3.2.1 Good Is Light and Bad Is Dark

Metaphor researchers consensually discuss positive emotions in terms of ‘light’ and negative emotions in terms of ‘dark’, leading to the cross-domain mappings good is light (i.e., ‘a bright day’) and bad is dark (i.e., ‘dark thoughts’) (Arnheim, Reference Arnheim1969; Lakoff and Johnson, Reference Lakoff and Johnson1980: 50–53; Lakoff et al., Reference Lakoff, Espenson and Schwartz1991: 190; Meier and Robinson, Reference Meier and Robinson2005; Forceville and Renckens, Reference Forceville and Renckens2013). According to Arnheim (Reference Arnheim1969: 313), these two associations ‘go as far back as the history of man’, and the affective link and contrast between light and darkness is due to the symbolic representation of good and evil. The texts included in this research feature multiple examples of colour tones as part of the surroundings that illustrate emotions. Most examples can be divided into two categories: light and dark. Therefore, the master metaphor that emerges is emotion is colour tone, and since the colour tones are part of the surroundings, this mapping falls under the master metaphor of PF emotion is surroundings (see Pager-McClymont, Reference Pager-McClymont, Pöhls and Utudji2021b: 269–274).

Firstly, the mapping bad is dark is prevalent. An example of this can be observed in Act II Scene II of Macbeth (Shakespeare, Reference Shakespeare1606/2014: 34–35):

This scene is Lennox’s description of the night King Duncan was murdered by Macbeth. The audience knows the murder occurred, but Lennox does not. The three criteria of PF according to Pager-McClymont’s definition are present: Lennox is the animated entity, and he expresses his anguish and worry over events of the nights through negative terms such as ‘terrible’, ‘woeful’ or ‘lamentings’. This negative feeling is reflected by the dark surroundings (i.e., ‘the night has been unruly’ or ‘obscure bird’). Lennox’s bad feeling of anguish is the target domain, and the dark atmosphere of the scene is the source domain, thus providing the metaphor bad is dark. In this instance, the opaque dark tone of the surroundings is the most salient characteristic of the source domain mapped onto the anguish expressed by Lennox (the target domain). This cross-domain mapping builds ambience (Stockwell, Reference Stockwell, Stockwell and Whiteley2014: 365) and reinforces the suspense already present in the scene due to the dramatic irony or ‘suspense paradox’ (Carroll, Reference Carroll, Vorderer, Wulff and Friedrichsen1996: 147–150) of Lennox not knowing of Duncan’s murder whilst the audience is aware of it. Indeed, suspense relies on a level of uncertainty in a scene due to characters facing conflicting situations, and the tension of the suspense only lifts when a denouement occurs (Iwata, Reference 52Iwata2009: 253; see also Carroll, Reference Carroll, Vorderer, Wulff and Friedrichsen1996). In the case of Macbeth, this occurs when the truth about King Duncan’s murder is revealed.

Secondly, the mapping good is light is equally prevalent as bad is dark. For instance, in chapter 11 of Jane Eyre (Brontë, Reference Brontë1847/2007), Jane describes her first morning at Thornhill:

The three criteria in Pager-McClymont’s model of PF are present: Jane is the animated entity represented by the personal pronoun ‘I’. Her feelings about Thornhill are explicitly positive (‘gay’, ‘my spirit rose’, ‘fairer’, ‘pleasures’), as are the surroundings (‘bright little place’, ‘sun shone’, ‘window’). In fact, the metaphor ‘my spirit rose up’ is in itself enclosed in the orientational metaphor good is up (Lakoff and Johnson Reference Lakoff and Johnson1980: 10–11) to fully convey Jane’s positive emotions. In addition to this metaphor, the use of PF projects Jane’s feelings onto the ‘bright’ surroundings. In this instance Jane’s positive emotions are the target domain and the light present in the scene through the sunshine and windows is the source domain, thus generating the cross-domain mapping good is light. The passage describes Jane’s first impression of Thornhill, and this is particularly interesting, as so far in the narrative Jane has had mostly negative experiences in her life, such as living with the Reeds (her aunt and cousins) who tormented her, or struggling at Lowood charity school. However, she describes the room at Thornhill positively, thus creating a contrast with her past experiences. Indeed, a direct comparison is drawn by Jane herself between Thornhill and Lowood: ‘unlike the bare planks and stained plaster of Lowood’ or ‘fairer era of life was beginning for me’ (our emphasis). This contrast in perception of surroundings foreshadows the rest of the plot, as eventually Jane and Mr Rochester will marry and live in Thornhill. Therefore, the use of PF with the mapping good is light signposts to readers how special Thornhill is in the development of the story.

The cross-domain mappings of bad is dark and good is light are also present in The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (Stevenson, Reference Stevenson1886/2018), along with another colour metaphor: discomfort is brown (see Pager-McClymont, Reference Pager-McClymont, Pöhls and Utudji2021b: 271). The novel features a man with a split personality: Dr Jekyll, an academic, and Mr Hyde, his evil personality. As discussed, Arnheim (Reference Arnheim1969) suggests that the concept of light is associated with the concept of good, whereas the concept of dark is associated with evil. This aspect of the conceptual metaphors bad is dark and good is light is salient to the characters of Jekyll and Hyde. Indeed, the first description of both characters occurs in chapter 2 (Stevenson, Reference Stevenson1886/2018, our emphasis), in which Mr Utterson states: ‘‘this Master Hyde, if he were studied,’ thought he, ‘must have secrets of his own; black secrets, by the look of him; secrets compared to which poor Jekyll’s worst would be like sunshine’’. The colour black (darkest colour tone possible) is associated with Hyde and the notion of light through ‘sunshine’ is associated with Jekyll, who is portrayed as a respectable and good character. Therefore, the conceptual metaphors bad is dark and good is light are representative of the characters’ personalities and the contrast between the two, thus contributing to their characterisation (see also Alter et al., Reference Alter, Stern, Granot and Balcetis2016).

