Setting

Fiction can be defined as character in action at a certain time and place. Now we turn our attention to setting, a term that, in its broadest sense, encompasses both the physical locale that frames the action and the time of day or year, the climatic conditions and the historical period during which the action takes place. At its most basic, setting helps the reader visualize the action of the work, and thus adds credibility and a n air of authenticity to the characters.

There are, however, many different kinds of setting in fiction and they function in a variety of ways. Some settings are relatively unimportant. They serve as little more than incidental and decorative backdrops. Some settings, on the other hand, are intimately and necessarily connected with the meaning and unity of the whole work. The most important fictional settings are those that are “dramatic”, those that are organic and essential parts of the work as a whole.

In order to understand the purpose and function of setting, the reader must pay particular attention to the descriptive passages in which the details of setting are introduced. Generally speaking, unless such passages are intended merely as local colour, the greater the attention given to them, the greater is their importance in the total work. In most short stories and in many novels setting is established at or near the beginning of the work as a means of orienting the reader and framing the action that is to follow.

The quality of the language by which the author projects the setting provides another clue as to his or her intention. When that intention is to invest the setting with a photographic vividness that appeals essentially to the reader’s eye, the details of the setting will be rendered through language the language that is concrete and denotative. The author will pile specific detail on top of specific detail in an attempt to provide the illusion of stable external reality. On the other hand, the author may want us to “feel” rather than simply “see” the setting, as is the case when setting is to be used as a means of creating atmosphere. In that case the appeal will be to the reader’s imagination and emotions through language that is connotative, emotionally heightened, and suggestive. The author will, that is, manipulate the poetic qualities of language to elicit from the reader the desired and appropriate response. Often the author will want the reader to both see and feel the setting and will use the resources of language to bring about both effects simultaneously.

The Functions of Setting

Setting in fiction is called on to perform a number of desired functions. These functions must not, however, be thought of as mutually exclusive. In many works of fiction, setting can and does perform a number of different functions simultaneously.

1. SETTING AS BACKGROUND FOR ACTION. To quote Elizabeth Bowen once more: “Nothing can happen nowhere”. For this reason, if for no other, fiction requires a setting or background of some kind. Sometimes the background is extensive and highly developed, as in many historical novels where setting – in the form of costume, manners, events and institutions, all peculiar to a certain time and place – is rendered in minute detail to give a sense of “life as it was”, In other cases, as in many modern short stories, setting is so slightly that it can be dispensed with a single sentence or must be inferred altogether from dialogue and action. When we speak of setting as background, then, we have in mind a kind of setting that exists largely for its own sake, without any clear relationship to action or characters, or at best a relationship that is only tangential and slight.

To see whether setting acts as an essential element in fiction, or whether it exists merely as decorative and functionless background, we need to ask ourselves: Could the work be set in another time and another place without doing an essential damage? If the answer is yes, then the setting can be said to serve as a decorative background whose function is largely irrelevant to the purpose of the work as a whole.

2. SETTING AS ANTAGONIST. Often, the forces of nature function as a causal agent or antagonist, helping to establish conflict and to determine the outcome of events. The Yukon wilderness with which Jack London’s nameless tenderfoot tries unsuccessfully to contend in his famous story To Build a Fire is one example of a setting that functions as antagonist.

Perhaps the most famous example of setting as an agent that shapes and determines the lives and fate of those who come within its presence is Hardy’s meancing Egdon Heath in The Return of the Native. The overpowering “titanic” personality of the Heath is established immediately, in the first chapter, well before the reader is introduced to the characters of the plot:

The most through-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. Colours 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)

Egdon Heath, as Hardy makes clear, is no mere neutral background to action, but a sinister, almost human (or even superhuman) force, intimately connected with the lives of its inhabitants. Hardy speaks of the “influences” of the Heath and personifies its qualities (“the storm was its lover, and the wind its friend”) to suggest a dominating presence whose influence is inescapable. As one well-known critic has correctly observed, “This dynamic use of scene to determine the lives of the characters … is technically the most interesting thing in the book.” And one might add, it is the most impressive as well.

3. SETTING AS A MEANS OF CREATING APPROPRIATE ATMOSPHERE. Thomas Hardy’s Egdon Heath serves his novel not only as a causative agent but as a means of establishing atmosphere. Many authors manipulate their settings as a means of arousing the reader’s expectations and establishing an appropriate state of mind for events to come. No author is more adept in this respect that Edgar Allan Poe. In the following passage from The Fall of the House of Usher, the narrator first enters Roderick Usher’s room. Notice how 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 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 vein 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)

The room which Poe skillfully makes us both see and feel, is as “inaccessible” and “gloomy” as its owner and as such establishes an appropriate mood that anticipates and foreshadows our eventual meeting with Roderick himself.

