desperation, 23.2 occurrences on average) and orgoglio (pride, 20.4 occurrences on average), which appear with close to the same frequency in all translations: the frequency of — for example — felicità is exactly the same in Pozzo Galeazzi, Reali, D’Ezio and Sacchini (40), with the other translators using it slightly less, like Gallenzi (39), Déttore (36), etc., down to Pareschi, with her 32 occurrences, who therefore lowers the mean value a bit more. That SE z-scores should point to a lower-than-normal dispersion rate in the frequencies of disperazione (–0.60), felicità (–0.55), and orgoglio (–0.52), across the translations is significant precisely because of their relatively high frequencies.

The list of emotion-nouns that are consistently reproduced in all the translations are therefore listed in Table 2 below. Nouns with the highest mean frequencies are highlighted in grey:

	Emotion-noun	Usual English equivalent	Mean	SD	SE z-score
1	rimorso	remorse	11.8	0.8	–1.21
2	gelosia	jealousy	8.6	1.1	–1.13
3	commozione	stirring emotion	1.1	1.2	–1.10
4	agonia	agony	1.5	1.4	–1.03
5	rimpianto	regret	7.6	1.6	–0.99
6	delusione	disappointment	10.6	1.7	–0.95
7	ammirazione	admiration	13.5	1.8	–0.93
8	disprezzo	contempt	11.9	1.9	–0.91
9	infelicità	misery	2.8	1.9	–0.89
10	curiosità	curiosity	14.7	2.1	–0.85
11	divertimento	fun	4.9	2.5	–0.72
12	impazienza	impatience	12.0	2.6	–0.70
13	disgusto	disgust	8.6	2.8	–0.65
14	odio	hate	12.9	2.8	–0.64
15	amarezza	bitterness	9.9	2.8	–0.64
16	malinconia	melancholy	7.7	2.9	–0.62
17	godimento	enjoyment	6.3	2.9	–0.61
18	delizia	delight	3.1	2.9	–0.60
19	disperazione	despair/desperation	23.2	2.9	–0.60
20	felicità	happiness	37.0	3.1	–0.55
21	sconforto	discouragement	2.4	3.1	–0.54
22	eccitamento/eccitazione	excitement/excitation	7.1	3.1	–0.54
23	preoccupazione	concern	7.7	3.2	–0.54
24	gratitudine	gratitude	12.5	3.2	–0.53
25	orgoglio	pride	20.4	3.2	–0.52
26	meraviglia	wonder	6.2	3.3	–0.50

Table 2: High consistency

At the other end of the spectrum, there are those emotions that do not have much consistency in the frequency with which they appear in each translation, and whose SE z-score is >0.5 (here it is nouns with the lowest mean frequencies that are highlighted in grey):

	Emotion-noun	Usual English equivalent	Mean	SD	SE z-score
1	ansia	anxiety	10.7	7.2	0.61
2	timore	dread	19.4	7.4	0.66
3	pietà	mercy	25.3	7.7	0.76
4	collera	choler/wrath	10.8	8.2	0.89
5	piacere	pleasure	86.8	8.3	0.92
6	simpatia	sympathy	15.5	8.6	1.00
7	amore	love	88.0	8.7	1.04
8	sofferenza	suffering	27.1	8.8	1.07
9	pena	pity	29.3	10.8	1.64
10	dubbio	doubt	48.7	13.0	2.25
11	gioia	joy	57.6	13.0	2.26
12	dolore	pain	39.8	13.6	2.43
13	paura	fear	81.2	20.0	4.26

Table 3: Low consistency

Unsurprisingly, their mean frequency is relatively high. Indeed, the correlation coefficient between frequencies and z-scores happens to be strongly positive (+0.7): in other words, emotion-nouns whose frequency is higher tend to have greater variability, and vice versa. That such correlation should only be strong and not perfect explains why even lower frequency words like ansia (anxiety, 10.7 occurrences on average) and collera (choler, 10.8 occurrences on average) make it among the least consistent ones (SE z-score >0.5), whereas the z-score of amore (love, 1.04 SE z-score), which has the highest mean frequency in the selection (88), is virtually identical with that of simpatia (sympathy, 1 SE z-score), whose frequency is much lower (15.5).19

One last case that is worth commenting on is the least consistent of all, paura (fear): its frequency in each translation varies so much that it is impossible to identify anomalies since there is no ‘normal’ value — even more so considering that its usual equivalent in the source text is used 47 times only, against a mean of 81 occurrences in the translations. As a matter of fact, the frequency of paura ranges from the 55 occurrences in Pareschi to more than twice as many in D’Ezio (119). The impact this has on the texts is clearly remarkable as Pareschi’s turns out to be a fearless translation, whereas D’Ezio’s is a fearful one.

English-Italian Equivalents and Outliers

The preceding section focuses on the consistency of nouns expressing emotions throughout the translations. This section relates such data to equivalent emotion-nouns in the original anglophone version of Jane Eyre.