3.2.2 Discomfort Is Brown

In The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (Stevenson, Reference Stevenson1886/2018), good is light and bad is dark are not the only conceptual mappings between colours and emotions. Indeed, as the story progresses and the boundaries between Hyde and Jekyll’s personalities become blurred, the most prevalent colour present is brown, and it is often featured when other characters display emotions of anguish and discomfort. For instance, the passage further down is from chapter 10 and follows the Carew murder’s discovery committed by Hyde (Stevenson, Reference Stevenson1886/2018, our emphasis):

The three criteria of PF are present, as Mr Utterson is the animated entity and the lexical field of death (‘pall’, ‘wreath’, and ‘mournful’) hints at Hyde committing murder. Mr Utterson displays negative feelings of anguish or discomfort (‘embattled’, ‘lurid’, ‘strange’, and ‘nightmare’). The surroundings are mostly described through spatial deixis (‘Soho’, ‘street to street’, and ‘cab’) and through colour tones. Indeed, although the idea of ‘darkness’ is also present, brown is the colour used to describe the surroundings, not black: ‘chocolate-coloured’, ‘hues of twilight’, ‘rich, lurid brown’, and ‘muddy’. Moreover, the term ‘pall’ not only reminds readers of Hyde’s crime, but it also suggests decay that is typically of an earthy brown colour. Therefore, Mr Utterson’s feeling of discomfort is the target domain mirrored by the source domain of the surroundings’ brown tones, thus creating the cross-domain mapping discomfort is brown. In this example, the brown tones of the surroundings build ambience but are also character-building. Indeed, brown is the colour obtained when all the other colours are mixed together: when light colours are mixed, light brown is obtained, when dark colours are mixed, dark brown or near-black colour is created (Edwards, Reference Edwards2004: 74). We argue that the prevalence of the colour brown in the passage following Hyde’s crime is not coincidental: it implicitly conveys Jekyll and Hyde’s mixed personalities.

Another example of discomfort is brown is implicitly featured when the potion created by Dr Lanyon and Jekyll to dissociate himself from Hyde changes colours (Stevenson, Reference Stevenson1886/2018, our emphasis):

The colours of the potion are first red, then purple, and finally green (‘first a reddish hue’, ‘changed to dark purple’, ‘watery green’). When those three colours are mixed, the colour obtained is brown (Edwards, Reference Edwards2004: 74). Dr Lanyon feels ill-at-ease with Jekyll’s behaviour and the creation of the potion (‘grew alarmed’, ‘something of an effort’). The colour brown – here the blend of all stages of the concoction – is a potential metonymy of the overall potion and its effect on the narrative. It is also the manifestation of Dr Lanyon’s discomfort, suggesting he realises the impact the potion will have on Jekyll and Hyde’s mixed personality. This example demonstrates that in literature, known conceptual metaphors such as good is light and bad is dark are present but so are more novel instances of conceptual metaphors like discomfort is brown. Each instance of metaphor associating emotions to colour concepts is an instance of PF and contributes to the process of building characters and ambience.

3.2.3 Uneasiness Is Grey

Another example of a colour metaphor is uneasiness is grey, which can be observed in chapter 9 of The Woman in Black (Hill, Reference Hill1983/2011):

The passage takes place after Arthur and his dog Spider spend a night at Eel Marsh House, where supernatural and eerie events had previously occurred. PF’s three criteria are present: Arthur is the first-person narrator (‘I’), and he explicitly expresses his feelings of uneasiness (‘I felt unrefreshed and nervous’) after the events of the night, seemingly depressed to have awoken at the house and realising the events were not a dream. The surroundings are described and the colour grey is dominant in this description (source domain), mirroring Arthur’s negative emotions (target domain). The cross-domain mapping uneasiness is grey can thus be generated. The most salient characteristic of the colour grey mapped onto Arthur’s feelings is the mix of black and white. Indeed, grey is a combination of those two tones, blurring them together, similarly to how the sea, the land, the sky, and the clouds are described in the previous extract. Additionally, the cloud and the drizzle, combined with the grey tones of the scene, could represent Arthur’s uncertainty of the events of the previous night. Indeed, his judgement can be considered as clouded or foggy because he is unsure of what happened or of what he saw or heard.

Furthermore, the idea of uncertainty and uneasiness being emphasised through grey tones is also present in chapter 1 of Dracula (Stoker, Reference Stoker1897/2013):

The three criteria of PF in the model are present: the narrator describing the scene is Jonathan Harker and he is on a journey with Slovak men (hence the ‘we’ or ‘us’). Harker’s feelings of uneasiness and uncertainty are expressed through negative language (i.e., ‘weird and solemn’, ‘grim’, ‘strange relief’, and ‘ghost-like’). The scene occurs at night and the surroundings are trees, mountains, and snow. Interestingly, the dominant colour of the surroundings is grey, as it is the only colour directly named (‘greyness’). There is also a mix of two tones suggesting the overall dominance of the colour grey: the ‘darkness’ (here likely meaning black because of the night) is mixed with the ‘ghost-like’ clouds and the snow, both of which are white, thus emphasising the grey colour in the extract. Harker is not sure of where he is heading and the surroundings do not allow him to see what is around him, leading him to feel uncertain and uneasy (target domain) about his journey with the Slovaks. The grey colour of the surroundings (source domain) mirrors his uncertainty, thus generating the cross-domain mapping of PF uneasiness is grey. This correspondence has for effect to not only convey explicitly Harker’s feelings but also to build the ambience of the scene and its suspense: Harker is uncertain of what will happen, and he is uncertain of what surrounds him; thus, one could say he is in a ‘grey area’ until he privy to the details of the journey. This last point is further developed in Section 3.4.

