Where a story happens — its geographical location, its historical moment, its placement in a city or town, inside or outside — contributes to what a story may be trying to communicate to a reader.
A setting is the time and place in which a story is told. (Links to an external site.)
Time, place, history, geography all work together to shape who WE are as much as the characters in a fictional narrative.
Let’s turn back and look at two stories we’ve already read and examine their settings in relation to larger themes:
A Scandal in Bohemia
Late 19th century London. The story begins inside Sherlock’s living room: “Holmes, who loathed every form of society with his whole Bohemian soul, remained in our lodgings in Baker Street, buried among his old books, and alternating from week to week between cocaine and ambition, the drowsiness of the drug, and the fierce energy of his own keen nature.”
You can see that the narrator, Watson, is making a comparison between what Holmes’s environment is like (messy and chaotic) and what his “soul” is like (“Bohemian (Links to an external site.)”). The setting mirrors the characteristics of the person.
Thematically, the setting becomes central to the plot. It is through Holmes’s intrusion into Irene Adler’s private home, and his surveillance of her secret closets, that he comes to discover where she is hiding the important photograph. Holmes must investigate the setting in order to solve the mystery.
The Paper Menagerie
The setting moves between suburban Connecticut, probably sometime in the mid-80s, and provincial China after the Great Famine and during the Cultural Revolution. Each of these settings profoundly influences the perspectives of the main characters.
Jack grows up in a setting populated with people that look different than himself. Do you think his setting influenced the way he treated his mother?: “‘We are not other families.’ I looked at him. Other families don’t have moms who don’t belong.”
The mother’s setting — the fact that she was born to a poor family during a moment of political upheaval — forced her to find ways to survive: “There I was, a ten-year-old orphan. The only relative I had in the world was my uncle in Hong Kong. I snuck away one night and climbed onto a freight train going south.”
The mother moves from one setting to another — from China to Hong Kong to Connecticut. Could you argue that this dislocation influenced the way she raised her son? “Now I had someone to talk to. I would teach you my language, and we could together remake a small piece of everything that I loved and lost.”
Read
Read the following story, “The Garden Party” by Katherine Mansfield. Download “The Garden Party” by Katherine Mansfield.
The story takes place in Australia in the late 1800s. There are two distinct locations.
Submit
Answer the following questions related about the story:
What do you think the end of the story means. When Laura sobs and hugs her brother, Laurie (Laurie is a boy, Laura is a girl) and says “Isn’t it marvelous” — what has effected her so much? What does she mean? How do you interpret the ending of this story?
Find two passages that describe two different settings in the story. Find one passage that describes the Sheridan’s own setting. Find another passage that describes the neighboring community. Think about how the way the settings are described reflect the opinions and prejudices of the Sheridan family.
Quote each passage.
Explain, in your own words, what the passage is saying.
Interpret how the language and imagery of the passage reveals the prejudices and blindness of the Sheridan’s point of view.
Explain how Laura may have come to change her perspective on the two different setting by the end of the story. Do you see a change in the way the setting is described?
