When we refer to setting, we mean more than just the historical time period, societal conditions, and geographic location in which a story takes place. While that background information is certainly important and needs to be discussed prior to beginning a novel or play, we also want to focus on how authors use various settings within a story to create mood, establish tone, and convey theme. Oftentimes the setting for a particular scene is symbolically significant, and we need to understand how a description of the setting helps reveal the author's intent and the deeper meaning of the text.
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Before Eliezer and his family arrive at the concentration camps in Elie Wiesel's memoir Night, they are moved into the small ghetto in their hometown of Sighet and are then sequestered within the town synagogue as they wait for the cattle cars to transport them to Auschwitz. Students work in small groups to analyze how each of these settings is symbolically depicted by Wiesel to convey the emotional and psychological impact that the experience had on Eliezer and his family:
For Wiesel's memoir, we use the 2015 AP Literary Argument prompt as the thematic focus of the unit, which asks students to analyze "how cruelty functions in the work as a whole and what the cruelty reveals about the perpetrator and/or victim." When students consider the cruelty of Eliezer's family's being sequestered in the small ghetto, they also have to ask why they so readily use the things left behind by the previous inhabitants and the significance of his admission that "we had already forgotten all about them." It's only in retrospect that Wiesel is able to see his own family's lack of concern for those who had come before them, which he implies is what happens when people are forced to think solely about their own survival in the moment.
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When the Jews of Sighet are sequestered in the town synagogue to await their transport to the concentration camps, Wiesel notes how the "altar was shattered, the wall coverings shredded, the walls themselves bare," symbolically depicting the destruction of their community, their culture, and their faith. When they are "[f]orbidden to go outside, people relieved themselves in a corner," graphically demonstrating how debased their existence had become. Finally, when the doors of their cattle car are "nailed" shut, Wiesel describes their "world" as becoming "hermetically sealed," suggesting that there was no escaping their fate and they "had fallen into the trap, up to [their] necks."
Even though Japanese Americans detained in internment camps in the United States during World War II did not face the same horrors that Jews endured during the Holocaust, Julie Otsuka describes the long-lasting trauma of their imprisonment in her novel When the Emperor Was Divine . When the family returns to their home in Berkeley, California, after the war, the expectation is that they will return to their lives as if nothing has changed in their three-year absence. When the children return to school, however, Otsuka juxtaposes how the external world views them, meaning their teachers and classmates, and how they feel inside as a result of their experience in the internment camps.
The purpose of schools in the United States is to provide a solid academic foundation for all students, regardless of background, in order to achieve our nation's goal of equal opportunity for all. It is ironic, then, to consider how the United States government's decision to imprison Japanese families has caused such psychological damage to these children that they no longer feel free to be honest about their thoughts and feelings. Otsuka describes the children as trying to move "silently through the halls" in the hope that they "would not be noticed" by others. When students work in small groups analyzing the passage, they should consider how their teachers and classmates would have perceived their always being "polite" and contrast it with the sarcastic tone of the children's claim that they would immediately apologize if they ever did something "terribly wrong"—such as "coming back" to school at all or having accidentally "touched" another classmate's arm that was "resting there so quietly, so beautifully, so perfectly, so irresistibly, on the edge of the desk"—to determine how the children actually feel on the inside. ​
In the Point of View section, we discussed how playwrights—such as Lorraine Hansberry in A Raisin in the Sun—often use stage directions to not just describe the setting, but also to establish tone and plant thematic seeds that will be developed over the course of the play. At the beginning of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, the stage directions create an intentionally disturbing scene with little subtlety. When students work in small groups to analyze the significance of the setting, they should consider how audiences are expected to feel when seeing the stage for the first time and how Miller uses the opening setting to foreshadow his overall theme concerning the American Dream:
Students usually conclude that the "towering, angular shapes" surrounding the "small, fragile-seeming home" let the audience know that the inhabitants of the house are most likely weak and vulnerable. The "angry glow of orange" seem to represent hostile forces from which there is no relief or escape. Despite this ominous backdrop, Miller states that "an air of the dream clings to the place," which seems somewhat desperate and perhaps delusional considering the surroundings. Inside, the simple, functional set has only one extraneous element, "a silver athletic trophy" sitting on a shelf, as though it were a reminder of a past glory now long gone. The transparency of the set allows the past to mingle with the present, suggesting that we cannot escape the past, even if it might be beneficial to do so.
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Miller creates this disorienting backdrop to open his play and then concludes with Willy in the backyard frantically planting seeds in a garden where nothing will grow because the surrounding apartment buildings have "boxed in the whole goddamned neighborhood!". Miller suggests that Willy's desperation is the result of his belief in a false reality, which his son Biff confirms at Willy's funeral when he says, "He had the wrong dreams. All, all, wrong." What makes Willy's demise so tragic is that we are led to believe that Willy could have made different decisions that would have led to a more fulfilling life, but as Biff notes, "He never knew who he was."