These analyses have demonstrated that PF as a conceptual metaphor maps the characters’ emotions onto the surroundings (such as colours). Some of these metaphors are known conceptual metaphors (i.e., good is light, bad is dark) and others are more novel, such as brown is discomfort or uneasiness is grey. However, one can wonder if the association between those emotions and the specific colours of brown and grey also exists in the psychological impact of colours on human emotions. The next section aims to discuss this point and draws parallels between the correspondences observed in our analysis of literature and data from empirical studies in psychology.

4.1.1 Corpora Selection

Focusing on a single word requires a large number of texts to allow salient conclusions to be drawn, resulting in the need for digital editions due to the vast amount of text being searched and analysed. Additionally, complete passages were needed to develop a clear understanding of the context, meaning, and usage of colourless. These criteria negated the use of popular corpora such as the British National Corpus and the Corpus of Contemporary American, as the co-text required for a thorough analysis is often not readily available. Initially, three corpora containing nineteenth- and twentieth- century prose texts were selected for study: CLiC 19th Century Reference (Mahlberg et al., Reference Mahlberg, Stockwell, Wiegand and Lentin2020);Footnote ² CLiC Dicken’s Novels (Mahlberg et al., Reference Mahlberg, Stockwell, Wiegand and Lentin2020); and HUM19UK.Footnote ³

The CLiC corpora website allows for simple searches on one or more terms for each of the corpora available within the online application. The HUM19UK corpus is comprised of 100 complete British novels published between the years 1800 and 1899. There is no search facility available for HUM19UK, so the texts were downloaded and examined using the search capabilities of Windows Explorer. A total of forty-six texts in all three corpora contained the lexeme colourless.

The lexeme colourless occurs fifteen times in the CLiC Dickens corpus and there are twenty-six instances in the CLiC 19th Century corpus. Additionally, the word colorless with the American spelling is found nine times in the CLiC 19th Century corpus, resulting in thirty-five uses of the lexeme in the two corpora. There are fifty-eight occurrences in total of colourless in the HUM19 corpus. The text with the highest frequency is Shirley (1849) by Charlotte Brontë, containing the lexeme colourless seven times. Two texts in the HUM19 corpus both have six occurrences of colorless: Under Two Flags (1867) by Louise de la Ramee and Robert Elsmere (1888) by Mary Augusta Ward. As there were only fifty-eight passages and three texts written by three authors, we concluded that the HUM19 corpus would also not provide a diverse representation of the notions put forth by colourless in prose. As these three corpora are comprised of nineteenth-century prose, we made the decision to create a bespoke corpus of Modernist prose (see Section 4.1.2), speculating there would be a large number of texts available in digital format, offering significantly more examples of colourless to examine and research. Our findings show that 144 texts use the lexeme colourless in the bespoke corpus – at least four times more than the corpora discussed earlier. The following sub-section explains how the corpus was created and the selection criteria used to identify those texts warranting further analysis.

4.1.2 The Modernist Literature Project

Modernism as a literary movement is characterised by the rise of industrialisation and development of the modern world in Europe and the United States between the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century and was particularly shaped by World War I. In both poetry and prose fiction, modernism is defined by an intentional departure from conventional literary methods (Childs, Reference Childs2008; Parsons, Reference Parsons2014).

We use the Modernist Literature ProjectFootnote ⁴ (henceforth MLP; McClure and Pager-McClymont, Reference McClure and Pager-McClymont2022) as the starting point for this study. Presently, the MLP contains over 20 million words, 328 texts, and 31 authors. The corpus offers Modernist prose fiction, shorter prose, and poetry as well as sub-corpora for specific authors and themes. Each text has been processed by WmatrixFootnote ⁵ (Rayson, Reference Rayson2009) to create parts-of-speech and semantic domain tagsets that are also available on the website. The MLP includes only digital versions of texts that exist in the public domain to avoid copyright issues as the corpus is freely accessible. Therefore, some works from canonical Modernist authors such as Joyce and Hemmingway are not included.

4.1.3 Methodology

We chose a corpus-based approach grounded in stylistic frameworks to aid in the identification of the lexeme colourless in Modernist prose, thus avoiding an oversimplified process of general passage selection. After we retrieve potential occurrences of the term, close reading and qualitative analysis are necessary. As noted by Mahlberg (Reference Mahlberg and Baker2009), a main benefit of corpus stylistics is methodological eclecticism, adding systematicity to literary analysis. Provided in the following sections is a detailed discussion of how the texts were selected and the data analysis frameworks that are applied in our research, addressing the concepts put forth by the lexeme colourless in Modernist works. Following Mahlberg and Smith (Reference 54Mahlberg, Smith, McIntyre and Busse2010), quoted extracts that are presented in this section will not have page numbers, as these often do not exist for the electronic versions of texts.

4.1.4 Selection of Modernist Texts Employing Colourless

We examined the MLP corpus using the search capabilities of Windows Explorer. Twenty authors in the corpus employ the term colourless in their prose, resulting in 144 texts containing the lexeme. As the focus of this research is on a single lexeme, we did not feel unequal balance in total texts amongst Modernist authors would negatively affect the reliability of our results; the aim of our analysis is to show how colourless is employed in Modernist prose and our research findings are not purely reliant on quantitative analysis. The authors and corresponding frequency counts are shown in Table 1.

Texts from the first four authors comprise over 50% of the results. In the nine texts authored by Kipling that contain colourless, there are eleven occurrences of the term. Although Richardson only has seven texts, there are twenty-one individual occurrences of the lexeme. We concluded that our research corpus would focus on authors that employed the term twenty or more times. The resulting frequency counts of colourless for these four authors are shown in Table 2.

