Setting

Fiction = character in action at a certain time and place.

Setting = physical locale (frames the action) + the time of day or year, the climatic conditions, and the historical period.

Setting helps the reader visualize the action of the work, and thus adds credibility and an air of authenticity to the characters.

Some settings - relatively unimportant: incidental and decorative backdrops, have little or no necessary relationship to either the plot or the characters.

Some settings - intimately and necessarily connected with the meaning and unity of the total work.

"Scene, is only justified in the novel where it can be shown, or at least felt, to act upon action and character; in fact, where it has dramatic use," (British author Elizabeth Bowen)

Any setting can be justified as long as it is appropriate.

The most important fictional settings are those that are "dramatic", organic and essential parts of the work as a whole.

To understand the purpose and function of setting - pay attention to the descriptive passages (where the details of setting are introduced). Unless such passages are intended merely as local color, the greater the attention given to them, the greater their importance in the total work.

Setting is established at or near the beginning of the work for orienting the reader and framing the action that is to follow.

If the emphasis on setting in such passages is slight, or then referred to again only incidentally or never = that setting is subordinate to the author's other concerns and purposes.

If the emphasis on the setting in early passages is substantial, and if similar references to the setting recur periodically as a kind of echoing refrain = the setting is designed to serve some larger function in relation to the work as a whole.

The quality of the language = another clue.

For photographic vividness = concrete and denotative language: specific details → illusion of a stable external reality.

To "feel", not to "see" the setting = connotative, emotionally heightened, and suggestive language: manipulations with poetic qualities of language → elicit from the reader the desired and appropriated response.

To both see and feel the setting = use the resources of language to bring about both effects simultaneously.

The Functions of Setting

Setting may serve

(1) to provide background for the action;

(2) as an antagonist;

(3) as a means of creating appropriate atmosphere;

(4) as a means of revealing character;

(5) as a means of reinforcing theme.

Not mutually exclusive.

1. Setting as background for action.

"Nothing can happen nowhere." (Elizabeth Bowen)

Fiction requires a setting or background of some kind:

• extensive and highly developed (historical novels, where setting – in the form of costume, manners, events, and institutions, all peculiar to a certain time and place = a sense of "life as it was.")

• a single sentence or in a dialogue and action (modern short stories)

• exists largely for its own sake (= background, with no or slight relationship to action or characters).

To understand function:

Could the work in question be set in another time and another place without doing it essential damage?

If yes = decorative background whose function is largely irrelevant to the purpose of the work as a whole.

2. SETTING AS ANTAGONIST.

Forces of nature = causal agent or antagonist, helping to establish conflict and to determine the outcome of events.

E.g: 1) The Yukon wilderness with which Jack London's nameless tenderfoot tries unsuccessfully to contend in his famous story To Build a Fire

2) the "tumultuous" and "snarling" sea in Stephen Crane's The Open Boat.

The most famous example:

Setting as an agent that shapes and determines the lives and fate of those who come within its presence is Hardy's menacing Egdon Heath in The Return of the Native. The overpowering "titanic" personality of the Heath is established immediately, in the first chapter ("A Face on Which Time Makes but Little Impression"), well before the reader is introduced to the characters or the plot:

The most thorough-going ascetic could feel that he had a natural right to wander on Egdon: he was keeping within the line of legitimate indulgence when he laid himself open to influences such as these. Colors and beauties so far subdued were, at least, the birthright of all. Only in summer days of highest feather did its mood touch the level of gaiety. Intensity was more usually reached by way of the solemn than by way of the brilliant, and such a sort of intensity was often arrived at during winter darkness, tempests, and mists. Then Egdon was aroused to reciprocity; for the storm was its lover, and the wind its friend. Then it became the home of strange phantoms; and it was found to be the hitherto unrecognized original of those wild regions of obscurity which are vaguely felt to be compassing us about in midnight dreams of flight and disaster, and are never thought of after the dream till revived by scenes like this.

– From The Return of the Native, Thomas Hardy [1878]

3.  SETTING AS A MEANS OF CREATING APPROPRIATE ATMOSPHERE. Thomas Hardy's Egdon Heath = not only as a causative agent but as a means of establishing atmosphere.

Edgar Allan Poe is one of the best.

E.g.: The narrator first enters Roderick Usher's room. Poe not only provides the details of setting, but tells the reader just how to respond to them:

The room in which I found myself was very large and lofty. The windows were long, narrow, and pointed, and at so vast a distance from the black oaken floor as to be altogether inaccessible from within. Feeble gleams of encrimsoned light made their way through the trellised panes, and served to render sufficiently distinct the more prominent objects around; the eye, however, struggled in vain to reach the remoter angles of the chamber, or the recesses of the vaulted and fretted ceiling. Dark draperies hung upon the walls. The general furniture was profuse, comfortless, antique, and tattered. Many books and musical instruments lay scattered about, but failed to give any vitality to the scene. I felt that I breathed an atmosphere of sorrow. An air of stern, deep and irredeemable gloom hung over and pervaded all.

– From The Fall of the House of Usher, Edgar Allan Poe [1839]