My previous blog post discussed the significance of literary places and the uses of narrative setting to establish character and suspense in Gillian Flynn’s 2012 novel Gone Girl. As I originally quoted, Franco Moretti has asserted that literary maps enable literary scholars to ascertain “’emerging’ qualities, which were not visible at the lower level,” the lower level being traditional literary analysis and close-reading practices (Moretti 53). This becomes evident in my own use of StoryMap JS, a digital tool which enables user to create stories using pinpointed locations on a world map, tracing movement through physical space. According to StoryMap JS’s website, the tool is meant to “highlight the locations of a series of events;” in particular, the StoryMap JS website seems to highlight stories that map historical events and current news events as effective uses of the tool. The only literary example provided by StoryMap JS is a map of Arya Stark’s journey across Westeros, the imaginary world of George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire. It seems clear that the use of this tool for literary analysis remains somewhat uncharted. By analyzing Gone Girl with StoryMap JS, I hope to demonstrate the advantages, and some disadvantages, of literary analysis and distant-reading through digital mapping.

The above map, “Sensational Identities and Movements in Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl,” follows the movements of the novel’s main characters, Amy and Nick Dunne, in relation to the development and exposure of their various identities and façades. Perhaps the most fascinating discovery from this project is the notion that their movement through literary space corresponds with the fluidity of their own identities, particularly Amy’s. Amy moves figuratively from her “cool girl” persona in New York, to the role of dissatisfied and sympathetically victimized wife in North Carthage, to “Actual Amy” in the Missouri Ozarks. While it is clear through simple close-reading that her identity shifts frequently throughout the novel’s mystery plot, the StoryMap JS tool enabled me to see the way in which Flynn forces identity changes through literal movement of narrative location. The reader only learns who “Actual Amy” is when she leaves the confines of her marital home in suburban North Carthage, heading into the unknown wilderness of the Missouri Ozarks. As Amy sheds the restraints of her “cool girl” and sympathetic wife personas, physically removing herself from the spaces in which these personas are expected of her, she decides to expose her true nature (and the nature of her diabolical revenge) when she is in a literary space that provides her the agency to do so. These movements coincide with her efforts to elicit the sympathy of the reader; the constructed sympathetic “Amy” of North Carthage is necessitated by her desires to assert power over Nick in a way that does not undermine expectations of her own feminine subservience and domesticity. She does not rely on this readerly sympathy when she has removed herself from the space in which these expectations arise. Nick similarly changes his physical location in order to affect the sympathy that the public (and the reading audience) hold in regard to him and his actions. Though North Carthage is his hometown and a familiar, comforting place for Nick, his inability to play the role of perfect husband and his affair with Andie draw the ire of those around him and provoke suspicion against him in the disappearance of Amy. It is only when Nick travels to St. Louis that this suspicious, adulterous identity begins to dissipate; his appearance on Sharon Schieber’s show enables him to redirect and control the narrative surrounding his own innocence. StoryMap JS was key in my ability to ascertain and articulate these narrative and spatial manipulations by Gillian Flynn.

There are some disadvantages with using StoryMap JS that I would also like to address. First, Gone Girl follows a complicated narrative structure, constantly flipping back and forth between the narrative voices of Nick and Amy, as well as the past and the present. This tool does not enable me to track their movements simultaneously, forcing me to combine them in a way that follows the chronological movements through space, despite the fact that these movements do not necessarily occur chronologically for a large portion of the text. Secondly, Flynn has created multiple fictional locales within representations of real-life places. North Carthage, Hide-A-Way cabins, and Lake Hannafan are entirely figments of Flynn’s literary imagination, and specific places in North Carthage, including Nick and Amy’s home, The Bar, and the beachhead are likewise not to be found on a map. Since Flynn has not constructed an entirely fictional world à la George R.R. Martin, I cannot superimpose a fictional map which details the locations of these fictional places. Thus, I had to do research into real locations in Missouri which could feasibly represent the fictional world of Gone Girl. As Flynn found inspiration in the real-life town of Cape Girardeau, Missouri (and filmed the Gone Girl movie there, too!), all of the North Carthage locales in the book have been pinpointed in various spots on a map of Cape Girardeau. I’ve located Nick and Amy’s home in a residential area of Cape Girardeau, placed The Bar at the physical location in which it was filmed, and set the fictional beachhead on the bank of the Mississippi River near the town. Furthermore, I set the location of Amy’s Ozarks cabin somewhere nondescript within the real Missouri Ozarks, and Desi’s lake house at the site of the popular Lake of the Ozarks. Thus, tracing movement through fictional spaces, especially those that have some or no basis in real locations, is limited by the mapping technology of StoryMap JS.

Despite the above-noted limitations of StoryMap in analyzing fictional space, the tool is nonetheless helpful in augmenting and providing nuance to traditional analyses of literary texts. By orienting a literary text with a visual, cartographic aid, the reader can thus place themselves within the literary world of the text and apprehend the ways in which character movement dictate character development, behavior, or motivation.