To summarise, the research corpus is comprised of eighty-five texts which contain the lexeme colourless that are written by these four authors.

Once we determined the 4 authors under study that employed colourless more than 20 times, approximately 400 to 500 words of co-text for each occurrence were selected, resulting in 164 passages. However, Conrad, Richardson, and Wharton employ the lexeme twice within a single co-text selection. Wharton also uses colourless twice within a single co-text selection in The Children (1928), and colorless twice intrasententially in the text In Morocco (1920). In The Tunnel (1919), Richardson employs the adverbial form colourlessly in a reporting clause and then 148 words further in the text uses the word colourless. Taking into consideration these 5 incidences of the lexeme occurring twice within a co-text extract results in a total of 169 occurrences contained within 164 extracts in the 85 texts being studied.

4.1.5 Conducting Stylistic Analyses: Foregrounding and Conceptual Metaphor Theories

The employment of 400 to 500 words of co-text allows us to compare how the passage fits within the wider context of the text itself. To systematically analyse the extracts, we use two stylistic theories. The first is the theory of foregrounding (Mukařovský, Reference Mukařovský and Garvin1932/1964; Miall and Kuiken, Reference Miall and Kuiken1994; Kuiken et al., Reference Kuiken, Miall and Sikora2004; Leech and Short, Reference Leech and Short2007; Leech, Reference Leech2008), which underpins how specific elements of language stand out against the rest of the text. This foregrounding can occur:

• by internal deviation, meaning the text deviates from its own established pattern (i.e., a non-rhyming stanza in a poem that otherwise only features rhymes);

• by external deviation, the text deviates against the norm of the language (here, English), such as idiomatic expressions;

• by parallelism, such as repeated terms or structures.

We specifically focus on foregrounded elements, showing how the authors use the lexeme colourless in their prose.

As shown in Section 4.1.4 we observe that the term was frequently used metaphorically. Thus, we draw on CMT (see Section 3.1) to analyse the extracts where one concept is understood in terms of another. However, in certain metaphorical expressions, one of the domains is alluded to by one of its components: these are conceptual metonymies of those domains. Metonymies are tropes in which concepts are referred to or substituted by one of their attributes (Wales, Reference Wales2011). Kövecses argues that it is possible for the physical manifestation of emotions to allude to the emotion metaphor cross-domain mapping. Kövecses (Reference Kövecses and Gibbs2008: 382) states:

For example, in the sentence she smiled when she saw him, the smile is a conceptual metonymy of happiness. This aspect of metaphor mapping is particularly salient to our analysis of colourless, and it contributes to the mapping anatomy is mind in our corpus, as discussed in Section 4.2.2.

4.1.6 A Note on Orthography

As it is important to allow for the replication of our methodological approaches, we discuss the challenge presented by the Australian and British spelling of colourless in contrast to the American colorless. Numerous Modernist authors, including James, Kipling, Richardson, and Wharton, use both conventions in their works but show a preference for one spelling over the other. We were concerned that this may be a general problem with the country-specific transcription of digital texts. Therefore, we examined printed copies of two randomly selected texts by a British and American author – Aaron’s Rod and In Morocco – and the spelling in the printed version is the same as the digital editions.

4.2.1 The Use of Colourless by Four Modernist Authors

As discussed in Section 4.1.4, four authors in our Modernists corpus employed the term colourless more than twenty times:

• James employs colourless fifty-seven times across thirty-five texts;

• Conrad employs it forty-six times across twenty texts;

• Wharton employs it forty-five times across twenty-three texts;

• Richardson employs it twenty-one times across seven texts.

As stated, there are 169 occurrences of colourless in 85 prose works written by the 4 authors under study. In the following sections, we first present each of the authors’ use of the term, listed in ascending order of number of occurrences. We then provide a foregrounding analysis, progressing to a discussion of similarities and differences between the writers. Tables 3–6 list multiple functions for a single occurrence of colourless. Thus, the total number might not correspond to the figures in Table 3. For example, in the reporting clause ‘he said colourlessly’, the adverb colourlessly contributes to characterisation in addition to the representation of events.

Our first author of interest is James, who is often considered one of the most well-known Modernists. His style is often described as intricate because of the complex syntax and juxtaposition used in his writing (Watanabe, Reference Watanabe1962; Simon, Reference Simon2007). The effect on readers is to leave them feeling ‘uneasy and disoriented as some of his characters are’ because his style creates ambiguity to climax potential dénouements (Cross and Berger, Reference 50Cross and Berger1993: 1). Table 3 summarises how James uses the lexeme colourless in his prose.

James uses colourless to describe the characters’ personality traits through their physical appearance and to hint at their negative traits since the term is systematically used negatively. James employs colourless to indicate pale or white, but his use is divergent from the other three authors as he does not consistently add additional colour term pairings. However, when the term is used with other colours such as ‘olive’, as evidenced in Section 4.2.2 example (1) further, then colourless becomes oxymoronic, which can be considered to contribute to his complex style of combining contradictory extremes.

Our second author of interest is Conrad, who drew on his personal experiences, namely of being a sailor, to inform his plots and characters. He embraces modernism in his capacity to provide psychological depth through layers of narration while showing the moral ambiguity of his characters. Conrad’s narration subtly deals with the reality of the good and bad of the world with scepticism (Graham, Reference Graham and Stape1996). His use of third-person narration allows for narrative perspective and distance, potentially allowing him to maintain focus on his characters and sombre tales (Lothe, Reference Lothe and Stape1996). Table 4 summarises the different uses of colourless employed by Conrad.

