Complete Map

The 'ball of yarn' of the complete map exemplifies the limits of the model in relation to a three volume realist text. The density of the work makes the map almost unreadable. Aside from the Heath itself, the dominant nodes – Blooms-End, Captain Vye’s cottage, the Rainbarrow, the Quiet Woman – spatially encapsulate the novel’s key characters and their interactions: Clym Yeobright, Eustacia Vye, Thomasin Yeobright and Damon Wildeve. Since the novel’s action is completely contained in Egdon and its surroundings, we rely on the toporefs (detailed references to place) to give the external context, or wider sense, of the world in which Egdon is nested. Where direct toporefs are topographical and describe known places ('shaggy slope', 'her grandfather’s'), other, indirect or distant toporefs often reinforce a sense of the other ('Louvre', 'Versailles', the 'little Trianon'). 'Paris' is the Paris of the visitor and not the inhabitant. This immediate spatial insularity is shown in that all such places outside the Heath are connected indirectly (dotted rather than full purple lines) or via jumps (orange). Further analysis of the directly connected toporefs reveal the Egdon scenery dotted with stains, spots and patches. The heath itself both is 'a lonely spot' and contains, for instance, 'furze spots' and Wildeve’s Patch. This contrast between the expansive and the particular correlates with the novel’s episodic structure – a symptom of its serialised form. This is also detectable in the distinct topoi nodes: the Egdon region is partitioned out into smaller patches or topoi nested within it. This can be given more clarity in the topoi map.