If it is true that there is no exact correspondence between lexical systems of different languages, it is also true that, especially when languages have common origins — as is the case with English and Italian — overlapping areas do exist and can be quite broad, with occasional equivalence. Terror, for example, finds its unquestionable counterpart in the Italian terrore, there is no tangible difference between solitude and solitudine, remorse and rimorso: their substantially similar semantic core is proven not simply by common etymologies — as etymologically equivalent words can gain completely different meanings across languages and develop, for example, into false friends like actually and attualmente (currently), eventually and eventualmente (possibly) — but by semantic and pragmatic similarities. Indeed, even when etymologically different, there is no doubt that the overwhelmingly most common equivalent of love in Italian is amore, hate corresponds to odio, bitterness to amarezza, and so on and so forth. Appendix 1, at the end of this paper, provides the English-Italian equivalents for each emotion-noun as found in Jane Eyre. For the most part, the parameters applied for identifying such correspondences are: etymology, semantics, and pragmatics. Sometimes, however, the equivalence is not straightforward: in those cases, equivalence was determined on the basis of similarity in frequency and, in exceptional cases, similar words had to be grouped20 — so it happens that rage was pooled with anger, excitement with excitation, solitude with loneliness, etc.²¹

In spite of these adjustments, which are due to the inevitable differences in languages, there is a hefty equivalence in the frequency of most emotion-nouns between the anglophone version of Jane Eyre and the Italian ones. In light of the many factors that can and do affect the outcome of translations, which never turn out to be identical, such consistencies are indeed noteworthy. Here is a selection of the most similar emotion-nouns in terms of frequency:

English	Italian	Eng. Freq.	Mean It. Freq.
contempt/scorn	disprezzo	11	11.9
despair/desperation	disperazione	20	23.2
emotion	emozione	17	17.8
fury	furia	14	13.6
hope	speranza	57	60.1
jealousy	gelosia	9	8.6
love	amore	81	88
passion	passione	30	27.6
regret	rimpianto	7	7.6
relief	sollievo	11	10.2
remorse	rimorso	11	11.8
shame	vergogna	16	16.1
solitude/loneliness	solitudine	31	31.3
terror	terrore	17	17.3

Table 4: Similar frequencies of emotion-nouns

It could certainly be argued that there might be discrepancies between source text and target texts as to where these words occur, because each occurrence of every Italian emotion-noun is not necessarily a systematic translation of always the same corresponding English word. The most representative such case is possibly gioia, which can translate a whole range of emotions besides joy, including delight, enjoyment and bliss (see infra). This, however, does not invalidate the evidence that the impact these emotion-nouns have on the English novel as a whole is nearly identical to the one they have on the Italian translations, because what matters is the sheer amount of emotion-nouns rather than their displacement. Besides, the evidence pointing to substantial consistency is impressive.

There are exceptions, though, and they can be even more revealing than the consistencies. It could be assumed that the lack of correspondence in the frequency of emotion-nouns would concern special cases with little or no semantic overlap between English and Italian words. That is not the case. Surprisingly, common emotions such as agony, courage, excitement, happiness, joy, and the above-mentioned bitterness and hate — which all find ready-to-use equivalents in Italian — are substantially inconsistent. In Table 5, the inconsistency between English and Italian emotion-nouns is expressed in z-scores: when z-score is >+2, the emotion is under-represented in the translations, when it is <–2, it is over-represented. These reference values indicate that the frequency with which they occur in Jane Eyre is higher or lower than 95% of all other values in the normal distribution — which makes them truly exceptional. Table 5 also shows the mean difference between the mean frequency of the emotion in the Italian translations and its English equivalent in the original text:

English	Italian	JE Z-score	Mean difference
delight	delizia	8.2	–23.5
excitement/excitation	eccitamento/eccitazione	3.8	–12.2
agony	agonia	6.6	–9.0
enjoyment	godimento	2.3	–6.4
misery	infelicità	2.7	–5.5
hate	odio	–2.1	5.7
bitterness	amarezza	–2.8	7.4
affection	affetto	–2.1	8.7
sadness	tristezza	–2.3	11.5
courage	coraggio	–2.4	14.1
happiness	felicità	–4.5	14.1
joy	gioia	–2.8	36.6

Table 5: Emotion-nouns whose frequency in Italian is not consistent with the source text

Figure 16 further elaborates the data by representing English occurrences as reference point (zero on the Y axis) and the bars indicating the difference between the frequency of emotion-nouns in the translations and the frequency of corresponding emotion-nouns in the source text (which is given in parentheses).

Thus, delight and excitement appear much less in Italian (as delizia and eccitamento) than in the original (on average –23.5 and –12.2 times respectively). Likewise, agony, enjoyment, and misery do not occur in Italian as often as in English. In Stella Sacchini’s and Bérénice Capatti’s translations, for example, agony is never used, whereas in the original there are 11 such occurrences. A close reading of the text reveals that, for example, Sacchini tends to systematically translate agony with angoscia or also miserie (miseries), but never with its closer equivalent agonia. Bars above zero indicate that the opposite is true: hate, bitterness, affection, sadness, courage, happiness, and joy are to be found much more in the translations than in the original text. Among these, the frequency of joy is outstanding. Its frequency in Italian (gioia) is higher by up to 61 occurrences (in Luisa Reali). This means that Italian readers’ general impression of the novel will be a lot more joyful than it is for readers of the English text.

Fig. 16 Difference in frequency of emotion-nouns in English and Italian

At this point it remains to be seen what happens to those emotions that tend to disappear from the translations or pop up where there is no trace of them in the original. Let us consider joy, which is the most extreme case of asymmetry, and see the reasons why there are so many instances of gioia in the Italian translations.