4. SETTING AS A MEANS OF REVEALING CHARACTER. Very often the way in which the character perceives the setting, and the way he or she reacts to it, will tell the reader more about the character and his state of mind than it will about the setting itself. This is particularly true of works in which the author carefully controls the point of view. In My Kinsman, Major Molineux, for example, there is no indication that the outlandishly arrived conspirators, who move easily through Boston’s streets, are confused in the slightest by the city. Yet, Robin Molineux, Hawthorne’s young protagonist, most certainly is. For Robin the city is scarcely real; he is “ready to believe that a spell was on him.” The dark “crooked and narrow” streets seem to lead nowhere, and the disorienting moonlight, so perfect for the carrying out clandestine activities, serves only to make “the forms of distant objects” fade away “with almost ghostly indistinctness, just as his eye appeared to grasp them.” As Hawthorne presents it, the urban landscape mirrors perfectly Robin’s growing sense isolation, loneliness, frustration and confusion.

An author can also clarify and reveal character by deliberately making setting a metaphoric or symbolic extension of character. Roderick Usher’s “inaccessible” room is a perfect representation of its owner-occupant. So, too, with the entire house. As the reader soon discovers, Roderick Usher and his house are mirror images of one another. Roderick is as remote and gloomy as the house itself: his eyes like the windows, are vacant and lifeless; his hair has the same gossamer consistency as the fungi growing from the eaves; and there is within him the same perceptible and fatal fissure. As the action of the story proceeds to make clear, Roderick and his house are in advanced state of internal disintegration. Setting and character are one; the house objectives, and in this way serves to clarify its master. It is only fitting, therefore, that at Roderick’s death the melancholy House of Usher should collapse into “the deep and dank tarn”.

5. SETTING AS A MEANS OF REINFORCING THEME. Setting can also be used as a means of reinforcing and clarifying the themes of a novel or a short story. In Hardy’s Return of the Native, for example, Egdon Heath not only serves as antagonist and as a means of creating and sustaining atmosphere, but also as a way of illustrating Hardy’s vision of the role of blind causality in an unfriendly universe. Stephen Crane, who shared much of Hardy’s belief in naturalism, utilizes setting in a similar way in his story The Blue Hotel. The setting of Crane’s story is introduced in the very first sentences:

The Place Hotel at Fort Romper was painted a light blue, a shade that is on the legs of a kind of heron, causing the bird to declare its position against any background. The Palace Hotel, then, was always screaming and howling in a way that made the dazzling winter landscape of Nebraska seem only a grey swampish hush. It stood alone on the prairie, and when the snow was falling the town two hundred yards away was not visible.

From “The Blue Hotel”, Stephen Crane (1898)

The reader subsequently discovers that this setting has direct thematic relevance to Crane’s conception of the relationship between man and nature, as the author-narrator makes clear:

We picture the world as thick with conquering and elate humanity, but here, with the bugles of tempest pealing, it was hard to imagine a peopled earth. One viewed the existence of man then as a marvel, and conceded a glamour of wonder to these lice which were caused to cling a whirling, fire-smitten, ice-locked, disease-stricken, space-lost bulb. The conceit of man was explained by this storm to be the very engine of life. One was a coxcomb not to die in it.

In fundamentally different universe, a man’s survival (and, ironically, at times his destruction) depends on a capacity for self-assertion, much in the way that the blue hotel asserts its lonely presence against the stark, inhospitable Nebraska landscape.

A Note on Setting in Time

In most of the preceding examples we have emphasized the physical aspects of setting at the expense of temporal ones. But the time of day, time of year, or period of history at which a given event or series of events occurs can also contribute importantly to setting, as in the case of historical novels. The fact that the events of Hawthorne’s My Kinsman, Major Molineux take place at night is a highly relevant part of the setting, for darkness is traditionally an appropriate cover doe deeds of conspiracy and violence.

In much the same way, certain seasons of the year lend themselves more to certain kinds of events that others. Poe’s narrator arrives at the House of Usher on “a dull, dark and soundless day in the autumn”, a period we normally associate with the coming of winter and death. Authors will often use the cycle of the year and the cycle of the day to establish setting precisely because of the traditional association with the successive cycles in human life: spring – morning – youth; summer – noon – maturity; fall – evening – old age; winter – night – death.

Analyzing Setting

1. What is the work’s setting in space and time?

2. How does the author go about establishing setting? Does the author want the reader to see or feel the setting, or does the author want the reader both see and feel? What details of the setting does the author isolate and describe?

3. Is the setting important? If so, what is its function? Is it used to reveal, reinforce, or influence character, plot or theme?

4. Is the setting an appropriate one?