Setting In Literature: Definition, Importance, & Examples
- Melchior Antoine
- Oct 18
- 7 min read
Updated: Nov 23
Setting plays a big role in establishing mood or atmosphere in a story, and this is not just true of short stories, novels, and movies. It is equally true for plays and shorter works like poems. In addition to mood and tone, the setting in literary works also contributes to the wider theme and meaning of a literary text.
Before we explain how that works, let’s begin with a formal definition of the term:
A setting refers to the time and place in which a story is told.
It is that simple. But is it really? In this article, we look at the role played by setting using examples from Thomas Hardy’s “The Voice,” and Shakespeare’s Othello.
Setting and mood
Let’s look at a poem to see the role that setting plays in establishing the tone and mood in a piece of literature. The poem in question is Thomas Hardy’s “The Voice” (published in 1912):
Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me,
Saying that now you are not as you were
When you had changed from the one who was all to me,
But as at first, when our day was fair.
Can it be you that I hear? Let me view you, then,
Standing as when I drew near to the town
Where you would wait for me: yes, as I knew you then,
Even to the original air-blue gown!
Or is it only the breeze, in its listlessness
Travelling across the wet mead to me here,
You being ever dissolved to wan wistlessness,
Heard no more again far or near?
Thus I; faltering forward,
Leaves around me falling,
Wind oozing thin through the thorn from norward,
And the woman calling.
In the first two stanzas of the poem, the writer is making reference to the possibility of a woman calling to him. It is Thomas Hardy's deceased first wife, Emma Gifford. In the third stanza, we see him knocking the wind out of the possibility by mentioning that it is merely the wind blowing through the tall grasses or trees in the mead (or meadows). Hardy is using defamiliarization, where something as ordinary as the sound of the wind is likened to a dead woman communicating to him.
Curiously, the setting described in the first two stanzas is that of woman in a town dressed in an "air-blue gown." It is an unreal setting located in the poet's memory. We can say that the unromantic description of the meadows is being used to bring the writer back to reality. His pathetic hope that he’s possibly hearing the voice of his deceased wife is described as “only the breeze, in it listlessness,” whereas his wife has “dissolved to wan wistlessness.”
The setting of the poem in short highlights the despair and grief that the persona is experiencing. It can be described as a cruel setting. It first raises or excites the persona with the possibility that his dead wife may be speaking to him in the first two stanzas, only for the poet to realize it's just the physical sound of leaves in the wind.
In the last stanza, the poet’s incurable despair is symbolized in the imagery of the wind “oozing thin through the thorn,” with the word thorn suggesting his pain. The last line ends with the delusion of “the woman calling,” which suggests that the poet will be haunted by the memory of his deceased wife for the rest of his life.
Setting and character & plot
There are instances where setting plays a major role in affecting character and plot. A good example of this is the plot and narrative arc for Othello and Desdemona in Shakespeare’s Othello. The play occurs across two main settings: Venice (Act 1) and Cyprus (Acts 2–5). In Venice, in terms of character, Othello and Desdemona seem like a perfect couple.
They are able to sail through the tension, challenge, and drama of Desdemona’s father, Brabantio, protesting his daughter’s elopement with Othello. Brabantio goes as far as accusing Othello of witchcraft. This accusation is put to rest, when before the Duke of Venice, Desdemona explains that she chose Othello of her own free will:
My noble father,
I do perceive here a divided duty.
To you I am bound for life and education.
My life and education both do learn me
How to respect you. You are the lord of duty.
I am hitherto your daughter. But here’s my husband.
And so much duty as my mother showed
To you, preferring you before her father,
So much I challenge that I may profess
Due to the Moor my lord. (Act 1, Scene 3)
This is a gentle but firm assertion by Desdemona of her right to choose her own husband. She turns the table on her father by telling him that her proper upbringing by him (i.e., life and education that she owes him) has taught her duty first and foremost to her husband as much “as my mother showed / To you.” In short, his own marriage to Desdemona’s mother is the model that Desdemona has followed in choosing Othello.
He sees the justice and reason in her argument and relents by telling Othello after handing over Desdemona to him:
I here do give thee that with all my heart
Which, but thou hast already, with all my heart
I would keep from thee.
Othello also exhibits high self-esteem and confidence. When Brabantio threatens to take him to the Duke to hold him accountable for stealing away Desdemona using witchcraft, he answers confidently:
Let him do his spite.