Reali uses the word gioia 82 times, whereas in English there are only 21 occurrences of joy — four times as many as in the original. On a closer reading of the occurrences within the text, it transpires that gioia works as a passe-partout word to be used here and there every time the translator finds it suitable: in particular, it appears that Reali systematically uses gioia to translate delight (as a matter of fact, Reali never uses its corresponding delizia at all):

it is my delight to be entreated22

È una gioia per me sentirmi pregare²³

I permitted myself the delight of being kind to you²⁴

Mi concessi la gioia di essere gentile con te²⁵

This thus explains, on the one hand, the remarkably high frequency of gioia in Reali, as the 27 occurrences of the word delight add to the frequency of joy (21) in the source text; and, on the other hand, why the word delight is under-represented in Italian.

The following examples are from Dèttore’s translation instead. As in Reali, here too joy is nowhere to be found in the original:

I seemed to distinguish the tones of Adèle, when the door closed.26

mi parve distinguere le grida di gioia di Adèle, quando la porta venne chiusa.27

Oh, it is rich to see and hear her!²⁸

Oh, non è una gioia vederla e udirla?²⁹

I have at last my nameless bliss: As I love — loved am I!³⁰

Raggiunto ho infine la mia gioia infinita: Amare… essere amato.³¹

and my eyes seemed as if they had beheld the fount of fruition.³²

e gli occhi sembravano aver contemplato la fonte della gioia.³³

The one systematic tendency that can be appreciated in Dèttore lies in the translation of enjoyment with gioia (even the example above, concerning fruition, is a reflection of such tendency, as the obsolete Middle English meaning of fruition is indeed enjoyment):34

Much enjoyment I do not expect in the life opening before me.³⁵

Non mi aspetto molta gioia dalla vita che mi si apre dinanzi.³⁶

It is not like such words as Liberty, Excitement, Enjoyment.³⁷

[…] non è davvero come Libertà, Esultanza e Gioia.³⁸

To the outliers in Figure 16 must be added the noun infelicità, which deserves some attention. It is the only case included in the selection of emotion-nouns to be used less than 10 times, either in the translations or in the source text. As a matter of fact, its usual English equivalent, unhappiness, is never used by Charlotte Brontë in Jane Eyre. Yet, it pops up here and there across the translations, with up to 5 occurrences (in Lia Spaventa Filippi, Luca Lamberti, and Monica Pareschi — while Giuliana Pozzo Galeazzi and Luisa Reali remain faithful to the original and never mention it). Infelicità is the opposite of felicità, just as unhappiness is the opposite of happiness, but Charlotte Brontë prefers using misery, never unhappiness. Misery occurs 8 times in English and it can surely be translated as miseria (there are actually several such occurrences in the translations), but the Italian word — not unlike the English one, only to a much greater extent — tends to be associated with a condition of destitution or poverty (therefore not an emotion), and this is why it happens that some Italian translators express the emotion of feeling miserable with infelicità, thus reserving the use of miseria to refer to the condition of poverty. Besides, as is well known, unhappiness is not necessarily associated with destitution — albeit just moral — and may befall anyone, even the rich and wealthy, or the otherwise non-destitute.

That unhappiness is nowhere to be found in the source text may be surprising, but it is not uncommon, since the word itself is sparsely used in other nineteenth-century novels as well: it appears only twice in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, in William Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, and in Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist; it is also never mentioned by Charlotte Brontë’s sisters Anne in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, and Emily in Wuthering Heights.

Emotional Fingerprints

The lexical idiosyncrasies of the translations in relation to the number and frequency of outliers is visually represented by means of word clouds constituting the emotional fingerprint of each translation. The aim of the previous sections was to identify those emotion-nouns that are consistently reproduced in the target texts, those that are not, and what emotions differ quantitatively the most in relation to the source text. This section revolves instead around the identification of outliers in each translation, so as to characterize them on the basis of their idiosyncrasies. Such idiosyncrasies are the actual emotional fingerprints of the translations, making them unique and distinguishable from all the others, and affecting the emotional impact of the novel on its readers. All translations have some emotional fingerprint: this is revealed by identifying and visualizing39 the extent to which the emotion-nouns that are used by a specific translator differs from the source text and from all other translations. The translation’s emotional fingerprint is therefore not a mere representation of the most frequent emotion-nouns, because it reveals what emotions set that particular translation apart from the others, hence making it one of a kind.

Fig. 17 Emotional fingerprints (i)

Fig. 18 Emotional fingerprints (ii)

Fig. 19 Emotional fingerprints (iii)

The statistics used as a basis for creating emotional fingerprints are emotion-nouns’ z-scores, calculated with reference to the mean and standard deviation of the distribution of each emotion-noun in the source text as well as in the translations. For an emotional fingerprint to be significant, it is not necessary that there should be outliers: even where all emotions are within the norm (their variability from the mean is non-remarkable), it is revealing to appreciate the idiosyncrasies of the translations, as the values fed to the cloud generator are based on the individual emotions’ z-scores in each translation. They include all z-scores >+0.1 (which indicate that the noun is used more than average). Yet, since a translation’s emotional fingerprint can also be characterized by low frequencies of certain emotions, these are likewise comprised in the cloud, with the ten lowest z-scores (i.e., the words that are used the least) coloured in grey and preceded by a minus sign. As in the previous sections, emotion-nouns lying outside the range mean ±2 standard deviations — i.e., whose z-score is either >+2 or <–2 — are considered extreme outliers.