In contrast to James, Conrad uses colourless in the negative portrayal of surroundings and anatomy, particularly in descriptions of lips, face, and tone of voice. In The Secret Agent, Conrad presents the bomb-throwing character as the Lombrosean type of the ‘born criminal’ through negative facial features. Conrad employs the term colourless six times to indicate the colour black or darkness and there are twelve occurrences that mean pale or white. As such, the oxymoronic aspect of the term is emphasised and strengthened. In Conrad’s forty-six texts, colourless is paired with black twenty-nine times and white twenty-five times, further reinforcing the oxymoronic use and contrasting the definition of the term. Conrad’s use of colourless corroborates elements of his style so far discussed, highlighting his scepticism when describing characters and their surroundings.

Our third author of interest is Wharton, who embodies values of Modernism by drawing on her womanly experiences of breaking from the Victorian Era and the effects of World War I. Her narratives often portray the mundane and brutal aspect of life for women during this time of upheaval (Haytock, Reference Haytock2008). Although she did not consider herself a Modernist, the scepticism and the ‘uneasy dialogue’ portrayed in her writing arguably show commonalities with other Modernists (Herman, Reference Herman2001; Ware, Reference Ware2004). Wharton also has varied uses of the term colourless, as evidenced in Table 5.

Wharton is the only one of our four authors to use colourless twice as often in the description of female characters as for male characters. Wharton often employs the term to describe the physical characteristics of female characters or the affairs of their everyday life. In contrast to male characters, where there is no mention of the term in this context, the lexeme colourless often stresses the negative aspect of female habits and existence, mirroring her unique feminine Modernist view of the world expressed through her engagement with gender issues and broader feminist discourse (Ammons, Reference Ammons1980). The lexeme is also associated with the notion of vagueness through the lexical field of unknown, including the terms smoke, blurred, mists, grey, and shadow. This concept could be linked to the metaphorical mapping of uncertainty is grey (see Section 3.2.3).

Similarly to Wharton, Richardson draws on her own womanly experiences and the tragedies of her life such as her mother’s suicide to inspire her writing. Her fiction ‘transgress[es] boundaries’ despite their shorter nature and show a ‘strong resistance to obvious or fixed meanings and are mostly uncertainly ended, opening out, inviting speculation and interpretation’ (Drewery, Reference Drewery2016: 4). The complexity of her style stems from her ‘fragmented syntax’ allowing for stream of consciousness, the use of varied narrative viewpoints, and ‘unconventional plot developments’ (Frost, Reference 51Frost, Janik and Janik2002: 273). The language of Modernist prose adopted this style to ‘transcribe thought, perception, and emotion at the moment before it is fully articulated in the mind’ (Sotirova, Reference Sotirova2013: 40). Table 6 illustrates how Richardson employs the lexeme colourless in the prose contained in the Modernist corpus:

Like Conrad, Richardson uses colourless to represent the oppositional concepts created by the terms pale or white and black or darkness. The lexeme colourless is associated with the term black fourteen times and twenty times to white, further emphasising the contrast. There are twenty occurrences of the colour grey in the immediate co-text of colourless, reinforcing Richardson’s use of it to represent black or darkness and pale or white, as grey is the blend of these colour tones. As we found with Wharton, Richardson mostly employs colourless in reference to female characters or an omniscient narrator. This is frequently accomplished through descriptions of scene surroundings and character anatomy such as face, lips, and voice. For instance:

1. (1) ‘I caught a glimpse of an unprepossessing countenance – despite rather good features and fine hair – the most striking characteristics of which were a missing front tooth and lips that hung loose and colorless’, The Long Day (Richardson, 1905).

2. (2) ‘Surprised into amazement, Miriam looked up to consult the face of Jessie Wheeler, the last speaker – a tall flat-figured girl with a strong squarish pale face, hollow cheeks, and firm colourless lips’, Backwater (Richardson, 1916).

3. (3) ‘Her will and the shapeless colourless voice murmuring from the back of her throat were given to the lesson’, Interim (Richardson, 1919).

4. (4) ‘In the colourless moaning voice with which she agreed that there was much for her to see in London and that she had many things she wished particularly not to miss’, Revolving Lights (Richardson, 1923).

Strikingly, when Richardson uses the term, it is within a negative context, highlighting the scepticism likely generated by her own traumas of financial hardship, parental suicide, and the miscarriage of her out-of-wedlock child with H. G. Wells (DorothyRichardson.org, 2025).

The quantitative and qualitative analyses of the lexeme colourless as employed by the four authors under study highlighted commonalities and differences in their stylistic use of the term. The similarities are of particular interest, and we thus analyse them in greater detail in the following three sections. To summarise, there are five distinct and frequent occurrences of colourless being used as a stylistic device and these are presented in Table 7. Although other researchers may categorise these incidents differently, ours is informed by the focus of this research on foregrounding analysis.

The lexeme colourless is used 32% of the time to describe physical descriptions of characters, often alluding to their personality traits. It is the only usage of the term that is employed similarly across all four authors; thus, a further discussion is presented in Section 4.2. The other uses of colourless reflect the authors’ idiosyncrasies. However, the use of morphological negation in the lexeme colourless (see Section 4.3) to describe events, surroundings, or characters’ personalities is typical of Modernism. This mirrors each of the authors’ style as reviewed, representing the changes of the world with scepticism and embracing the harshness of reality. Our analyses reflect this despite its focus being on the use of colourless in physical descriptions.

