Lesson 1.2 · Unit 1 · Short Fiction I · SET 2.A, 2.B
Setting and what it does
Students lose the setting point by stopping at the weather. “The setting is gloomy” is a paraphrase; “the setting functions to…” is the start of an argument.
Setting is everything the characters move through (place, hour, weather, the social world), and every detail of it was chosen. Ask what each one makes possible, impossible, or inevitable.
- SET-1.A. Setting includes the time and place during which the events of the text occur.
- SET-1.B. Setting includes the social, cultural, and historical situation during which the events of the text occur.
- SET-1.C. A setting may help establish the mood and atmosphere of a narrative.
- SET-1.D. The environment a character inhabits provides information about that character.
- Setting (SET 2.A): place, time, weather, and social world; the conditions a character lives under, not a backdrop behind them.
- Atmosphere (SET 2.A): the feeling those details produce. Naming it is the first step of analysis, never the last.
- Function of setting (SET 2.B): what the place does to the story: shapes a character, limits a choice, embodies a conflict, prepares an ending.
- Setting given a body (SET 2.B), when a place is described with human parts or moods, it stops holding the action and starts acting.
About the text: Edgar Allan Poe, “The Fall of the House of Usher,” first published 1839. From the story's opening paragraph; the ellipses mark internal cuts.
During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country; and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher. I know not how it was — but, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit. … There was an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart — an unredeemed dreariness of thought which no goading of the imagination could torture into aught of the sublime. … acting upon this idea, I reined my horse to the precipitous brink of a black and lurid tarn that lay in unruffled lustre by the dwelling, and gazed down — but with a shudder even more thrilling than before — upon the remodelled and inverted images of the gray sedge, and the ghastly tree-stems, and the vacant and eye-like windows.
Poe's opening does not decorate the story with a mood; it builds a place that performs the narrator's dread for him. The house returns his look through “the vacant and eye-like windows”, the anatomy of a face with the sight removed, so that being watched and being unseen arrive in the same phrase. When he tries to correct the impression by studying the “black and lurid tarn,” he finds only “the remodelled and inverted images” of what he has already seen. The second look was supposed to test the first; instead it repeats it upside down. The setting functions to shut off escape by re-examination: the trap the narrator spends the story inside.
Exam tip: the point is in the sentence after the adjective. “The mood is gloomy” paraphrases; “the gloom comes from a house given a face and no sight” explains.
Write one paragraph arguing what this setting functions to do, not what mood it creates. Quote two phrases of eight words or fewer and explain how each produces the effect you name.
Show a model response
Poe uses the setting to strip his narrator of his senses before the story proper begins. The day is “dull, dark, and soundless,” three adjectives that each take something away (color, light, sound), so he arrives already short of what he would need to judge the house fairly. Then the building looks back at him with “vacant and eye-like windows,” which face him without seeing him. The setting functions to put him in a world that watches and withholds at once: the relation he will have with Roderick Usher throughout.
Rubric: the opening sentence claims a function rather than a mood (Row A); each quotation is followed by the sentence explaining its effect (Row B).