Stamler Lili

y68uwo

17 April 2016

Colours And Layers: Atmosphere Analysis Of Victorian Short Stories Based

On My Own Concerns And Statistics Summoned By Myself

Stamler Lili
Balogh Eszter Edit
Literary Analysis 1
17 April 2016

Hereby I certify that the essay conforms to the international copyrights

and plagiarism rules and regulations.

Stamler 1.

Stamler Lili

y68uwo

17 April 2016

Like thoroughly planned paintings, written literary works also

consist of many related layers, let them be thin or thick, visible or hidden
under the rosy cheeks of a seemingly cheerful young woman. Each layer
tells an other story, reveals something new about the secrets of the
construction itself. My aim this time is to examine the layer of colours in
some short stories, which is quite an unexplored area, therefore I am
hoping to discover some valuable treasures behind the surface. I believe
that the different fields of arts have a lot in common when it comes to
analysing, therefore I am going to re-construct these literary works as
paintings or waves of colourful scales to define and describe them from a
new angle and to add new dimensions to the well-known and commonly
consulted ones.
To begin with I would like to share the way I see these eight short
stories. If you recall the image of an endless cylindrical skyscraper (Figure
1), you will see how it works. It has three dimensions; you can go up and
down the stocks maybe by using the elevator (V in Figure 1), horizontal by
walking through the floors of the level in question (T in Figure 1) or if you,
poor soul are a window cleaner, you can get to any point of the surface but
only the surface (A in Figure 1). Now what I am just writing about may
sound familiar to the students of the Arts Institute because in the field of
visual arts this is the way of describing colours. Its name is COLOROID
Colour System, created by a most famous Hungarian artist and university
teacher, namely Prof. Antal Nemcsics. (Nemcsics) Many further information
and of course the graphic representations of what I have described in the
lines above can be obtained from his publications. Once you have
Stamler 2.

Stamler Lili

y68uwo

17 April 2016

understood the system you will be able to follow the flow of

my thoughts.

1. (Nemcsics
2: Figure 1)

On the surface, where our imaginary window cleaner works,

the purest shades of colours can be found. They do not

contain black or white. When horizontally moving towards the core of the
building, colours will contain more and more of the dark and light shades.
If you move upwards in the inside, you will see that the shades turn lighter
and if downwards, darker shades repress the brightness of pure colours. In
general the structure contains all the colours and their shades. In case of a
literary work -or at least in my imagination- there are some groups or
types of colours and shades that appear more frequently than the others.
As far as I am concerned Nemcsicss complex idea of the colour system
could also be applied to other areas of study such as literature. In the first
place I had to isolate the colourful parts of the short stories that I wished
to analyse. For this I enlisted the primary colours which I did quite
arbitrarily. Thus the six main categories consist of red, green, blue, yellow,
and the additional white and black which as we all know are not even
colours. According to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe these two are saturated
and non-saturated, so basically light and dark shades.
In each category I also specified the names of colours occurring in the
short stories, for example there is group reds, which contains the colours
red, purple, rose, orange, ruby, pink, violet and the word blood as it is
also a significant shade of red while being a liquid at the same time. It was
maybe one of the most important part of my work. Find the Excess table

Stamler 3.

Stamler Lili

y68uwo

17 April 2016

attached. Statistics only confirmed the idea of the colourful

stories which I am planning to visualise later on during my
studies because it could easily provide the base of a longer
2.
(Nemcsics
2: Figure 2)

study. I can already imagine the colour-monster of each story.

Having named the main categories and the names of colours all I had to
do was searching the previously enlisted colours in the stories and set up a
table of it. You can see in the table attached that in some cases
determining the anomalies was easy to carry out, like in case of the group
blues and greens. I must add that Stevensons The Strange Case of Dr
Jekyll and Mr Hyde was way longer than any other stories I put under
examination, yet I decided not to take length into consideration, regarding
that this time I only wanted to determine the primary colours of the
writings. Minor changes can always be made later.
Let me again concentrate on the so called Coloroids of the short stories.
Since there are some more frequently appearing colours and shades in
each short story, I would indicate them on the Coloroid with the colours
they represent, while shades and groups of colours not appearing in the
story would remain transparent. In the end of the process each story
would have a coloured system visually displaying the overall amount and
quantity of colours used in them.
The most important advantage of this method is that the brightness,
darkness and lightness of the stories can be spectacularly available to
consultation. At this point I have to mention one of my favourite
inspirations, David MacCandless. He himself states on his website that A

Stamler 4.

Stamler Lili

y68uwo

17 April 2016

passion of mine is visualizing information facts, data, ideas, subjects,

issues,

statistics,

questions

all

with

the

minimum

of

words.

(MacCandless) His way of visualising is something really new and he also

works with the related layers of different subjects such as books and films.
For representation he uses scales, symbols, slides and figures amongst
many, which differ from the widespread traditional depicting methods like
drawings, paintings and photographs. In his explicit way he is interested
in how designed information can help us understand the world [] and
reveal the hidden connections, patterns and stories underneath. Or, failing
that, it can just look cool! (MacCandless)
Looking at the table attached the reader can easily tell that I already
cheated when I decided to colour the rubrics that contain the highest
numbers. Group blacks seemingly takes the lead, although its leading
role derives from the unfortunate fact that using the search engine I could
not detect the words light simply because of the several meanings it has.
Manual searching would have been the obvious solution, however I
postponed it indefinitely and for now relied only on my personal impacts.
After all group blacks dominates only because of its vantage point; the
situation is not at all as unfavourable (meaning dark) as it seems to be at
first sight.
The darkest short story, although not being the longest of them all, turned
out to be Hoffmanns The Sandman. The word dark appears seventeen
times in it, while in Stevensons The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr.
Hyde there is only fifteen. Dark has quite a wide range of usage. Most

Stamler 5.