4.2.2 The Lexeme Colourless as Conceptual Metonymy, Oxymoron, and Opposition

The lexeme colourless is used by James, Conrad, Wharton, and Richardson in a stylistically similar metaphorical manner. As established in Section 4.1, the term colourless literally means having no colour – being transparent or clear. In contrast, the term colour refers to any component of light seen in a spectrum or rainbow, or any specific hue or tint. Black and white are also defined as colours, black being ‘the darkest colour possible’ whereas white is ‘the lightest colour possible’ (‘black’, 2024; ‘white’, 2024). However, it is recorded in Table 7 that the literal sense of colourless is only employed 5% of the time by the four authors. This allows us to conclude that 95% of the occurrences in the Modernist corpus of the lexeme colourless are employed as a figurative stylistic device. The OED’s (2024) figurative definition for colourless is ‘having no distinctive character, vividness, or intensity; lacking in interest; bland’. Our analysis is carried out using CMT, allowing for salient conclusions to be drawn on how the authors’ usage of colourless is figurative and the ensuing impact this has on readers’ mental representation of colourless descriptions. We argue that this phenomenon stems from colourless being an inherent lexeme of imagery.

Even though several definitions of imagery exist, scholars agree that it incorporates the auditory, visual, kinaesthetic, olfactive, and tactile senses (Halpern, Reference Halpern1988; Finke, Reference Finke1989; Nanay, Reference Nanay2015, Reference Nanay2017, Reference Nanay2018; Anderson, Reference Anderson2021). Dancygier (Reference Dancygier, Stockwell and Whiteley2014: 214) investigates the notion of imagery in relation to readers’ perspective, focusing on bodily experiences linked to the senses. They state:

Dancygier (Reference Dancygier, Stockwell and Whiteley2014) employs Abrams and Harpham’s idea that imagery generates in readers’ minds ‘vivid and particularized’ mental images, commenting on the rich yet subjective experience this entails (Reference Abrams and Harpham2005: 128). Pager-McClymont (Reference 55Pager-McClymont2021a: 125) defines imagery as the text’s formation of a vivid image using sensory language that elicits a mental image in the mind of readers. Figurative language and metaphors function as imagery when they engage the senses, prompting readers to form mental images based on their own physical and sensory experiences: since readers usually share those senses, they can relate to the descriptions and visualise the scene through personal experiences and memory (Boerger, Reference Boerger2005; see also Nanay, Reference Nanay2015, Reference Nanay2018). Green (Reference Green2017) distinguishes between ‘image-permitting’ metaphors which allow for mental representation of images, and ‘image-demanding’ metaphors which necessitate the creation of a mental image to properly comprehend the metaphor. This is salient to our analysis of colourless as an oxymoron and as a factor in the conceptual metaphor anatomy is mind because the lexeme is an inherent form of imagery, as it draws on visual senses. In this metaphor, characters’ physical traits (pale faces, wan expressions, or colourless voices) are not merely literal descriptions of appearance but serve as a window into their psychological or emotional states. The abstract domain of ‘mind’ or ‘personality’ is understood via the concrete domain of ‘body’, so that anatomical features function as a proxy for mental and emotional life.

The first figurative usage of colourless is the association with other colours in the immediate co-text of the extracts, and this is observed for all four authors as shown:

1. (1) ‘After I had left the town I became more intimate with that Provencal charm which I had already enjoyed from the window of the train, and which glowed in the sweet sunshine and the white rocks, and lurked in the smoke-puffs of the little olives. The olive-trees in Provence are half the landscape. They are neither so tall, so stout, nor so richly contorted as I have seen them beyond the Alps; but this mild colorless bloom seems the very texture of the country’, A Little Tour In France (James, 1884).

2. (2) ‘Linda pouted, advancing her red lips, which were almost too red; but she had admirable eyes, brown, with a sparkle of gold in the irises, full of intelligence and meaning, and so clear that they seemed to throw a glow upon her thin, colourless face’, Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard (Conrad, 1904).

3. (3) ‘That the moment one wanted to hold fast to was not, in most lives, the moment of keenest personal happiness, but the other kind – the kind that would have seemed grey and colourless at first, the moment when the meaning of life began to come out from the mists’, The Fruit of the Tree (Wharton, 1907).

4. (4) ‘There were shabby drawing room chairs standing in an irregular row on the dirty grey stone, railed by a balustrade of dark maroon painted iron railings almost colourless with black grime. But the elastic outer air was there and away at the end of the street a great gold pink glow stood above and showed through the feathery upper branches of the trees in Endsleigh Gardens’, Interim (Richardson, 1919).

As the examples show, other colours are used in the same descriptions that feature colourless, such as red, gold, brown, white, pink, and grey. Therefore, in the immediate co-texts, the use of colourless is oxymoronic: two opposite concepts are juxtaposed to one another. The association of contrasting concepts generates a rich and complex mental representation for readers. This joins Chomsky’s idea (Reference Chomsky1956: 116) that the ‘colorless green ideas sleep furiously’ is, although grammatically correct, nevertheless semantically nonsensical. Part of the meaning is deprived because of the association of colorless with the colour green, creating an oxymoron. Additionally, as we discussed in Section 3.1, Conrad and Richardson both employ colourless to mean black or darkness and white or light. Further illustrated in example (2) earlier is the phenomenon with ‘colourless face’ implying a face that is so pale it is almost deprived of colour. Whereas, colourless in example (4) is directly associated with iron railings that are almost black. Therefore, it could be argued that in these contexts the lexeme colourless is its own opposite.

The second figurative use of colourless occurs in descriptions of characters’ physical appearance. In a wider co-text, the term most often refers to the characters’ personality traits. For instance:

1. (5) ‘I have had this opportunity more than once, for I have met him at Tours, at Nantes, at Bourges; and everywhere he is suggestive. But he has the defect that he is never pictorial, that he never by any chance makes an image, and that his style is perversely colorless, for a man so fond of contemplation. His taste is often singularly false; it is the taste of the early years of the present century’, A Little Tour in France (James, 1884).

