Chapter 5-Setting

Setting is an aspect of literature that may seem obvious when first mentioned. It’s where the story takes place, right? Absolutely. But there is more to setting than just where the story takes place. It also includes time and social environment. Setting is the context in which the action of the story occurs. As readers, we need to understand the context because the actions of the characters will usually only make sense in that setting. The details of the setting also evoke the correct mood and  atmosphere. For example, “The Tell-Tale Heart” by Poe has a completely different mood than something such as “The Open Window” by Saki. The details of the setting, including location, social context, and time period contribute to those different moods. Sometimes the time frame in a story changes, so pay attention to the time period of the story. In “A Rose for Emily,” you’ll notice the story goes back and forth in time. Faulkner tells much of Emily’s story in flashbacks and then returns to the present, so you really want to notice the time frame as part of the setting.

Setting also includes the social environment in which the story is set. Social environment can have a powerful impact on how the characters act. It provides us with context. If we just talk about two characters maybe having a fight but we don’t know any of the social setting, it really means nothing to us. If we talk about two characters robbing a bank or getting married or anything else without context, it really doesn’t mean much to us, so we want to understand the context which is what the setting provides for us.

The behavior of the characters has to make sense, so we need to understand the context. If someone behaves in a certain way because they live in a war zone, you can understand their behavior. You won’t find characters acting the same way if they live on a university campus or if they were in a shopping mall. Characters won’t act the same way in a shopping mall that they would act in church or on a playground, so you have to have an understanding of the context for the behavior of the characters to make sense. It also gives us significance of their actions because the way someone might behave in a shopping mall is completely different than how they might behave at school. How they would even talk to the people around them or what they would do with their time changes from setting to setting, so you understand the significance of where they are and what’s going on; don’t skip reading the details of the setting. If the story is set in a jungle, you want to understand what the characters are dealing with. Is it hot, is it muggy? If they were in a desert, is the sand blowing in their face? Deserts get really cold at night and really hot during the day so you want to understand how they are reacting. The setting creates the atmosphere and is quite important to me. I read a story once set in Albuquerque, New Mexico but when I read the story itself, nothing in the story really related to Albuquerque, where I have spent some time, so I know what it should look and feel like and yet the story could have been set in Parsons, Kansas or New York City. For me, that writer completely failed. I didn’t read anything more by that author because the setting he used didn’t relate to the story. Nothing went together and when you see that in the story, you know something is off, so make sure you understand character’s location and what’s going on around them.

Literature classes usually cover quite a few time periods, so understanding those time periods is necessary. We tend to make assumptions sometimes about time periods with which we aren’t familiar. Sometimes people will assume that in any time period in the past, men oppressed women and treated them as property. Not true. Women had little power in some time periods, but women had significant power in others. We sometimes assume people in the past had a more primitive way of thinking. They did not. They may have had more primitive technology, but they didn’t have a more primitive way of thinking. We should not make assumptions about time periods just because they were in the past. The characters still should act in character. They should still have the same intelligence. See what the story says about the time period. If you read something and you’re not really familiar with the time period, you might want to research a little bit, read up a little bit about the time period. If you are reading poetry by Samuel Taylor Coleridge from the Romantic period, know this was a time when the Industrial Revolution was going on. The Romantic authors pushed back against industrialization and against the advances of science. Frankenstein was written in the same time period, and if you’ve read Frankenstein, Shelley clearly pushes back against the evils of science and glorifies the beauties of nature. It’s important to know this; otherwise, Frankenstein doesn’t have nearly the same impact on you, so it’s good to know a little bit about the time periods that the stories are set in and what was going on there and not assume that you already know. Don’t make assumptions about it. Do a little bit of research to make sure you understand the time period that the story was written in.

Does the dress and language of the characters suit the geographical location? Do they act and dress appropriately? If the story is set on a beach, are they dressing and acting like someone would act on a beach? If the story is set in a jungle, do the characters act in and dress the way you act and dress on a beach or in a jungle? Those settings require totally different kinds of clothes, both probably pretty casual. Upper-class people from New York City are going to wear a different type of clothing and act differently than those on the beach or in the jungle. How would being in a hot or a cold place affect the characters? In “The Ice Palace,” by F. Scott Fitzgerald, what would you expect a person to wear? How would being in a city versus being on a farm affect the characters? If someone lives on a farm and yet talks and acts as if they live in a big city, their behavior throws you out of the story. This behavior inspired the whole premise behind the television show Green Acres in the 60’s and was used for laughs. Characters not fitting into their setting properly can leave the reader confused and disappointed unless it is written as humor.

How does the behavior of the characters suit the social environment? Upper class versus lower class makes a significant difference. An author from the early 1900s, Edith Wharton wrote about upper-class New York. If another writer at the same time had been writing about lower-class New York, they would have had a completely different take. In fact, the story by Stephen Crane, Maggie Girl of the Streets relates the story of a very lower-class family and at the same time as Edith Wharton’s stories take place. If you read the stories by Edith Wharton at the same time as the Stephen Crane story, you wouldn’t even been able to tell it was in the same city because they’re so completely different.

The country a story is set in changes the social environment. I have a close Chinese friend, and she and I have had many discussions over how they were raised to behave and treat people in China is different than how Americans were raised to behave and treat people in the United States, so a Chinese character in a story should act as if they grew up in China, while a person from the United States should act as if they grew up in the United States. You should be able to see the difference in how they act and suit their social environment.

Educated versus uneducated changes how someone would act and speak, and that is part of the social environment aspect of setting. A history professor speaks differently than an auto mechanic and it has nothing to do with intelligence but the difference in the education. It’s important to pay attention to these types of social settings. Is this person acting as they should act in this setting?

Writers can use the setting to establish expectations . Where they set their story help set your expectations of the story. By drawing on the traditional associations for that setting, they can then fulfill or subvert those expectations. If you were reading a story where the setting is in a carnival, you would expect a lot of fun, a light bright lively story. If the setting is a beautiful garden, you expect something maybe a little bit more calm and beautiful and serene. If you had a setting of a dystopian future like you would see in Hunger Games, you would expect things to be a little bit more rough, harder to deal with. But what if you have these settings and what if you find out that in this beautiful garden everything you touch is poison? The author Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote a story where this happened. In “Rappacinni’s Daughter,” everything goes bad in the lovely garden, so what you’re set up to expect is then subverted by the author to create a different outcome and to  give you the surprise and the twist that authors love to give. If you’re at a carnival and you stumble across a dead body suddenly, you have a twist from what you were expecting for your characters, so again, it subverts the expectations. If you were set in a dystopian future where everything seems rough and hard, and then someone is goes out of their way to do kind acts for other people, you can see how authors have fooled you with the setting. They set you up for one thing and then took it in a different direction than what the reader is looking for. These are the kinds of ways in which authors can either use their settings the way you expect them and help them set up the story, or they can subvert the expectations of the setting and give you the twist that you might be looking for, so definitely think about setting as you’re reading through the stories.