Mapping Hardy and Brontë

Abstract

Cartography illustrates the contours and limits of national identity as well as a nation’s fictions. As Benedict Anderson writes, maps give shape to national definition.¹ Pamela K. Gilbert explains that maps help people see where they fit: they “perform an important function in defining communities—not only spatial communities, but interpretive and identity-based communities.”² Maps reflect a widespread cultural interest in discovering, defining, and incorporating space—an interest that is illustrated but also problematized in fiction. J. Hillis Miller claims that “A novel is a figurative mapping,” part of a “series” along with the “real landscape” it describes diachronically.³ The connection between fiction and cartography is a political project, for as Franco Moretti writes, “Geography is not an inert container, is not a box where cultural history ‘happens’, but an active force that pervades the literary field and shapes it in depth.”⁴ In Atlas of the European Novel, Moretti creates maps based on novels in order to see the ways in which geography “shapes the narrative structure of the European novel.”⁵ Novels, writes Moretti, function “as the symbolic form of the nation-state […] an essential component of our modern culture.”⁶ Novels, like maps, create political realities.