Ultimately, this discussion suggest

Ultimately, this discussion suggests that the meaning of a narrative space is important far more because of the kinds of movements that it opens up than because of the atmosphere or symbolism that it enables. Consider, for example, the contrast between the graveyard scenes in Great Expectations and Hamlet. In Dickens’s novel, the graveyard setting is positioned against a horizon of perceived space that is seen to be corporeally accessible: Pip opens the novel by realizing “that the dark flat wilderness beyond the churchyard, intersected with dykes and mounds and gates, with scattered cattle feeding on it, was the marshes; and that the low leaden line beyond, was the river; and that the distant savage lair from which the wind was rushing, was the sea.”l3 Already the novel imagines Pip s location against a space that he looks out onto in order to develop “expectations”一in some sense, the exemplary response to the kind of moving, kinetic space that I have been describing. In contrast, Shakespeare s graveyard is surrounded not by spaces that can be seen or traveled to, but instead by the “houses”of the grave that “［last] till doomsday. 14 Initially such a space may seem to be entirely rhetorical, but such a house quickly turns out to be the literal destination of Ophelia-and, as Hamlet reminds us, all of us. The graveyard scene here is surrounded by spaces accessible only through the imagination and at the cost of the body. Dickens s setting is organized by real-world move­ ment outward; the graveyard is a beginning place that holds his family and origin. Shakespeare, conversely, creates a setting in which physical movement is curtailed and directed back to the imaginative spaces that can be entered only by giving up the body. In both cases, however, the meaning of these spaces is created by real and potential movement far more than by the settings themselves.