Setting is essential to narrative, but it’s something that students often overlook. My experience with teaching literature is that students want to talk about what happens next and often something that’s vaguely like character motivation, but they need help moving beyond plot. Talking and writing about setting forces students to look at the details of the narrative and requires a careful examination of the words on the page.
I often introduce setting by showing students clips from particularly atmospheric movies—The Shining’s opening sequence; Fargo; almost anything by Tim Burton. While watching the brief clips, I have the students make a list of significant (or not-so-significant) details that they notice about the setting. We then talk about how all of these elements and details work together to set the tone of the movie. That long opening sequence of The Shining, for example, intensifies the feeling of dread, and highlights the sheer isolation—both physical and emotional—of the main character.
Moving from movies to literature itself can be a bit complicated. I want students to do more than simply explain how the setting establishes the tone, because setting is more important than simply being part of the atmosphere. To do this, we talk about symbolism, typically within Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. I have students come up with a list of symbols and have them work through what they might represent in the story. I try to steer discussion towards the physical objects—the items within the setting—as we work our way through the final act of the play. My favorite symbol is the mailbox: it is the way that information from outside of the home enters the Helmers’ apartment, the conduit between the public space and the private space. And only Torvald has the key. We discuss the way that this shows Torvald’s control over information and ultimately over Nora.
On a subsequent day, we read “Hills like White Elephants,” and we talk about the way that Hemingway describes the landscape. Students are pretty good at picking up on the importance of the train station setting – we talk about the difference between a train station and a fork in the road (and we’ve, of course, read Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken”). We discuss the relevance of these elements to the characters’ lives. We also discuss the fact that “I’m-so-minimalist-I-don’t-need-speaker-tags”-Hemingway devotes an entire paragraph to describing the scenery of the Ebro valley.
After it seems like they have a good handle on it, I set the students to work writing about how setting affects our interpretation of two different texts. I give the students a couple of options: to write about how the setting develops the main characters or to write about how the setting develops the theme of the narrative. My point in doing this is to help students understand how the essential nature of the setting contributes to our understanding of the text.
Of course, I want students to think about setting as more than symbol—so I give them other options aside from the Ibsen and Hemingway to write about, including (this semester) Charlotte Perkin Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” and Richard Wright’s “The Man Who Was Almost a Man.” While these texts can be examined for the symbolic aspects of the setting, they are also texts that can clearly only happen in one specific time and place. Modern readers may recognize some degree of universal experience within the texts, but these two are deeply rooted in their own moments in history.
What I really want to promote with the students is the idea that a literary text isn’t simply its plot. The work consists of much more than that, and looking at setting is a deliberative way to break students out of the paradigm they bring into the classroom.
How do you teach setting? What other methods to you use to steer students away from one-dimensional plot summary?