2. (6) ‘The emotion, however, was but meagrely expressed in the flatness with which she heard herself presently say: ‘I’ll go to the Registrar now’. ‘Now?’ Magnificent was the sound Mrs Gereth threw into this monosyllable. ‘And pray who’s to take you?’ Fleda gave a colorless smile, and her companion continued: ‘Do you literally mean that you can’t put your hand upon him?’ Fleda’s wan grimace appeared to irritate her; she made a short, imperious gesture’, The Spoils of Poynton (James, 1896).

3. (7) ‘This feeling accounts for nine tenths of their audacious gestures. Her face had gone completely colourless. Ghastly. Fancy having it brought home to her so brutally that she was the sort of person who must run away from the police! I believe she was pale with indignation, mostly, though there was, of course, also the concern for her intact personality, a vague dread of some sort of rudeness’, A Set of Six (Conrad, 1908).

4. (8) ‘Their own faces were sallow with the unwholesomeness of hot air and sedentary toil, rather than with any actual signs of want: they were employed in a fashionable millinery establishment, and were fairly well clothed and well paid; but the youngest among them was as dull and colourless as the middle-aged’, House of Mirth (Wharton, 1905).

5. (9) ‘At the end of an hour spent pacing the half-dark platform exhausted with cold and excitement and the monotonously reiterated effort to imagine the arrival of one of Mrs. Hungerford’s heroines from a train journey, Miriam, whose costume had been described in a letter to the girl’s mother, was startled wandering amidst the vociferous passengers at the luggage end of the newly arrived train by a liquid colourless intimate voice at her elbow’, Backwater (Richardson, 1916).

6. (10) ‘Sissie read her set of phrases in heavy docility. Her will and the shapeless colourless voice murmuring from the back of her throat were given to the lesson; but the kindly sullen profile smouldered in slumber’, Interim (Richardson, 1919).

These six passages help to illustrate that physical descriptions of faces, mannerisms, bodily actions, and expressions can be used to convey characters’ personality traits. As such, the anatomical description becomes a conceptual metonymy for the characters’ mind, allowing for the cross-domain mapping of anatomy is mind (Kövecses, Reference Kövecses and Gibbs2008: 382). The characters’ mind, an abstract target domain, is understood through their anatomical description, which is a concrete source domain.

Overall, colourless is used as a factor in the conceptual metaphor anatomy is mind and as an oxymoron, which are a type of imagery triggering a visual sensory response. As such, when colourless is used figuratively, it is an image-permitting metaphor (Green, Reference Green2017). This allows readers to have a rich and comprehensive mental representation of the characters, as their personalities are represented and embodied by their physical or visual appearances. Indeed, by mapping mental states onto bodily traits, readers are prompted to infer characters’ emotions and dispositions from visible features, engaging in an embodied form of comprehension that enriches their mental representation of the narrative.

4.2.3 Negative Co-Text of Term Colourless

Another finding from our foregrounding analysis of the lexeme colourless is the prevalence of negation in the extracts’ co-text. Negation is a way to build propositions: for each P proposition that is true, there is a ~P proposition that exists that is false (Hidalgo-Downing Reference Hidalgo-Downing2000a, Reference Hidalgo-Downing2000b; Giovanelli Reference Giovanelli2013). It is argued by Leech (Reference Leech1983) that positive propositions are more informative than negated ones, and thus choosing to negate a proposition foregrounds the information conveyed by the negation, noting there are exceptions. For instance, the sentence She is not a teacher is not as informative as She is a doctor. However, stating My cat is not female is equally informative as My cat is male.

There are different types of stylistic and linguistic negation and three are prominent in our study. Firstly, syntactic negation involves the adverbs ‘not’ or ‘never’ (e.g., she is not a teacher), and is thus marked (Tottie, Reference Tottie1991; Hidalgo-Downing, Reference Hidalgo-Downing2003; Nørgaard, Reference Nørgaard2007). Secondly, morphological or affixal negation is also marked and involves the use of prefixes or suffixes to negate a term (e.g., colourless, unhappy). Thirdly, lexical or inherent negation is unmarked, but ‘it corresponds to the value which tends to be assigned to a term in opposition to a “positive” term (good/bad, dead/alive, crazy/sane)’ (Hidalgo-Downing, Reference Hidalgo-Downing2003: 339). Lexical negation is context dependant, as we demonstrate in this section, meaning that specific terms such as long (see example 14) might be positive in certain contexts but are not in others. This justifies our analysing extracts of 400 to 500 words of co-text as opposed to only focusing on concordance lines.

In the extracts analysed in this research, each type of negation is not only present, but is also repeated, rendering it foregrounded by parallelism. Syntactic negation is the most prevalent in the Modernist corpus. When comparing our findings against the British National Corpus (BNC)Footnote ⁶ Written Sample, ‘nt’ (not abbreviated) is the twenty-eighth keyword featured and has a log-likelihood (LL) of 36.38, indicating statistical significance, as LL values over 15.13 shows a 99.99% level of confidence in the result (Busse et al., Reference Busse, McIntyre, Nørgaard and Toolan2010; Mahlberg and McIntyre, Reference Mahlberg and McIntyre2011). Similarly, ‘never’ is the sixty-fourth keyword of the corpus and has a LL score of 22.67. The BNC is a reference corpus, meaning that it represents ‘external norm against which to compare a single text’ (McIntyre and Walker, Reference McIntyre and Walker2019: 26), indicating that syntactic negation occurs more often in the surrounding co-text of colourless.