Whenever the use of a certain item is particularly recurrent, it sticks out more. In the emotional fingerprints, the bigger the word, the more unusual it is — with the most unusually frequent words popping out with greater visibility and flashy colours, as opposed to the colour of the unusually infrequent ones, which is always grey.40

Translator	Extreme outliers
	In excess	In dearth
Anonymous	agonia (agony), collera (wrath), commozione (stirring emotion), dolore (pain), meraviglia (wonder), vergogna (shame)	affetto (affection), amarezza (bitterness), angoscia (anguish), curiosità (curiosity), desiderio (desire), disperazione (despair), dubbio (doubt), malinconia (melancholy), preoccupazione (concern), rimpianto (regret), sorpresa (surprise)
Pozzo Galeazzi	delizia (delight), vergogna (shame)	rabbia (rage)
Spaventa Filippi	―	―
Dèttore	―	―
Reali	dubbio (doubt), orrore (horror)	―
Gallenzi	agitazione (agitation), coraggio (courage)
Lamberti	―	―
D’Ezio	agonia (agony)	―
Capatti	divertimento (fun), sconforto (discouragement)	ammirazione (admiration), disperazione (despair), gelosia (jealousy), gratitudine (gratitude), solitudine (solitude).
Pareschi	furia (fury), terrore (terror)	―
Sacchini	―	―

Table 6: Extreme outliers (for complete data see Appendix 2)

The 1904 anonymous translation is a semi-abridged one, therefore it is unavoidable that some nouns should be fewer than average.41 In this case, then, outliers by dearth are not really significant as their lower frequency may be due to the text being abridged. For the very same reason, the anonymous translator’s outliers in excess are particularly remarkable. Those which are used with unusual frequency are: agonia (agony), vergogna (shame), meraviglia (wonder), collera (wrath), dolore (pain), and, above all, commozione (stirring emotion) — whose z-score is a good +9.27. Stirring emotion is a label used here for a word that does not have a ready equivalent in English, and which the anonymous translator uses 12 times, i.e., once every three chapters on average. Commozione means being stirred or touched, often to tears, sometimes out of joy, sometimes out of grief — hence, stirring emotion seems to be its closest equivalent. The anonymous translator is not the only one to use commozione, as Pozzo Galeazzi (2), Spaventa Filippi (2), Dèttore (3), and Reali (2) use it too, albeit with a much lower frequency. From the gathered data, it can be evinced that there is a temporal decrease in its use, as it disappears altogether from Gallenzi’s 1997 translation onward.42 In the translations that did use it, the words commozione and emozione are equivalents of the same word emotion, even though their meaning — in current Italian — is not at all interchangeable, as commozione is a hyponym of emozione. That the 1904 translation should be one of a kind is consistent with its publication date — which certainly sets its language apart from the more recent translations — and is also compatible with the tendency this translator shows to omit whole sentences, which again is in line with the higher occurrence of negative outliers. With such a tendency to abridge, the higher frequency of positive outliers really stands out — as can be appreciated by observing its emotional fingerprint (see Figure 17).

Moving on to the second most emotionally peculiar translation, Capatti’s, there are here seven outliers: two in excess (divertimento, sconforto) and five in dearth (ammirazione, disperazione, gelosia, gratitudine, solitudine). Among these, the most remarkable is the frequent use of sconforto (discouragement), a word which is barely used by all other translators (Pozzo, Reali, Lamberti, and D’Ezio use it just once, Déttore, Pareschi, and Sacchini twice, Gallenzi three times), or never at all (anonymous, Spaventa Filippi), but which Capatti repeats 11 times. The higher frequency of such word is to be explained in several ways. A couple of occurrences, for example, are the result of the nominalization of adjectives:

All I see has made me thankful, not despondent.43

Tutto ciò che vedo mi ha fatto provare gratitudine e non sconforto.⁴⁴

the most troubled and dreary look.⁴⁵

uno sguardo pieno di ansia e sconforto.⁴⁶

In this latter case, two pre-modifiers (the past-participle ‘troubled’, and the adjective ‘dreary’) are replaced by post-modifying nouns (ansia e sconforto). Capatti uses sconforto also when translating ‘dejection’ (3 occurrences), usually in the expression ‘to sink into dejection’ or simply ‘to sink’ (1), where sconforto clearly constitutes an over-interpreting addition:

my heart again sank47

il mio cuore sprofondò nuovamente nello sconforto.⁴⁸

[I] sank into inevitable dejection⁴⁹

sprofondavo nello sconforto⁵⁰

sank with dejection⁵¹

sprofondato nello sconforto.⁵²

The remaining occurrences of sconforto variously translate distress (2), depression (1), and damp (2).

After the anonymous translator’s and Capatti’s, third in order of peculiarity is Pozzo’s translation, with three extreme outliers, two of which are in excess (vergogna and delizia) and one in dearth (rabbia). The rest of the translations have only a couple of extreme outliers each, or none at all — which points to a substantial uniformity in the use of emotion-nouns across the Italian translations. Among the extreme outliers, Reali’s repetitive use of the word dubbio (doubt, 77 occurrences) is particularly striking as it concerns a highly variable word (the anonymous translation and hers are in fact the only translations to have extreme outliers in highly variable distributions). Also, the increase in frequency of such a word in the other translations, which can be observed after hers was published, might be due to an influence she might have exerted on them by virtue not only of her skills as translator but also of her renowned publisher Mondadori (Gallenzi’s 1997 translation came out just a few months after Reali’s and was probably not affected at all): be that as it may, the frequency of the word dubbio in all subsequent translations is >40, whereas before 1996 it was always <40.

As a conclusion to this section, the emotional fingerprint of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (Figure 20) is a suggestive way to summarize what it feels like to read her novel in its original form rather than in translation.

