A strange issue with GSub

Greetings, 

Apologies if this turns out to be a very silly question, but because I am the only person learning/using R at my workplace, I have no choice but to ask folks here.
I have been using Gsub to change some expressions in my Corpus object. After applying the gsub function, say
newCorpus<- gsub("game","war",newCorpus, fixed=TRUE)
an object of class character is returned by the gsub function, as is understandable, like so:
[1] this is the text of the 1st document....[1000] this is the text of the 1000th document.
However, all such text is enclosed as such:
[1] "c(\"this is the text of the 1st document.\", \"\\a\")" ...[1000] "c(\"this is the text of the 1000th document.\", \"\\a\")" 
The worst part is that I tried recreating the problem with another example to post here, but I face no such problem with the example. So, after banging my head against the computer for two days now, I still remain clueless as to why this is happening. I was wondering if somebody had an explanation to why this happens? That will be very helpful.
The only thing I can think of is that I had initially converted MS word documents into txt files, and then imported them using R's plain text reader. Could this be the issue?

Thanks. 		 	   		  
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mydf <- data.frame(a=c("this is a test", "another test"), b=c("athird", "a fourth"))
gsub("test","tester", mydf)