Setting: A story’s support and meaning
By Michael Lin
“Authors use setting to create meaning, just as painters use backgrounds and objects to render ideas.”
~Eudora Welty
Often overlooked and brushed past, setting is the main supporting column of any great story. Without setting, the characters wouldn’t have a place to be at all, anywhere, or to do anything, and time would just not exist, which is exactly why all stories have settings to begin with, but Welty’s settings in particular always push the story forward in discrete yet meaningful ways. While the setting in Welty’s stories often lays in the background, it also creates meaning in the stories, just like how a painting’s background adds to the whole piece itself. Though sometimes taken for granted as just the backdrop to the plot, a firm grasp on setting can actually bring many elements together (such as internal versus external, a trap and then a release) in the analysts’ mind.
Born into a loving family and home on North Congress Street in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1909, Welty was brought into a setting that rivals her own works. Waking up to gongs of a grandfather clock that echoed “through the living room, dining room, kitchen, and pantry, and up the sounding board of the stairwell,” (One Writer’s Beginnings, 1).
Welty would soak in her environment, taking everything she listened to and saw to heart. At a very young age, she was quite time-minded and learned chronology immediately as a girl. Not only was she herself a sponge for information, but her parents were spouts that never stopped flowing. Welty’s father kept many gadgets and gizmos that gave Welty a sense of wonder: a kaleidoscope, barometer, gyroscope, and magnifying glass. Her mother, on the other hand, would not only read stories, but tell some of her own fascinating ones, such as how she survived through septicemia – a disease that even with today’s medicine can be lethal – by drinking champagne, or how she had kept “two polished buffalo nickels, embedded in white cotton” (OW’sB, 17) that were for her firstborn son who didn’t make it. In this pivotal moment that shocked her world as a child, Welty was simply playing around as a kid, fiddling with some “treasures of her [mother’s]” that she found in boxes. Welty finds the two nickels and rushes out to ask her mother if she could buy something with them, but Welty is immediately greeted with an extravagant “NO” from her mother. Welty inquires, and her mother eventually tells her how the two nickels were for her firstborn son who surprisingly died despite showing signs of being completely healthy. At this moment, Welty was bewildered – her world had been flipped upside down.
How did realizing that she was in fact not the oldest shape her elder sister mentality? How did uncovering this tragic secret change her perspective on her home and parents? Welty discusses how discovering a secret can often lead to also discovering a hidden, darker secret that was not meant to be seen. Essentially, how did discovering this ghastly secret modify her views on her parents and home being a safe place where everything was how it seemed?
The special way she grew up, absorbing everything around her, also made her think in her own special way too. From her childhood, Welty always pondered words themselves, and how they can connect to, or rise from, what they actually mean. For example, when she first saw a risen full moon, shining brightly, the connection between the 4 letters “m”, “o”, “o”, and “n”, connected to the big shining ball in the sky, with a similar shape to a plump Concord grape her Grandpa once gave to her. And it was at this moment “the word ‘moon’ came into her mouth as though fed to her out of a silver spoon” (OW’sB, 10). For myself and probably many others too, I just associate words with their meaning instantly if someone tells me what they mean; this deep, meaningful process where Welty simply connects the word moon with the glowing ball in the sky truly brings out how imaginative and creative she was from the start. However, Welty was under the impression that the sun and moon rose in their respective east and west sides, thinking that they “crossed over (when [she] wasn’t looking) and went down to the other side” (Welty 10). She held this erroneous view for quite some time, and it was only after literary critic Herschel Brickell pointed her misconception out to her, when she realized her mistake. He said, “Always be sure you get your moon in the right part of the sky.” Welty’s statement about setting is broad, but its true implications can be drawn from examining many of her stories under an individual close eye.
In “Death of a Traveling Salesman” (1936), her first published story and what brought her into national attention, the main character R.J. Bowman finds himself in a place he’s never been to before. After a “long siege of influenza” (Welty, 1), Bowman prematurely rushes out of the hospital, and he attempts to drive to Beulah (“as he remembered, Beulah was fifty miles away from the last town”), a trip he had already made and knew how to get to, yet he ends up on a cow trail, by a hill he had never seen before. In fact, he just didn’t want to admit he was lost – that he’d just driven out on this unknown trail for miles, and… he even crashed his car, solidifying the inescapability of the setting. This setting Bowman finds himself in is really half interior, being Bowman’s own interpretation of his surroundings, and the surroundings themselves. For example, Bowman describes a woman who lived in the only house nearby as stupid, shapeless, and growing old, also describing how his heart fluttered as he talked to her; but Bowman wanted to embrace and hold her, due to his lack of an actual connection to a woman. However, near the end of the novel, and his life, it is revealed that this old woman and her Sonny were actually a happily married couple, and the dusty husk of woman that Bowman envisioned was pregnant, was about to have her baby, and in the right light was attractive on top of that!