We remind students that the setting of a novel or play is an artificial construct. As a result, students should examine how the settings provide clues to the author's intent. While the beginning and ending scenes of a novel or play are always important, there are often pivotal scenes in the middle of a work that carry thematic significance. For instance, in Kate Chopin's The Awakening, the day after Edna takes her baptismal swim after hearing Mademoiselle Reisz play the piano at Grand Isle, she decides to take a boat over to a nearby island, the Cheniere Caminada, for Sunday mass. She invites Robert, her lover-to-be, to join her, which we believe is one more act of liberation as Edna forges her new independent identity:
Sailing across the bay to the Cheniere Caminada, Edna felt as if she were being borne away from some anchorage which had held her fast, whose chains had been loosening—had snapped the night before when the mystic spirit was abroad, leaving her free to drift whithersoever she chose to set her sails.
When Edna is overcome by a "feeling of oppression and drowsiness" during the church service, Robert takes her to Madame Antoine's to rest. The bedroom is described as "immaculately clean, and the big, four-posted bed, snow-white, invited one to repose." The allusion to "Snow White" is coupled with an allusion to "Sleeping Beauty" when Edna awakes and asks Robert how long she has slept. He replies, "You have slept precisely one hundred years. I was left here to guard your slumbers; and for one hundred years I have been out under the shed reading a book." The question for students to consider is why Chopin would allude to these fairy tales and whether they are a positive or negative sign for Edna's desire for liberation and independence. Since we have already identified Chopin's novel as a feminist text, how would a feminist interpret these fairy tales? One possible activity is to have students work in small groups to analyze one of the fairy tales and what the allusion suggests about Edna's situation:
In a feminist reading of both fairy tales, students should recognize that Snow White and Sleeping Beauty are passive characters who need to be "rescued" by men to "live happily ever after." Even though Edna has a romantic interest in Robert, would Chopin want Edna to put her faith in Robert to "save" her? After students present their analysis to the rest of the class, it should be noted that Chopin concludes this chapter with an ominous tone. As the sun sets, Chopin writes, "The shadows lengthened and crept out like stealthy, grotesque monsters." When Edna and Robert step into Tonie's boat and prepare to return to Grand Isle, Chopin writes that "misty spirit forms were prowling in the shadows and among the reeds, and upon the water were phantom ships, speeding to cover," which seems to foreshadow that Edna's fairy tale might not have a happy ending after all.
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At the conclusion of Toni Morrison's Beloved, the narrator states, "This is not a story to pass on," which is filled with obvious ambiguity. Are we meant to forget this story and not re-tell it, or is this a story that we should embrace and not look past? The character of Beloved remains mysterious from beginning to end, and readers are left wondering if she has been a positive or negative influence on the characters' lives. If we are meant to believe that Beloved symbolically represents the legacy of slavery and the "disremembered and unaccounted for" in our nation's past, how should we psychologically move forward as a nation? Should we deliberately reopen those wounds or should we try to bury the past since "[r]emembering seemed unwise"?
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To further emphasize Beloved's ambiguity, Morrison ends the novel with a final description of the setting around 124 Bluestone after Beloved has seemingly disappeared:​​​
Down by the stream in back of 124 her footprints come and go, come and go. They are so familiar. Should a child, an adult place his feet in them, they will fit. Take them out and they disappear again as though nobody ever walked there.
By and by all trace is gone, and what is forgotten is not only the footprints but the water too and what is down there. The rest is weather. Not the breath of the disremembered and unaccounted for, but wind in the eaves, or spring ice thawing too quickly. Just weather. Certainly no clamor for a kiss.
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Beloved.
To discuss the role of the setting in the novel's ambiguous conclusion, we use the following Philosophical Chairs activity to have students determine whether the ending is meant to be positive or negative:
As students discuss Morrison's final description of the setting around 124 Bluestone, they should consider the symbolic significance that Beloved's footprints "come and go, come and go" and that if anyone—children and adults, alike—puts their feet inside the prints, "they will fit." Students should also consider why when "all trace is gone," the narrator repeats that "[t]he rest his just weather"—only "the wind in the eaves, or spring ice thawing too quickly." What it is not, the narrator insists, is "the breath of the disremembered and the unaccounted for," nor does it "clamor for a kiss." Then, the narrator paradoxically concludes the story with a final one-word paragraph of that which is supposedly gone and not to be remembered: "Beloved."
As students discuss the ambiguous ending, they should also consider how Morrison uses the ambiguity to convey the the complicated legacy of slavery and overall theme of her novel. We remind students that there will never be a definitive answer to our questions because, as the French literary critic Roland Barthes notes, "Literature is the question minus the answer." Nonetheless, whenever we analyze a particular setting within a literary work, we encourage students to assume that the scene has been crafted with a specific purpose in mind. Students need to consider what the setting not only symbolizes, but how the author or playwright uses that setting to convey "the meaning of the work as a whole."