Digital methods offer new approaches to literary analysis that give us a way to represent the novel and interesting features of a text. Methods such as digital mapping and GIS can be used to track movement through space in a text, revealing changes in social factors, restrictions levied against characters, or even the significance of location to each protagonist.
Digital mapping particularly lends itself to our exploration of the meaning of home in Edward P. Jones’s collection of short stories. Within Lost in the City, home takes on a range of different characterizations — from Carmena Boone’s crowded efficiency apartment in “A Dark Night” to Cassandra G. Lewis’s lack of a concrete place to call home in “The Night Rhonda Ferguson Was Killed.” In the context of our analysis, we focus our exploration of home on its wide-ranging portrayal in four of Jones’s short stories.
In “Lost in the City,” Lydia reveals the consequences of her changing social class by retracing her past, starting with her upper-class town house nestled in Southwest D.C. and gradually revisiting her childhood homes in the lower-class Northwest region of the city.
In “The Girl Who Raised Pigeons”, Betsy Ann and her father cope with the slow degradation of the neighborhood that they still call home.
The absence of specific information about the physical locations of Madeleine’s homes in “The Sunday Following Mother’s Day” at first appears to point towards a limitation in the efforts of mapping; however, this lack of information draws attention to the emotional connections that creates the basis of what Madeleine calls “home.”
In “His Mothers’ House”, characters’ homes change with the acquisition of wealth and the consequences for abandoning their community are severe.
Ultimately, mapping allows us to understand how home functions in the story universe as well as its existence in concrete, physical space. By charting the journeys of our characters over the geography of Washington D.C., we are better able realize their homes as Edward P. Jones understood and imagined them. Mapping individual stories also affords us the ability to understand the geographical relationships among a community of characters. Though the protagonists of the stories may not interact with each other, they are members of the same communities. Their homes exist in the same physical space. The characters are each other’s neighbors and through them, Jones gives us a sample of the people who inspired Lost in the City.
The four stories that are being used to scaffold our explanation of home in Lost In The City are mapped here.
