Reviewing Space: Breaking the Surface

The initial identification of patterning in this study stemmed from a spatial analysis of Jane Eyre, which can be viewed as the ‘control text’ for this study. The naturalistic representation of both her subject matter and narrative style created an ideal spatial platform with which to study landscapes and people in the text. This was, in turn, heavily influenced by the protagonist’s visual relationship with her space so that patterning was facilitated by a relatively high frequency of topological frames within the text. Having captured patterning here, other texts were introduced from different genres and periods in order to test for cultural differences and they too were purposely chosen for their canonical standing but more importantly for the expectation of topological frames within the three categories of spatial study. However, the frequency of topological frames began to vary, and this was often due to narrative mode; for example, Modernism’s tendency to break from a coherent narrative voice, and this posed difficulties for pattern identification. This refocused the data collection on topological frame variance and its contents. As outlined in Chap. 1 , a topological frame provides the visual components of the surrounding locations—objects and people—where movement or action is suspended in order to relay large amounts of spatial data. Similar to ‘free clauses’ (Labov & Waletzky, 1967), topological frames are not fixed temporally to the narrative arc nor are they pertinent to narrative causality. Once it was understood that the frames were patterned, a typology of space was drafted to check for variation from those found in Jane Eyre which focused heavily on landscapes, rooms/indoor spaces and characters. This developed a set of patterning described as progressive, for landscapes, bouncing, for rooms, and two loops of body patterning—short and long. Chapter 1 describes in detail the variation of each of these patterns through their individual pattern sub-sets and argues that they appear when the spatial relationship between each of the nouns pertaining to location or object is tracked. Thus, landscapes develop a proximal to distal patterning whilst indoor spaces with their smaller surface areas ‘bounce’ between the foreshortened geometry of the rooms. The bodily description of characters is divided into those that provide a shape or outline and remain with the head/facial features, and those that add a further dimension by describing body parts, hence the short and long loop terminology.