Fig. 20 Emotional fingerprint of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre

Conclusion

Analysing emotions in fiction is a mammoth task. Novels play with emotions by definition — or else they would be non-fictional pieces of writing. Simply differentiating between what expresses an emotion and what does not is in itself problematic. Comparing patterns of emotional lexis in the original as well as in eleven translations is even harder.

The first challenge of this study was to define a methodology aimed at isolating a significant portion of emotionally relevant items in the source and target texts. This portion was defined as lexical labels expressing emotions, and falling into the category of singular and plural nouns.

The second challenge was to rank the relevance of such lexis in Jane Eyre as originally written by Charlotte Brontë, in English. In order to do that, it was not only the mere frequency of individual words that was considered, but — wherever possible — similar emotions were pooled together so as to account for the reading experience, regardless of subtle differentiations in the use of synonyms or near-synonyms (e.g., despair, desperation). It goes without saying that a close reading of all 78+ emotions would comprise an analysis of nearly every single sentence of the novel — which is why the focus was limited to pointing out a few outstanding cases: love, pain, pleasure, hope, fear, wish, and passion.

The third challenge was to compare the emotional lexis in the original with that of the translations. The first step in the comparison procedure was to analyse the frequency of emotion-nouns in the translations so as to assess their consistency — or lack thereof. The findings show a general homogeneity in the frequency of most emotion-nouns, with rimorso (remorse) ranking first for consistency and disperazione (despair), felicità (happiness), and orgoglio (pride) sticking out for greater relevance given their relatively high frequency. At the other end of the consistency spectrum, there are gioia (joy), dolore (pain), and paura (fear), the latter showing a most impressive level of variability among the translations. The focus was then shifted to the similarity in frequency between the Italian emotion-nouns and their corresponding English ones, revealing them to be substantially similar in most cases, with virtually identical frequency in emotion-nouns such as contempt and disprezzo, emotion and emozione, fury and furia, jealousy and gelosia, along with several more pairs. Exceptions to the many and substantial English-Italian equivalents are a handful of emotion-nouns whose differences are illustrated in Figure 16, with delight (delizia) and joy (gioia) being, respectively, the most under-represented and the most over-represented emotion-noun in the translations.

Finally, the emotional fingerprint of each translation was the ultimate challenge, as its goal is to summarize in one image the peculiarities of something as complex as the emotional dimension of different translations of the same text. To this purpose, the use of word clouds has proven to be effective.

There are still questions that remain to be answered. Among these, there is one which is not explicitly addressed by this transversal reading of the novel, but which the emotional fingerprints silently point to: besides the usual factors influencing translatorial outputs — such as time period, intended readership, ideology, or gender — what specifically accounts for the degrees of variability and idiosyncrasies in the representation of emotions? Surely it must be a reflection of the translators’ psyche, of their subjectivity as individuals, of their poetics as writers.

Works Cited

Edition and Translations of Jane Eyre

Brontë, Charlotte, Jane Eyre, ed. with an Introduction and Notes by Stevie Davies (London: Penguin 2006).

——, Jane Eyre o le memorie di un’istitutrice, 2 vols., trans. by anonymous (Milano: Fratelli Treves, 1904).

——, Jane Eyre, trans. by Giuliana Pozzo Galeazzi, with an Introduction by Oriana Palusci (Milano: Rizzoli, 1951, 1997).

——, trans. by Lia Spaventa Filippi, with an Introduction by Giuseppe Lombardo (Roma: Newton & Compton, 1956, 2002).

——, trans. by Ugo Dèttore, with an Introduction by Paolo Ruffilli (Milano: Garzanti, 1974, 1995).

——, trans. by Luisa Reali, with an Introduction by Franco Buffoni (Milano: Mondadori, 1996).

——, trans. by Alessandro Gallenzi (Milano: Frassinelli, 1997).

——, trans. by Luca Lamberti, with an Introduction by Carlo Pagetti (Torino: Einaudi, 2008).

——, trans. by Marianna D’Ezio (Firenze: Giunti Editore, 2011).

——, trans. by Bérénice Capatti (Milano: Rizzoli, 2013).

——, trans. by Monica Pareschi (Milano: Neri Pozza, 2014).

——, trans. by Stella Sacchini, with an Afterword by Remo Ceserani (Milano: Feltrinelli, 2014).

Other Sources

Alexander, Christine, The Early Writings of Charlotte Brontë (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983).

Damasio, Antonio, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain (London: Picador, 1994).

Evans, Dylan, Emotion: The Science of Sentiment (Oxford: Oxford University Press: 2001).

Gordon, Lyndall, Charlotte Brontë: A Passionate Life (London: Vintage, 1994).

Griffiths, Paul E., What Emotions Really Are: The Problem of Psychological Categories (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1997).

Hogan, Patrick C., ‘Affect Studies’, in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature (USA: Oxford University Press, 2016), http://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.105

Levorato, Maria Chiara, Le emozioni della lettura (Bologna: il Mulino, 2000).

Stoneman, Patsy, Brontë Transformations: The Cultural Dissemination of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights (London: Prentice Hall/Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1996).

Tan, Ed S., ‘Emotion, Art and the Humanities’, in Handbook of Emotions, 2nd edn, ed. by Michael Lewis and Jeannette M. Haviland-Jones (New York and London: Guilford Press, 2000), pp. 116–34.

