Lesson 1.4 · Unit 1 · RL.9-10.3
Place, time, and the pressure they apply
Setting is usually taught as where and when a story happens, which makes it sound like scenery. It is better understood as a set of constraints on what the characters can do, and the constraints are often the story.
- Setting has four components: place, time, social conditions, and weather or atmosphere.
- Setting constrains action. What a character may do depends on where and when they are, and a story often turns on a constraint the reader has to notice.
- Setting produces mood, since the same events read differently in a bright kitchen and in a catacomb.
- Setting can function as antagonist, where the place or the age is what the character struggles against.
- Social setting is the most frequently missed, because a reader who shares the assumptions of the story's world does not see them as assumptions.
- Historical distance changes meaning, so a reader has to reconstruct what a detail meant to its first audience.
- Setting can be a symbol, where the place carries a meaning beyond itself, which lesson 1.7 develops.
- A change of setting often marks a change in the story, so noticing where a scene moves is a reliable way to find its structure.
Where students lose marks: describing the setting instead of using it. The examinable move is to name a constraint the setting imposes and show an action that depends on it.
The text. Kate Chopin, "The Story of an Hour", 1894, and Edgar Allan Poe, "The Cask of Amontillado", 1846. Both public domain.
There stood, facing the open window, a comfortable, roomy armchair. Into this she sank, pressed down by a physical exhaustion that haunted her body and seemed to reach into her soul. She could see in the open square before her house the tops of trees that were all aquiver with the new spring life. The delicious breath of rain was in the air.
We came at length to the foot of the descent, and stood together on the damp ground of the catacombs of the Montresors. The drops of moisture trickle among the bones. We are below the river's bed.
Step one: work the Chopin passage for its four components. Place: an upstairs room with a window on a square. Time: spring, daytime. Social conditions: a household with servants and a sister, in the 1890s. Weather: rain approaching, trees in new leaf.
Step two: notice what the season is doing. Louise is supposed to be beginning a widowhood, and everything outside the window is beginning a life. Chopin did not have to set this in spring. The choice puts the character's official emotion in contradiction with the world she is looking at.
Step three: identify the constraint. She is upstairs, alone, behind a closed door, with her sister outside begging to be let in. That arrangement is what allows the story to happen: she can only discover the joy in private, and the social setting means it could not be discovered anywhere else.
Step four: state the social setting explicitly. A married woman in 1894 has no independent legal and economic standing to speak of, which is why the death of a husband can present itself as the arrival of a life. A modern reader who does not reconstruct this will find her reaction extreme rather than intelligible.
Step five: turn to the Poe passage and work the place. Underground, damp, lined with bones, below the river's bed. Every element is chosen and none is decorative.
Step six: identify the constraints it imposes. Below ground nobody can hear. Among bones a further corpse is unremarkable. Below the river the damp explains both the niter on the walls and Fortunato's cough, which is what the narrator uses to press wine on him. The setting supplies the murder weapon, the concealment and the pretext.
Step seven: note the tense. "The drops of moisture trickle among the bones." Present tense, in a story told fifty years later. For one sentence the narrator is back there, which tells us something about how present the event remains to him, and it is the setting that triggers it.
Step eight: state the general test. Ask what the characters could not do if the setting were changed. Move Chopin's scene to a crowded parlor and the story is impossible. Move Poe's to a garden and there is no concealment, no cough, no niter and no story. A setting that survives that test is doing work; one that does not is scenery.
Questions 1 to 5 are recall. Questions 6 to 10 ask for reasoning.
- Name the four components of setting.
Show the full solution
Place, time, social conditions, and weather or atmosphere
- What does it mean to say setting constrains action?
Show the full solution
What a character may do depends on where and when they are
- Which component is most often missed, and why?
Show the full solution
Social conditions, because a reader who shares the story's assumptions does not see them as assumptions
- What does a change of setting often mark?
Show the full solution
A change in the story, which makes it useful for finding structure
- State the test for whether a setting is doing work.
Show the full solution
Ask what the characters could not do if the setting were changed
- What is spring doing in the Chopin passage?
Show the full solution
Louise is supposed to be beginning a widowhood, and everything through the window is beginning a life: trees aquiver with new spring life, the breath of rain. Chopin did not have to set the story in spring, and choosing it puts the character's official emotion in direct contradiction with the world she is looking at. The season is arguing with the funeral, which is why the passage feels charged before anything happens. It contradicts the grief she is expected to feel, putting the season against the occasion
- Identify the constraint that makes Chopin's story possible.
Show the full solution
She is upstairs, alone, behind a closed door, with her sister outside begging to be let in. That arrangement is the condition of the whole story: she can only discover the joy in private, and the social setting of an 1890s household means privacy is available in exactly one place and for a limited time. Put her anywhere she can be observed and the recognition cannot occur. A locked room in a household where privacy exists nowhere else
- Explain what a modern reader must reconstruct to find Louise intelligible.
Show the full solution
That a married woman in 1894 had almost no independent legal or economic standing, so her husband's existence largely determined the shape of her life and his death could genuinely present itself as the arrival of one. A reader who imports modern assumptions will find her reaction extreme or monstrous. Reconstructing the social setting converts an apparently shocking response into a comprehensible one, which is what historical distance requires. A wife's lack of independent legal and economic standing in 1894
- List three things Poe's setting supplies to the plot.
Show the full solution
Concealment, since below ground nobody can hear and among existing bones a further corpse is unremarkable. A pretext, since the damp below the river's bed produces the cough that lets Montresor press wine on Fortunato and appear concerned. And the means, since the niter on the walls and the masonry of the catacombs are what he builds the wall from. The setting is the murder weapon, the hiding place and the excuse. Concealment, the cough that supplies a pretext, and the masonry itself
- What does the present tense in "The drops of moisture trickle among the bones" reveal?
Show the full solution
The story is told fifty years after the events, in the past tense throughout, and for one sentence the narrator slips into the present. He is back there. That tells us the event has not receded for him in half a century, which complicates his earlier claim to calm and deliberate satisfaction. The setting is what triggers the slip, which is a second way place operates in the story. The event is still present to him fifty years later, undercutting his claimed calm