American Book Review

Given its cast of perambulating characters and its distinctive registration of the geography of central London, Mrs. Dalloway (1925) has become something of a canonical text in spatial literary studies, as students and critics have traced out the itineraries of Clarissa, Peter Walsh, or Septimus Smith, either literally—see the "Mrs. Dalloway Mapping Project" (http://mrsdallowaymappingproject.weebly.com/index.html), for example—or more informally in their own minds. The movements of the characters in the city streets, combined with the involuntary memories and subsequent reflections sparked by their peripatetic perspectives, renders a narrative that appears devoted to the experience and conception of time as one that is equally attuned to space, and in particular, the distinctive social space in which such experiences take place. Then there is the prevalence of distinctive toponyms and municipal monuments, such as Bond Street, Regent's Park, Shaftesbury Avenue, and the omnipresent Big Ben, whose tolling of the hours punctuates the novel with a portentous ringing of sonic waves and circles. These, too, give Mrs. Dalloway the appearance of being a sort a spatial narrative, such that we might say that a literary geography of London emerges in its pages.

Of course, this is where I feel the need to add a properly Woolfian caveat: It is true that, when one thinks of space in relation to the novel, the first consideration is usually the depiction of specific spaces or places in the text. This is sometimes thought of as the "storyworld," the area in which the events of the novel take place. A storyworld could be entirely imaginary, such as Terry Pratchett's Discworld in his marvelous series of satirical fantasy novels, or it could closely resemble the geographical spaces of the real world, as with the gritty realism of Raymond Chandler's Los Angeles in The Big Sleep (1939) and other works. Or it might combine some aspects of the two, as in William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County, which undoubtedly resembles the real [End Page 99] Lafayette County, Mississippi, but which has developed its own mythic history over the course of Faulkner's writings once populated with Compsons, Bundrens, and Snopeses. The basic geography and distinctive places in a novel are powerfully effective in orienting the reader and establishing the setting of the fictional world.

But, then, no matter how much a given storyworld makes reference to places in the so-called real world, the spaces of a novel are necessarily imaginary by virtue of being part of that fictional universe. As Woolf herself observed in her 1905 essay, "Literary Geography," one of the foundational texts of that interdisciplinary field,

A writer's country is a territory within his own brain; and we run the risk of disillusionment if we try to turn such phantom cities into tangible brick and mortar. … No city indeed is so real as this that we make for ourselves and people to our liking; and to insist that it has any counterpart in the cities of the earth is to rob it of half its charm.

Woolf here insists that the storyworld maintains its own autonomy from the real world and that the reader encounters this geography as a space of the imagination.

In a sense, then, the "real" London as seen in fiction becomes something of a fantastic place, perhaps not quite a Narnia but also not quite the locale of this year's Wimbledon either. Charles Dickens's London in A Christmas Carol (1843) both is and is not the London in which Dickens himself lived. By making it the locale inhabited by such fictional characters as Ebeneezer Scrooge, Bob Cratchit, and Tiny Tim, not to mention supernatural beings like the Ghosts of Christmases Past, Present, and Future, Dickens transforms the "real" London into a place of enchantment, existing somewhere between reality and fantasy. As G. K. Chesterton put it, this was indicative of "that elvish kind of realism Dickens adopted everywhere."

In some ways, it is obviously true that locations in works of fiction are not "the same" as their real-world referents. The places and persons in...