My services which I have done the signiory
Shall out-tongue his complaints . . .
… I fetch my life and being
From men of royal siege, and my demerits
May speak unbonneted to as proud a fortune
As this that I have reached. (Act 1, Scene 2)
However, after the married couple moves to Cyprus, disaster unfolds. Othello grows jealous and arrogant, and Desdemona becomes weak and submissive, refusing to protest against groundless allegations of cheating on her husband. Why does this happen?
The setting may have a lot to do with it. Venice can be described as a complete or whole society. Othello, a Moor (or Black man), is able to find a place in a complicated society, which despite its racial prejudice or prejudice against foreigners, accepts him because of his proven martial and leadership ability. He is not merely respected for his ability as a soldier and general but treated honorably by the elites of Venice.
The same can be said of Desdemona. She was raised in a sophisticated society where a woman has a right to assert her choice of a husband, and in her we see a balance between being assertive and being genteel. However, Cyprus is a military outpost and presumably lacks the layers, depth, and sophistication of Venetian society. There, Desdemona is reduced to a stereotype of the submissive and abused wife and Othello is turned into the stereotype of the jealous, arrogant, and savage Moor.
In a military outpost, Desdemona lacks the familial relationships and support that made her into the assertive woman we saw in Act 1, where she defends her right to choose her own husband before her father and the entirety of the Venetian court. She cannot rely on her father for protection or retreat or any of the women in her family for counsel and support.
On the other hand, Othello is nothing but a soldier in the military outpost of Cyprus. All of his instincts as a soldier, especially the willingness to act and maneuver quickly, kick in in terms of the rash decisions that he makes. This military instinct presumably would have been curtailed in the more sophisticated Venetian society.
More than that, the military setting means that he relies too heavily on his ensign (a military position) — the jealous villain Iago — for social support and counsel, who poisons him against his own wife and who exacerbates his internal conflict defined by his being a Black foreigner in Venice, charged with protecting the state to which, in his other life before his conversion to Christianity, he would have been an enemy.
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Setting as a character: The case of pathetic fallacy
The setting of a literary work can also be personified as a character in and of itself. This is through a form of personification known as pathetic fallacy. So, what exactly is pathetic fallacy?
This is where human qualities are attributed to things of nature or the landscape. A good example is from Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations (published in 1861). The following describes the setting in a chapter (Chapter 39) just before Pip encounters his secret benefactor, Magwitch:
Day after day, a vast heavy veil had been driving over London from the East . . . . So furious had been the gusts, that high buildings in town had had the lead stripped off their roofs; and in the country, trees had been torn up, and sails of windmills carried away; and gloomy accounts had come in from the coast, of shipwreck and death. Violent blasts of rain had accompanied these rages of wind, and the day just closed as I sat down to read had been the worst of all.
The description here brings nature to life. Gusts of wind are described as furious, as well as “rages of wind,” whereas the rain is said to be “violent.” Charles Dickens is using the landscape here to foreshadow a revelation of the truth that will turn the worldview of the protagonist upside down.
Pip, the main character, is about to learn that his benefactor for several years is an escaped convict, not the genteel aristocrat he supposed. In short, Dickens transforms the landscape and setting into a character to reflect the mood and nature of the events that our character is about to experience. Victorian novelists were particularly fond of using pathetic fallacy as a literary device.
Another potent example of pathetic fallacy being used to turn the setting of nature into a character is from another Victorian novelist, Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (published in 1847). In the following passage, the main character describes the night she accepts a proposal of marriage from Mr. Rochester:
But what had befallen the night? The moon was not yet set, and we were all in shadow: I could scarcely see my master’s face, near as I was. And what ailed the chestnut tree? it writhed and groaned; while wind roared in the laurel walk, and came sweeping over us.
A proposal of marriage should be a joyful occasion, but it's as if the weather is trying to warn her that something is wrong. Well, it turns out that Mr. Rochester is already married to a crazy woman, Bertha, whom he keeps locked up in the attic. She eventually burns down Mr. Rochester's house before committing suicide. We could even go as far as to say that the wind roaring in the laurel walk was her malevolent spirit warning Jane to stay away from her husband or else.
Cite this EminentEdit article |
Antoine, M. (2025, October 18). Setting In Literature: Definition, Importance, & Examples. EminentEdit. https://www.eminentediting.com/post/setting |