Vinaya, ‘Five Reasons Why Jane Eyre Would Never Be A Bestseller in Our Times’ (December 2010), https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/135963844?book_show_action=true&from-review_page=1

WordClouds.com (Vianen: Zygomatic, 2003–2020), https://www.wordclouds.com/

Wehrs, Donald R. and Thomas Blake (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Affect Studies and Textual Criticism (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63303-9

Appendices

1. English-Italian emotion-nouns.
2. Italian emotion-noun frequency and z-scores.

Appendix 1: English-Italian Emotion Nouns53

English	Italian	Eng. freq.	It. mean freq.	It. SD	Eng. z-score
affection	affetto	30	40.4	5.0	–2.092
agitation	agitazione	3	7.4	3.7	–1.193
agony	agonia	11	1.5	1.4	6.626
bitterness	amarezza	2	9.9	2.8	–2.815
admiration	ammirazione	10	13.5	1.8	–1.967
love	amore	81	88.0	8.7	–0.805
anguish/distress	angoscia	15	20.1	5.6	–0.910
anxiety	ansia	8	10.7	7.2	–0.377
wrath/choler	collera	5	10.8	8.2	–0.709
stirring emotion	commozione	0	1.1	1.2	–0.919
compassion	compassione	3	10.4	4.1	–1.798
courage	coraggio	22	37.0	6.3	–2.372
curiosity	curiosità	12	14.7	2.1	–1.312
delight	delizia	27	3.1	2.9	8.176
disappointment	delusione	12	10.6	1.7	0.817
desire/wish54	desiderio/voglia	60	61.7	5.1	–0.335
disgust	disgusto	10	8.6	2.8	0.508
despair/desperation	disperazione	20	23.2	2.9	–1.090
contempt/scorn	disprezzo	11	11.9	1.9	–0.486
fun	divertimento	2	4.9	2.5	–1.153
pain/grief	dolore	50	39.8	13.6	0.752
doubt	dubbio	52	48.7	13.0	0.255
excitement/excitation	eccitamento/eccitazione	19	7.1	3.1	3.786
emotion	emozione	17	17.8	5.7	–0.142
happiness	felicità	23	37.0	3.1	–4.477
fury	furia	14	13.6	5.4	0.074
jealousy	gelosia	9	8.6	1.1	0.372
joy	gioia	21	57.6	13.0	–2.820
enjoyment	godimento	13	6.3	2.9	2.304
gratitude	gratitudine	11	12.5	3.2	–0.473
impatience	impazienza	8	12.0	2.6	–1.549
misery	infelicità	8	2.8	1.9	2.691
ire	ira	6	6.0	3.6	0.000
melancholy	malinconia	10	7.7	2.9	0.802
wonder	meraviglia	11	6.2	3.3	1.458
hate	odio	7	12.9	2.8	–2.102
pride	orgoglio	24	20.4	3.2	1.124
horror	orrore	13	11.5	3.7	0.400
passion	passione	30	27.6	5.5	0.433
fear	paura	47	81.2	20.0	–1.711
pity	pena	23	29.3	10.8	–0.584
pleasure	piacere	78	86.8	8.3	–1.066
mercy	pietà	11	25.3	7.7	–1.853
concern	preoccupazione	6	7.7	3.2	–0.537
anger/rage	rabbia	10	11.9	5.4	–0.353
remorse	rimorso	11	11.8	0.8	–1.014
regret	rimpianto	7	7.6	1.6	–0.380
discouragement	sconforto	0	2.4	3.1	–0.766
sympathy	simpatia	22	15.5	8.6	0.760
satisfaction	soddisfazione	6	12.6	3.8	–1.747
suffering/sorrow	sofferenza	38	27.1	8.8	1.237
solitude/loneliness	solitudine	31	31.3	5.5	–0.055
relief	sollievo	11	10.2	4.3	0.185
surprise	sorpresa	17	12.1	4.3	1.152
hope	speranza	57	60.1	4.6	–0.670
tenderness	tenerezza	6	13.4	4.5	–1.635
terror	terrore	17	17.3	6.1	–0.049
dread	timore	12	19.4	7.4	–1.005
torment	tormento	2	10.0	5.3	–1.512
sadness	tristezza	6	17.0	4.8	–2.277
shame	vergogna	16	16.1	3.3	–0.030

