SOURCE: Sample, Maxine. “Landscape and Spatial Metaphor in Bessie Head's The Collector of Treasures.” Studies in Short Fiction 28, no. 3 (summer 1991): 311–19.

In the following essay, Sample discusses Head's fictional representation of space in The Collector of Treasures.

In exploring how people experience the world, social scientists studying the environment generally acknowledge that people tend to respond psychologically to certain features in the environment, often establishing deep psychological and emotional ties to places where they live. The identification of individuals with their environment is a process that occurs on both a conscious and subconscious level and manifests itself in various aspects of daily life. This personal, individual viewpoint is what geographer Yi-Fu Tuan refers to as the “experiential perspective,” generally how the individual feels about space and place and how either reflects those feelings; the concern here is how one conceptualizes that experience, “the various modes through which a person...