Chapter 4: Study Project on Setting

Working with setting means paying attention to two different, but related aspects of setting:

1. the descriptions of setting
2. their functions in the story.

The following exercises will help you work with a story's setting and functions. The idea, as with character, is, in stories focused on setting, to come to an understanding of the story by looking closely at setting or settings.

1. Description

Many different elements come together to describe the setting of a story. Paying attention to setting is a matter of understanding the relations between the environment and actions that happen within it. In stories these relations are never accidental. Although they may be realistic, the details of setting are always chosen and function in some way to illuminate character, plot, and theme.

Here are a few of the elements you might look at to see how setting is established:

1. The narrator's direct descriptions of setting (see the paragraph from "The Fall of the House of Usher" below)
2. The setting evoked by references to place, time, weather, season, wealth, and atmosphere
3. The narrator's direct description of objects in the setting
4. What other characters observe about any element of the environment
5. Changes in the environment as noted by the narrator or other characters
6. At what point in the story the setting is described and in what context
7. Descriptions about how characters feel about the environment or how the setting makes them feel

To test your skills, locate all of the attributes of setting in the following paragraph:

Shaking off from my spirit what must have been a dream, I scanned more narrowly the real aspect of the building. Its principal feature seemed to be that of an excessive antiquity. The discoloration of ages had been great. Minute fungi overspread the whole exterior, hanging in a fine tangled web-work from the eaves. Yet all of this was apart from any extraordinary dilapidation. No portion of the masonry had fallen; and there appeared to be a wild inconsistency between its still perfect adaptation of parts, and the crumbling condition of the individual stones. In this there was much that reminded me of the specious totality of old wood-work which has rotted for long years in some neglected vault, with no disturbance from the breath of the external air. Beyond this indication of extensive decay, however, the fabric gave little token of instability. Perhaps the eye of a scrutinizing observer might have discovered a barely perceptible fissure, which, extending from the roof of the building in front, made its way down the wall in a zigzag direction, until it became lost in the sullen waters of the tarn.

Consider the following questions about this description:

1. What does the place look and feel like?
2. Where in the story does this description occur?
3. What does the setting make the narrator feel?
4. Are there other descriptions of setting in the story?
5. What is unusual about the building?
6. What in this description do we suspect will be important later?  What in the telling hints at its importance?
7. How do we understand the narrator's comparisons with other buildings and materials?
8. Do descriptions of the setting change in the course of the story?

2. Functions

Descriptions of setting provide a rationale for a story's events and a reflection of the events that occur as well as sometimes a reflection of the states of mind of various characters. When setting is described in detail, we can assume that setting is important in some way. We then need to consider how setting relates to both what happens in the story and to aspects of character. We might ask the following questions:

1. In what ways does the setting cause the story's events?
2. In what ways does it parallel and reflect events or characters?
3. Are there comparisons between setting and any character?  What might those comparisons tell us about character?
4. In what ways do descriptions of setting anticipate and foreshadow a story's events?
5. What kind of atmosphere or "feel" does setting give to a story?
6. How does that "feel" relate to the story's events and/or the insights characters might gain?

3. Interpretation

Interpretation consists of looking at all of the descriptions and functions of a story's setting and asking the following questions:

1. Why does the narrator describe the setting in detail?
2. What parallels are there between setting and events and/or setting and character?
3. How does the setting contribute to or establish the atmosphere of the story?
4. Does setting itself respond to events?  To what effect?

Putting It All Together

Considering everything you now know about the story's setting, what are the functions of setting in "The Fall of the House of Usher"?

If you were a historical critic, you might try to discern several historical facts that do not themselves appear in the text as a way of understanding where Poe's story came from. You might, for example, try to discover if there was a historical model for the Usher family, if such as house existed anywhere and if Poe had seen such a house. If you were to do a New Historical analysis of this story, you would try to understand how this story fit into general feelings about the gothic and the decadence of inherited wealth in 19^th century America. You might also try to understand how medicine treated such phenomena as Madeleine's "death" or Roderick's illness. You might also explore the ways such horror fiction circulated in American culture, who read it, and how popular it was. All of this would be by way of understanding how the story reflects and participates in the larger culture of the time in which it appeared.