Lecture 18: Evoking Setting and Place in Fiction
z Even if we hadn’t already been told that this is a haunted house, it would
be impossible for anybody to read this description and not understand
immediately that there is something wrong with this house—that there
is something bad waiting inside.z Notice that Hawkes uses the word VLOHQFH six times in this description.
Although normally the repetition of a word that many times in so short a
passage would be anathema to writers, here, it has the effect of making
the silence ominous. Note, too, that VLOHQFH is paired with active verbs—
IDOOV, GHHSHQV, PXUPXU[s]—changing it from an absence of sound to an
active presence in the house.Setting to Evoke Character
z In addition, setting can be used to tell readers about the characters in a
story. For example, a description of a room or a house is often used to
tell us something about the person who lives there.z One of the major plotlines in George Eliot’s 0LGGOHPDUFK is the ill-
advised marriage between Dorothea Brooke, an intense young woman in
her early 20s, and Edward Casaubon, a dry and humorless scholar who
is 30 years her senior. Early in the book, after their surprise engagement,
Dorothea goes to visit Mr. Casaubon’s home:The building, of greenish stone, was in the old English style, not
ugly, but small-windowed and melancholy-looking .... In this
latter end of autumn ... the house too had an air of autumnal
decline, and Mr. Casaubon, when he presented himself, had
no bloom that could be thrown into relief by that background.
(pp. 73–74)z Nearly everything that Eliot says about the house—that it is “not ugly,
but small-windowed and melancholy” and that it has an air of “autumnal
decline”—could also be said about Casaubon himself. The last clause of
the passage is one of the great backhanded insults in English literature:
the fact that there is nothing about Casaubon himself that could be
“thrown into relief” by his joyless home.