The Power of Setting

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The Power of Setting

• Using setting to establish mood

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From The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne

• The wooden jail was already marked with
  weather-stains and other indications of age,
  which gave a yet darker aspect to its
  beetle-browed and gloomy front. The rust on the
  ponderous iron-work of its oaken door looked more
  antique than anything else in the New World. Like
  all that pertains to crime, it seemed never to
  have known a youthful era.

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From Custom House by Nathaniel Hawthorne

• In the town of Salem, at the head of what, half
  a century ago, in the days of old King Derby, was
  a bustling wharfbut which is now burdened with
  decayed wooden warehouses, and exhibits few or no
  symptoms of commercial life except, perhaps, a
  bark or brig, half-way down its melancholy
  length, discharging hides or, nearer at hand, a
  Nova Scotia schooner, pitching out her cargo of
  firewoodat the head, I say, of this dilapidated
  wharf, which the tide often overflows, and along
  which, at the base and in the rear of the row of
  buildings, the track of many languid years is
  seen in a border of unthrifty grasshere, with a
  view from its front windows adown this not very
  enlivening prospect, and thence across the
  harbour, stands a spacious edifice of brick.

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From White Fang by Jack London

• Dark spruce forest frowned on either side the
  frozen waterway. The trees had been stripped by a
  recent wind of their white covering of frost, and
  they seemed to lean towards each other, black and
  ominous, in the fading light. A vast silence
  reigned over the land. The land itself was a
  desolation, lifeless, without movement, so lone
  and cold that the spirit of it was not even that
  of sadness. There was a hint in it of laughter,
  but of a laughter more terrible than any sadness
  - a laughter that was mirthless as the smile of
  the sphinx, a laughter cold as the frost and
  partaking of the grimness of infallibility. It
  was the masterful and incommunicable wisdom of
  eternity laughing at the futility of life and the
  effort of life. It was the Wild, the savage,
  frozen- hearted Northland Wild.

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From The Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum

• The cyclone had set the house down very
  gently--for a cyclone--in the midst of a country
  of marvelous beauty. There were lovely patches of
  greensward all about, with stately trees bearing
  rich and luscious fruits. Banks of gorgeous
  flowers were on every hand, and birds with rare
  and brilliant plumage sang and fluttered in the
  trees and bushes. A little way off was a small
  brook, rushing and sparkling along between green
  banks, and murmuring in a voice very grateful to
  a little girl who had lived so long on the dry,
  gray prairies.

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From The Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum

• Even with eyes protected by the green
  spectacles, Dorothy and her friends were at first
  dazzled by the brilliancy of the wonderful City.
  The streets were lined with beautiful houses all
  built of green marble and studded everywhere with
  sparkling emeralds. They walked over a pavement
  of the same green marble, and where the blocks
  were joined together were rows of emeralds, set
  closely, and glittering in the brightness of the
  sun. The window panes were of green glass even
  the sky above the City had a green tint, and the
  rays of the sun were green.

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From The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane

• The cold passed reluctantly from the earth, and
  the retiring fogs revealed an army stretched out
  on the hills, resting. As the landscape changed
  from brown to green, the army awak- ened, and
  began to tremble with eagerness at the noise of
  rumors. It cast its eyes upon the roads, which
  were growing from long troughs of liquid mud to
  proper thoroughfares. A river, amber- tinted in
  the shadow of its banks, purled at the army's
  feet and at night, when the stream had become of
  a sorrowful blackness, one could see across it
  the red, eyelike gleam of hostile camp- fires set
  in the low brows of distant hills.

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From A Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

• A squat grey building of only thirty-four
  stories. Over the main entrance the words,
  Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre,
  and, in a shield, the World States motto,
  Community, Identity, Stability.
• The enormous room on the ground floor faced
  towards the north. Cold for all the summer beyond
  the panes, for all the tropical heat of the room
  itself, a harsh thin light glared through the
  windows, hungrily seeking some draped lay figure,
  some pallid shape of academic goose-flesh, but
  finding only the glass and nickel and bleakly
  shining porcelain of a laboratory. Wintriness
  responded to wintriness. The overalls of the
  workers were white, their hands gloved with a
  pale corpse-coloured rubber. The light was
  frozen, dead, a ghost. Only from the yellow
  barrels of the microscopes did it borrow a
  certain rich and living substance, lying along
  the polished tubes like butter, streak after
  luscious streak in long recession down the work
  tables.

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From The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot

• A wide plain, where the broadening Floss hurries
  on between its green banks to the sea, and the
  loving tide, rushing to meet it, checks its
  passage with an impetuous embrace. On this mighty
  tide the black ships - laden with the
  fresh-scented fir-planks, with rounded sacks of
  oil-bearing seed, or with the dark glitter of
  coal - are borne along to the town of St. Ogg's,
  which shows its aged, fluted red roofs and the
  broad gables of its wharves between the low
  wooded hill and the river-brink, tingeing the
  water with a soft purple hue under the transient
  glance of this February sun. Far away on each
  hand stretch the rich pastures, and the patches
  of dark earth made ready for the seed of
  broad-leaved green crops, or touched already with
  the tint of the tender-bladed autumn-sown corn.
  There is a remnant still of last year's golden
  clusters of beehive-ricks rising at intervals
  beyond the hedgerows and everywhere the
  hedgerows are studded with trees the distant
  ships seem to be lifting their masts and
  stretching their red-brown sails close among the
  branches of the spreading ash. Just by the
  red-roofed town the tributary Ripple flows with a
  lively current into the Floss. How lovely the
  little river is, with its dark changing wavelets!
  It seems to me like a living companion while I
  wander along the bank, and listen to its low,
  placid voice, as to the voice of one who is deaf
  and loving. I remember those large dipping
  willows. I remember the stone bridge

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See Hear - Feel

• Look at the picture on the following slide and
  write a paragraph or two focusing solely on
  describing and developing setting.
• Use descriptive words and phrases that provide
  the reader with the sights and sounds of the
  setting as well the physical feeling of being
  there.
• Avoid entering into the plot or action that may
  be lingering around the corner
• You may insert any people present into your
  description, but avoid developing them as a
  character. Simply include them as part of the
  surroundings.

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See Hear - Feel
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The Mountain Pass

• As the morning sun slowly rose on the tall,
  majestic peaks, a sudden chill worked its way
  down the mountain. Winter wasnt ready to give in
  just yet. Its grip on the season, having frozen
  every drop of moisture left by the fleeing
  spring, summer, and fall, was brutal and cruel. A
  hiker, braving the elements, looked out across
  the ravine in front of him and felt the enormity
  of his task. Above the tree line, the world
  became suddenly exposed, the safety of the pines
  windbreak no longer was there to protect. Now all
  was open and bare. The sun began to climb higher
  now, lighting the soaring peaks, producing
  dizzying arrays of luminosity, reflecting
  downward along the slopes. The brightness seemed
  to offer a hope, a hope that the harsh winter
  would finally relent, a hope that the deep,
  treacherous ravines, filled with ice and snow,
  would begin to open once again to human
  intruders, a hope that life itself could once
  more take hold of the land, breaking through the
  bitter, unforgiving coldness. Spring was on its
  way, and for the hiker, could not appear too
  soon.

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See Hear - Feel