Appendix 2: Italian Emotion-Noun Frequency and Z-Scores55

	Anonymous		Pozzo		Spaventa		Dèttore		Reali		Gallenzi		Lamberti		D’Ezio		Capatti		Pareschi		Sacchini
	z-score	freq.	z-score	freq.	z-score	freq.	z-score	freq.	z-score	freq.	z-score	freq.	z-score	freq.	z-score	freq.	z-score	freq.	z-score	freq.	z-score	freq.
affetto	-3.701	22	-0.483	38	-1.690	32	0.724	44	1.529	48	0.121	41	0.121	41	-1.489	33	-0.080	40	0.724	44	0.523	43
agitazione	0.976	11	-0.108	7	0.705	10	-1.464	2	-0.922	4	2.061	15	0.434	9	0.163	8	-0.651	5	0.434	9	-0.651	5
agonia	3.836	7	0.349	2	0.349	2	-0.349	1	-0.349	1	-0.349	1	0.349	2	2.441	5	-1.046	0	-0.349	1	-1.046	0
amarezza	-2.102	4	1.104	13	0.392	11	-0.677	8	0.036	10	-1.390	6	0.392	11	-0.677	8	-1.390	6	1.461	14	0.748	12
ammirazione	-0.281	13	0.843	15	0.281	14	0.281	14	-0.281	13	0.843	15	0.281	14	0.843	15	-2.529	9	-0.281	13	-0.281	13
amore	-0.690	82	-0.230	86	1.035	97	-0.345	85	1.035	97	-1.496	75	1.265	99	0.345	91	-1.150	78	-1.035	79	0.575	93
angoscia	-2.515	6	-0.731	16	0.161	21	1.944	31	-0.375	18	0.339	22	-0.018	20	-1.088	14	-1.445	12	0.161	21	1.052	26
ansia	-1.075	3	-0.377	8	-1.214	2	0.879	17	1.996	25	0.042	11	-1.075	3	-0.656	6	0.879	17	0.042	11	-0.516	7
collera	2.838	34	1.981	27	0.147	12	0.269	13	1.248	21	-1.076	2	0.147	12	-0.587	6	-1.199	1	-0.587	6	-0.342	8
commozione	9.104	12	0.752	2	0.752	2	1.587	3	0.752	2	-0.919	0	0.752	2	-0.919	0	-0.919	0	-0.919	0	-0.919	0
compassione	0.146	11	0.632	13	-0.826	7	-0.583	8	-1.069	6	-0.826	7	0.146	11	0.875	14	1.118	15	1.604	17	-1.069	6
coraggio	-1.581	27	-0.316	35	-0.316	35	-1.107	30	0.316	39	2.055	50	0.316	39	0.000	37	-0.474	34	-1.423	28	0.949	43
curiosità	-2.284	10	0.146	15	1.604	18	-0.340	14	0.146	15	-0.340	14	-0.340	14	-0.340	14	-1.798	11	-0.340	14	1.604	18
delizia	1.334	7	2.018	9	0.992	6	-0.376	2	-0.718	1	-1.061	0	0.308	4	-0.718	1	-1.061	0	0.650	5	-0.034	3
delusione	-0.934	9	0.817	12	-0.934	9	1.401	13	1.401	13	-0.350	10	-1.518	8	-0.350	10	0.234	11	0.234	11	-0.934	9
desiderio/voglia	-4.273	40	-1.319	55	0.059	62	-0.138	61	0.847	66	-1.319	55	-0.926	57	1.437	69	-0.335	60	1.241	68	0.453	64
disgusto	-1.306	5	0.871	11	-1.306	5	-0.218	8	0.871	11	0.871	11	-1.306	5	0.145	9	1.233	12	-1.306	5	0.145	9
disperazione	-2.452	16	-0.068	23	0.954	26	0.272	24	-0.068	23	-0.068	23	0.954	26	-0.068	23	-2.452	16	-0.409	22	0.954	26
disprezzo	-0.486	11	-1.025	10	0.054	12	-1.025	10	-0.486	11	-1.025	10	1.673	15	0.054	12	-0.486	11	1.133	14	1.133	14
divertimento	-1.551	1	-1.551	1	-0.358	4	0.040	5	0.437	6	0.040	5	0.040	5	-0.358	4	2.426	11	-0.358	4	-0.358	4
dolore	2.741	77	1.267	57	-0.648	31	-1.312	22	-0.354	35	0.309	44	-0.427	34	1.857	65	-0.722	30	0.678	49	-0.648	31
dubbio	-2.138	21	-0.749	39	-0.749	39	-0.903	37	2.185	77	-0.980	36	-0.594	41	0.255	52	0.795	59	0.332	53	0.409	54
eccitamento/eccitazione	-0.986	4	0.923	10	0.923	10	1.559	12	-0.350	6	0.286	8	0.286	8	-1.305	3	-0.350	6	-1.623	2	-0.350	6
emozione	-0.318	16	-1.026	12	-0.318	16	0.389	20	1.627	27	-1.911	7	0.035	18	0.212	19	-0.495	15	0.743	22	0.743	22
felicità	0.320	38	0.959	40	-0.959	34	-0.320	36	0.959	40	0.640	39	-0.640	35	0.959	40	-0.959	34	-1.599	32	0.959	40
furia	-1.218	7	-0.295	12	-0.295	12	-0.111	13	-0.480	11	-0.664	10	-0.295	12	0.812	18	-1.402	6	2.288	26	0.443	16
gelosia	0.372	9	0.372	9	1.302	10	0.372	9	0.372	9	-0.558	8	0.372	9	0.372	9	-2.419	6	0.372	9	-0.558	8
gioia	0.031	58	-0.431	52	0.339	62	0.647	66	1.880	82	0.493	64	0.570	65	-1.202	42	-1.279	41	-1.048	44	0.031	58
godimento	1.272	10	-0.103	6	1.272	10	0.929	9	-1.135	3	-0.103	6	1.272	10	0.241	7	-1.823	1	-0.447	5	-0.103	6
