Setting: Psychological Environment

Given the preponderance of plot in much writing done today, setting often gets shortchanged. It’s not number one on many people’s list of features in a work of fiction. Plot, of course comes first. Many are aware of the need for character development and for good dialogue, but setting often gets little attention. Yet it is an important element, one that must not be neglected, and one that skillful writers exploit to their advantage.

Setting is the background to a story, where the story takes places. It is both the locale—the place where the action transpires, as in London, Paris, Bakersfield, New York City, New Haven; it is also the location:  a bar, a golf course, a haunted house, a suburban house that is anything but haunted, the countryside. But it is much more. Setting creates effect. It gives the mood and atmosphere to a story.

Mood and atmosphere is vital, and it’s a good idea to determine it early on. One of my all-time favorite passages that sets the mood is the beginning of Edgar Alan Poe’s classic story, “The Fall of the House of Usher.” I will quote the opening section here in full:  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.

Is this going to be a happy story? I don’t think so. Poe sets the mood up right away. It is going to be a gloomy story, an oppressive story, and a story of melancholy. And if you’ve read the tale of a mad brother who buries his sister alive, you know that Poe did what he wanted to do. He produced a narrative that equals his opening sentence, and then some.

Poe gives the story a psychological environment, which is another term literary critics use for setting. I like it. The setting creates this kind of feeling. It puts us in a certain mental and emotional disposition. Skillful writers know how to create this psychological environment and set it in such a way that it contributes to the story.

Another example is one of my very favorite stories, “Janus,” by Ann Beattie. It is the story of a realtor. The story is filled with empty houses, empty rooms, and the quiet of someone preparing a home for viewing by potential purchasers. This sets the mood of distant loneliness in Andrea, the realtor’s, life. She is married but not entirely happy. She had an affair some time ago that faded away. She is still married but seems alienated from her husband. And she is obsessed with a bowl.

The bowl was something her old lover bought for her at an antique sale, and Andrea always uses it when she shows a home. It is one of the “devices” she uses to make a home look more attractive when it is being shown. People sometimes want to buy the bowl. Once or twice she leaves it in a house and panics until she can recover it. Somehow it is symbolic—perhaps the empty bowl represents her empty life. It sits in the vacant, unlived-in houses that are the setting of much of the story.

Janus is the Roman god of the New Year, and he has two faces, one looking back and one looking forward. But he is also the god of doorways, of entrances, of passages. Going through doors is important in a home tour. Bettie uses setting—in this case, empty houses, numerous rooms, doors to pass through, quiet, vacancy—to set the psychological atmosphere of this story about a woman who lives in an emptiness she does not understand.

These are two examples of skillful use of setting. Many writers today seem to think that setting is a distraction, that we can simply say a person is in a house, on a spaceship, or in an airplane and this will suffice. Failing to exploit the element of setting, however—failing to create mood and atmosphere, to establish a psychological environment—will impoverish a story and cause it to tend toward superficiality. Set the mood. Create the atmosphere. This will take the story into full expressiveness.