Stamler Lili

y68uwo

17 April 2016

commonly it stands before a noun or darkens a primary colour and

sometimes in its own functions as a marker of the atmosphere.
As an unexpected example, I would like to mention Perkins The Yellow
Wallpaper, which contains black only once and dark also once. I see
her in those dark grape arbors and in the next paragraph she hides
under the blackberry vines (Perkins 8), referring to the woman in the attic
that gets out in the daytime (Perkins 8). Interestingly although the entire
atmosphere of The Yellow Wallpaper felt bright and shiny, before the
process of counting and searching I thought that the word dark will
definitely appear in each short story because of the mentioned wide range
of usage. Nothing is more satisfying than a justified theory. The most
frequently occurring colour in Perkins short story is obviously yellow,
which is even used as A yellow smell. (Perkins 8), but mainly to describe
the wallpaper in the attic. In view of the above the Coloroid of Perkins
short story should be composed of warm and light colours, predominantly
of the shades of yellow, also consisting orange and pale greens. The
symbolic meanings of colours could serve as a basis for an other essay,
but this time I am concentrating on the surfaces.
Even though I expected to see more of them, grey or the American English
form, gray is one of the least popular words to be used. From metal
shades, namely gold, bronze and silver Poes The Fall of The House of
Usher and Hawthornes Rappaccinis Daughter contain more than the
others. In Rappaccinis Daughter gold mainly means coins; a scanty
supply of gold ducats (Hawthorne 1), and silver appears as a material;

Stamler 6.

Stamler Lili

y68uwo

17 April 2016

silver phial (Hawthorne 15). Banners yellow, glorious, golden,/ (Poe

13), a palace of gold (Poe 22)-these show how Poe uses silver and gold
as colours.
White is an exceptional example of the different appearances. For
instance, in Stevensons story white probably describes both the doctors
face complexion and the blinding brightness of his intentions to kill the
man in question; every time he looked at my prisoner, I saw that
Sawbones turn sick and white with the desire to kill him. (Stevenson 7).
This was a hearty, healthy, dapper, red-faced gentleman, with a shock of
hair prematurely white, and a boisterous and decided manner.; here white
means the greyish shade of Dr Lanyons hair and throughout the story
white is used to illustrate hair colours, the chemicals Dr Jekyll used to
separate his two personalities and pale faces white of shock. If I have to
name a colour that fits the story I will definitely say a dark one in spite of
all the whiteness of the faces.
I am analysing colours, therefore I can not forget about Virginia Woolf. Not
that the statistics surprised me in any way. Kew Gardens is as colourful
as a spring garden. Greens, reds, blues, yellows, whites and even the
darker shades make an appearance and disappear and come up again
causing a dancing mass of vibrant spots. The whole story, its figures and
the episodal fragments harmonise with the shiny rushing colours. Kew
Gardens has the most colourful Coloroid of the examined stories, and
shades are not only on the surface but also in the inside.

Stamler 7.

Stamler Lili

y68uwo

17 April 2016

Meanwhile Woolfs The Mark on The Wall has quite a dark-themed

setting. The mark itself is black and the other colours are none the lighter.
What surprised me this time was that group reds has an outstanding
amount of representatives in the story, which means its primary colour
must be red. and I thought of the cavalcade of red knights riding up the
side of the black rock (Woolf 1), lips like red carnations (Woolf 1), with
diamond-cut red eyes (Woolf 4) are the examples. The storys Coloroid
might seem dark at first sight but when examining, lonely spots of bright
colours can be found scattered all over the surface so that the main
picture has a magical impact instead of a bloody hell.
Since I have been going through the coloured layers of short stories
and in the beginnings I stated that my swift journey will be successful if I
reach undiscovered gems somewhere between the layers, I can fly my
flag. The layer of colours still has uncharted territories with exciting hidden
truths and lies and sleeping monsters that are only waiting for an
enthusiastic keyboard and the hands to awaken them one day.

Stamler 8.

Stamler Lili

y68uwo

17 April 2016

Works cited:
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. "Rappaccini's Daughter." Rutgers University Newark. Web. 20 Apr. 2016.
Hoffmann, E. T.A. "The Sandman." The Sandman. Web. 20 Apr. 2016.
Hunt, Violet. "The Prayer." Project Gutenberg Australia. Aug. 2006. Web. 20
Apr. 2016.
MacCandless, David. "Ideas, Issues, Knowledge, Data - Visualized!"
Information Is Beautiful. Web. 18 Apr. 2016.
Nemcsics, Antal, Prof. Coloroid Colour System. 2004. MS ARC-030520-A.
Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Budapest.
Perkins, Charlotte. "The Yellow Wall-Paper - National Library of Medicine."
U.S. National Library of Medicine. May-June 2006. Web. 20 Apr. 2016.
Poe, Edgar Allan. "The Fall of The House of Usher." The Project Gutenberg.
15 Dec. 2010. Web. 20 Apr. 2016.
Stevenson, R. L. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. New York:
Flare, 1975. Print.
Woolf, Virginia. Kew Gardens. London: Hogarth, 1927. Print.
Woolf, Virginia. The Mark on the Wall. Richmond: Hogarth, 1919. Print.

Stamler 9.