Mapping, mobility, and selfhood in nineteenth-century narrative: Sir Richard F. Burton, Herman Melville, and Charles Dickens

This thesis examines how cartographic discourse shapes interactions between the subject and space in representative nineteenth-century American and British narratives. In this period, mapping became a material expression of the project of Empire and an integral part of the process by which “new” geographies were defined and possessed. The map also became an objective correlative for order and rationality. Richard F. Burton, Herman Melville, and Charles Dickens use maps and other cartographic orderings in their narratives to accomplish various imaginary acts of self-location, in the process drawing upon and interrogating the objectivity associated with cartographic discourse.; In their narrative negotiations with different kinds of space, Burton, Melville and Dickens express individual and general anxieties about the shifting social and cultural milieus that they occupied. All three writers were made to approach normative bourgeois life from a marginalized social position; each experienced remarkable successes and failures resulting in crises regarding his sense of place. Social uncertainty affected each author differently, but with similar consequences: all three formulated narratives that can be seen as making private experiences publicly coherent and as fixing a place inside the dominant culture that might mitigate his perceived status as an outsider. In the narratives considered here, maps and geographical overviews chart alternative routes through and around potentially antagonistic systems in response to some personal sense of alienation or disillusionment.; To elucidate these issues, a brief history of cartography and its role in the construction of modern forms of subjectivity are outlined. An examination of the ways in which mapping articulates particular cultural and subjective impulses in specific narratives follows. Chapter 1 investigates Burton's attempts to map Western Arabia in A Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Medinah and Meccah, focusing on how his cartographic engagements reinforce cultural conceptions of Middle-Eastern space and contribute to the narrative construction of self. In Chapter 2, the ambiguous mapping imagery used in Melville's Moby Dick and The Confidence Man reveals cartography's accommodation of different subjective, social, and geographical ends. Chapter 3 considers Dickens' use of the map image to mediate between idealism, disillusionment and material reality in Martin Chuzzlewit .