gratitudine	-0.473	11	0.158	13	0.473	14	-0.158	12	1.419	17	-0.473	11	0.473	14	0.473	14	-2.365	5	0.473	14	-0.473	11
impazienza	-0.775	10	0.000	12	0.387	13	0.000	12	-1.162	9	0.000	12	0.387	13	0.775	14	1.936	17	-0.775	10	-1.549	8
infelicità	-1.449	0	-1.449	0	1.139	5	-0.414	2	-1.449	0	0.621	4	1.139	5	0.104	3	-0.414	2	1.139	5	-0.414	2
ira	-1.405	1	1.124	10	0.562	8	1.124	10	-1.686	0	-0.843	3	0.000	6	-1.124	2	0.000	6	1.124	10	-0.281	5
malinconia	-2.684	0	1.150	11	0.453	9	0.105	8	-0.244	7	-1.638	3	-0.244	7	-0.592	6	-1.289	4	1.150	11	1.150	11
meraviglia	2.976	16	1.458	11	-0.061	6	0.547	8	-0.972	3	-1.579	1	-0.668	4	0.547	8	-0.364	5	-0.364	5	1.458	11
odio	-0.677	11	0.036	13	-0.677	11	0.036	13	-0.677	11	1.817	18	-1.390	9	1.461	17	-0.677	11	-0.321	12	0.392	14
orgoglio	-0.125	20	-1.061	17	0.499	22	1.436	25	1.748	26	-0.437	19	-0.125	20	-0.437	19	0.187	21	-0.437	19	-1.373	16
orrore	-0.934	8	-0.400	10	-0.400	10	0.400	13	2.000	19	-0.400	10	-1.200	7	-1.200	7	-0.133	11	0.133	12	1.200	16
passione	-0.469	25	-0.289	26	-0.108	27	1.155	34	0.433	30	0.794	32	0.072	28	-1.371	20	-1.732	18	1.335	35	-0.289	26
paura	-1.460	52	-0.760	66	-0.310	75	-0.210	77	-0.310	75	1.290	107	-0.410	73	1.891	119	-0.660	68	-1.310	55	0.790	97
pena	-0.120	28	-0.491	24	0.250	32	1.548	46	0.343	33	-0.120	28	0.436	34	-1.603	12	-0.676	22	-1.047	18	1.362	44
piacere	-0.218	85	-0.097	86	1.356	98	-0.945	79	-0.097	86	-0.218	85	0.630	92	1.114	96	0.751	93	-0.581	82	-1.914	71
pietà	-1.723	12	-1.205	16	0.479	29	0.350	28	0.091	26	0.739	31	-0.168	24	1.905	40	-1.335	15	-1.075	17	0.220	27
preoccupazione	-2.434	0	0.727	10	-0.853	5	-0.221	7	0.411	9	-1.169	4	-0.853	5	-0.221	7	-0.853	5	1.359	12	1.675	13
rabbia	-1.096	6	-2.024	1	-0.353	10	-0.910	7	0.019	12	1.504	20	0.204	13	0.947	17	0.761	16	0.204	13	-0.353	10
rimorso	1.521	13	1.521	13	-1.014	11	0.254	12	-1.014	11	0.254	12	-1.014	11	0.254	12	-1.014	11	1.521	13	0.254	12
rimpianto	-4.184	1	-1.014	6	-0.380	7	-0.380	7	1.521	10	0.254	8	-0.380	7	0.254	8	-1.648	5	0.254	8	1.521	10
sconforto	-0.766	0	-0.447	1	-0.766	0	-0.128	2	-0.447	1	0.191	3	-0.447	1	-0.447	1	2.744	11	-0.128	2	-0.128	2
simpatia	0.292	18	1.461	28	1.111	25	0.994	24	0.058	16	-0.877	8	0.643	21	-1.461	3	-0.877	8	-0.526	11	-0.526	11
soddisfazione	-1.483	7	0.371	14	1.430	18	-0.159	12	0.371	14	-1.483	7	1.694	19	-0.688	10	-0.159	12	-0.424	11	-0.953	9
sofferenza	0.556	32	0.329	30	-0.125	26	-1.033	18	1.577	41	-1.033	18	-0.125	26	-0.011	27	1.804	43	-0.806	20	-0.579	22
solitudine	-1.691	22	0.673	35	-0.055	31	0.309	33	1.219	38	0.127	32	0.127	32	0.127	32	-2.419	18	-0.782	27	0.673	35
sollievo	0.649	13	0.649	13	-1.205	5	0.649	13	-0.973	6	-0.742	7	-1.205	5	0.881	14	-0.278	9	0.649	13	1.576	17
sorpresa	-2.374	2	-1.199	7	1.622	19	0.212	13	-1.199	7	-0.024	12	1.387	18	-0.729	9	-0.024	12	-0.729	9	0.682	15
speranza	-0.886	56	1.058	65	-0.238	59	-0.886	56	1.058	65	0.410	62	-0.454	58	1.490	67	-1.750	52	-0.454	58	-0.238	59
tenerezza	-0.309	12	0.574	16	0.574	16	0.353	15	1.458	20	-0.972	9	0.574	16	-1.635	6	-1.414	7	0.133	14	0.353	15
terrore	-0.708	13	-1.037	11	0.280	19	1.103	24	0.280	19	-0.708	13	-0.379	15	-0.872	12	-0.872	12	2.091	30	0.115	18
timore	0.081	20	1.032	27	-0.054	19	-0.733	14	0.624	24	1.167	28	0.353	22	-1.955	5	-1.140	11	0.624	24	0.081	20
tormento	-1.323	3	-1.134	4	-0.189	9	-1.134	4	-0.378	8	1.890	20	0.000	10	0.189	11	-0.567	7	1.512	18	-0.189	9
tristezza	1.035	22	-0.828	13	1.035	22	0.621	20	0.414	19	1.035	22	1.035	22	-0.621	14	-1.863	8	-0.828	13	0.000	17
vergogna	2.957	26	2.061	23	-0.030	16	1.165	20	-0.030	16	-0.329	15	-0.329	15	-0.329	15	-1.225	12	-1.225	12	0.269	17

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