Moreover, morphological negation is also omnipresent in terms surrounding colourless, which in itself is a morphologically negated term. Selected examples from our research highlight morphological negation (italics) and lexical negation (underlined):

1. (11) ‘His tranquil unsuspectingness of the relativity of his own place in the social scale was probably irritating to M. de Bellegarde, who saw himself reflected in the mind of his potential brother-in-law in a crude and colorless form, unpleasantly dissimilar to the impressive image projected upon his own intellectual mirror’, The American (James, 1877).

2. (12) ‘The man, colourlessly uncouth, was drinking beer out of a glittering glass; the woman, rustic and placid, leaning back in the rough chair, gazed idly around’, Under Western Eyes (Conrad, 1911).

3. (13) ‘She had in truth no abstract propensity to malice: she did not dislike Lily because the latter was brilliant and predominant, but because she thought that Lily disliked her. It is less mortifying to believe one’s self unpopular than insignificant, and vanity prefers to assume that indifference is a latent form of unfriendliness’, House of Mirth (Wharton, 1905).

4. (14) ‘Intolerably monotonous seemed now to the Bunner sisters the treadmill routine of the shop, colourless and long their evenings about the lamp, aimless their habitual interchange of words to the weary accompaniment of the sewing and pinking machines’, Bunner Sisters (Wharton, 1916).

5. (15) ‘The Russian woman’s way of abolishing the mess and bother of clothes; keeping them close and flat and untrimmed. Shining out from them full of dark energy and indifference. More oppressively than before, was the barrier between them of Madame Lintoff’s indifference. It was not hostility. Not personal at all; nor founded on any test, or any opinion. In the colourless moaning voice […] there was an over-whelming indifference’, Revolving Lights (Richardson, 1923).

As the examples illustrate, in the immediate co-text of colourless, morphological negation occurs frequently, creating a repetitive structure as colourless is in itself negated morphologically. Syntactic negation is also present in each of the analysed extracts, often in the immediate co-text surrounding colourless, as shown in example (15). However, lexical negation is the most common form found in the passages.

The repetitive use of negation as a stylistic device could be explained by the term colourless being its own opposite, and it can also represent the deprivation of colour, black or darkness, and white or pale. This lack of systematic use, not only between authors but also within extracts by the same author, could be problematic for readers’ mental representation of a scene. Indeed, as discussed so far, when colourless is used figuratively, it is an image-permitting metaphor (Green, Reference Green2017). However, for this to occur, the meaning of the lexeme (dark or pale) must be consistent or an accurate mental representation might not be possible. Thus, the repetition of each type of negation is foregrounded by parallelism because it creates a theme and lexical field, providing readers with a rich mental representation and clarification of what colourless entails.

4.2.4 Semantic Associations in Texts Featuring Colourless

Lastly, it is readily apparent the word colourless is often joined with other descriptive terms through coordination. The words related through coordinating conjunctions and punctuation are often synonymous or can be considered near-synonyms; these occur in both the attributive and predictive positions. As per the ‘parallelism rule’, readers are invited to search for connections between parallel structures, coordination, and repetitions (Short, Reference Short1996: 14). What is striking is the frequency this occurs, affecting the stylistic composition and leading to a saturation or reinforcement of the notions put forth by the term colourless.

In Section 4.2, the literal meaning of colourless is provided and contained ‘clear’ in the definition. However, this word often occurs in the immediate co-text of colourless as in the expressions ‘colourless, clear complexion’, ‘clear, colourless, unflinching glance’, and ‘colourless, clear, glassy dawn’. Similarly, ‘colourless’ (OED, 2024) is defined as ‘lacking bright or conspicuous colour; dull, drab; dim’, and ‘dull’ is linked with the term in the phrase ‘the youngest among them was as dull and colourless’. Other near-synonyms related to this definition include ‘faint’ and ‘faded’ which occur in the expression ‘a scornful grimace as faint and faded and colourless’.

The figurative meaning of ‘colourless’ (OED, 2024) is ‘having no distinctive character, vividness, or intensity; lacking in interest; bland’. Words associated with this definition that are joined with colourless in the study texts include ‘expressionless’, ‘flat’, and ‘eventless’. Similarly, the term ‘vague’ appears in the expressions: ‘His gentle playing was colourless. Vague and woolly’ and ‘days of wrath dawn upon them colourless and vague’.

The most frequently occurring term joined with colourless is long, appearing in phrases such as ‘colourless and long their evenings’, ‘a long, strong, colourless voice’, and the parallel construction ‘so long, so colourless, so wasted’. Other terms on the scale of dimension include narrow (‘longish, narrowish, almost colourless face’) and lanky (‘colourless, rather lanky hair’). The word thin is used alongside colourless in two character descriptions: ‘thin colourless lips’ and ‘thin, colourless face’.

The coordinating conjunctions but and yet also appear in the immediate co-text of colourless. The semantic function is to highlight differences in the descriptive terms, as in the contrast between fresh and colourless in the expressions ‘fresh but colourless face’ and ‘perfectly colourless, yet amazingly fresh’. The effect of coordinators in these expressions is to add to the textual structure by offering contrasting patterns of dissimilar notions. For example, the term colourless is juxtaposed with the abstract concept of space in the phrases ‘abundant but rather colorless’ and ‘spacious but some-what colorless’.

Overall, the frequent semantic association of colourless across our corpus with words related to clear, dull, faint, and vague is foregrounded by parallelism. This is not only because of the repeated pattern it generates but also because of the synonym-like relation between the terms. This invites readers to perceive colourless as having different meanings depending on context, particularly when the immediate co-text provides it through the parallelism rule. It is also worth noting that each parallel term of colourless is lexically negated, including the coordinating conjunctions but and yet as they are used to create contrasting clauses. This reinforces the argument made in Section 4.3 that the omnipresence of negation in the immediate co-text of colourless affords readers a rich mental representation of a scene. This is bolstered by the parallel semantic associations described in this section.