Exploring female “aphasia” in Frankenstein through corpus-based analysis: a gender performativity perspective

Traditional literary criticism, grounded in close reading, privileges theoretical interpretation but often lacks empirical substantiation, including in the study of gender representation. Corpus-based methods, by contrast, provide quantitative evidence without fully explaining their discursive effects of linguistic patterns. To bridge these limitations, this study integrates corpus stylistics, dependency grammar, and Butler's theory of gender performativity to examine female ‘aphasia’ (i.e., constrained and performatively produced speech) in Frankenstein , using a customized nineteenth-century reference corpus (5,116,942 tokens) processed with Python spaCy and AntConc 4.3.1. Using the three-layer discursive framework developed in this study, the analysis reveals that female “aphasia” is structured through recurrent linguistic patterns: at the macro level (lexical context), keywords embed women within a male first-person narrative marked by negative emotions; at the meso level (collective dependency constructions), dependency constructions assign women passive object roles while positioning men as agentive subjects; and at the micro level (character-specific dependency relations), character analysis shows individual portrayals align with the collective portrait yet bear minor differences. Female aphasia is therefore discursively produced rather than mere silence. By operationalizing Butler's theory of gender performativity through corpus-based method, this study provides an empirically grounded account of how gendered subject positions are linguistically enacted and sustained in literary discourse. Beyond Frankenstein , the proposed framework offers a methodological model for examining the discursive construction of marginalized voices and contributes to broader discussions of gender inequality and representational justice.