The setting actively influences how Bowman thinks and feels throughout the story, yet Welty reveals the real setting as being separate from Bowman’s misperceptions. It is rural farmland, with not many people, and he is helped by two who live in a cozy little shotgun house, but we never get to see that. All Bowman – and the reader – see is a desolate, unfriendly wasteland, the house having a “dark passage” (Welty, 3), it being cold and even silent with the woman right next to him talking. All of these aspects of the setting drive Bowman further and further along his deranged path. As the story drives on, the more Bowman soaks in the fact that he is alone, trapped with a creepy couple, the more anxious, skeptical, and fantastical he gets. Bowman starts imagining and theorizing about everything he sees, instead of actually looking at it. All in all, the setting and Bowman’s interior thoughts form a destructive cycle that drives him to death.
In “Livvie” a 16-year-old young girl is married to Solomon, a much wiser older figure, already at the end of his glory days. From this moment on, Solomon only got older and older, eventually becoming bedridden, and Livvie’s youth only crumbled away. Livvie spends the majority of her youth alongside the deteriorating Solomon because she loves him, and the setting only furthers this feeling. Solomon’s house contained cozy furnishings, such as a “three-legged table with a pink marble top,” a “lamp with 3 gold feet,” or even a “jelly glass with pretty hen feathers in it,” (Welty, 208). No bleak and bland ordinary apartment or house would just have such intricate and unique items inside of it. Just these few items add to the sense of homeyness and the feeling that a true person is living in there with their specific quirks and feelings, just like the furniture’s own eccentricities. However, this loving home is never actually referred to as the couple’s or Livvie’s, even though they are married. By definition, marriage would split the property fifty-fifty, yet Livvie calls it “Solomon’s house,” (Welty, 209). Furthermore, Livvie never seemed to actually have any free will in the story, even if she was caring for Solomon out of love. She always had to clean, cook, and care for Solomon, and when a cosmetics lady arrived at the house, Livvie had no money to even buy the lipstick she wanted, even though the it “carried her away in the air through the spring,” (Welty 213). She could do nothing as Miss Baby Marie said her goodbyes, and she stayed in the isolated house watching Miss Baby Marie drive off. At this point, Livvie has been happy in her confined world; she has been joyfully tending to Solomon’s every need because of love, but now, Livvie has been introduced to something from the outside world that she wants. For the first time, Livvie desires something that she currently can’t have. The cosmetics provide a link to the outside world that Livvie had never had before, with Miss Baby Marie even saying that Livvie is “far from anywhere” (Welty 214), “anywhere” being a place with people and actual things happening, something that Livvie has likely never lived in and enjoyed to her fullest extent. Also, being that it is set in the spring, we are put into the mindset to think of Livvie’s future, the coming summer, fall, and how her life will change. In his final loving speech to Livvie, Solomon describes how he “spread sycamore leaves over the ground” (Welty, 217) for Livvie as, a newlywed, she’d be honored, preserving her life’s spring. He prayed, “God forgive Solomon for carrying away too young girl for wife and keeping her away from her people,” (Welty 218). In the end, the setting in “Livvie” first traps but then lets Livvie fly high into a new beautiful beginning.
In “The Wide Net”, William Wallace Jamieson discovers that his wife Hazel has gone missing. Returning at dawn, he reads a letter she left behind saying that she would drown herself because of his choice to go out drinking with his friend Virgil and one other, William immediately rushes out and calls for Virgil, who had “one foot inside the door” (Welty 153) of his house, ready to crash. They had just carried home the third man “flat between them”, so drunk from the previous night. To find Hazel, they seek out the Malones and the Doyles and go to Doc’s house, to borrow Doc’s huge fishing net to search for Hazel. Doc accompanies them, and the whole crew of them probes along the wide Pearl River, “glimmering, narrow, and soft,” (Welty 159), it bursting with joy. During their pursuit of Hazel’s drowned corpse, the group simply enjoys life, catching, cooking, and consuming fish. However, by the end of the merry day, William returns home empty handed, only to discover his wife was actually hiding in their house the entire time.
Even after he’d discovered his beloved wife had possibly jumped into the river to end her life, Wallace still reminisces about when he first met Hazel and the setting around them. He was walking down a road when he spotted Hazel carrying a “frying-size” chicken given to her by her grandma. They walked and walked through the bountiful fields of blackberries and down to Dover. When they got to Hazel’s house, he stayed for dinner, eating the tender chicken, berries, sweet butter with an elegant tree design drawn on it and a neat pitcher of new milk that she “leap[ed]” up to get (Welty, 154). Dover is a town only four miles away, and now Hazel lives in William’s town; regardless, these communities are close, but what is more at stake here is … where’s Hazel? The young men then, don’t sleep, and roust up their friends and neighbors to “drag the river”.
The setting in “The Wide Net” is just stunning. You have this group with a rather dark goal of finding William’s dead wife contrasted with a beautiful place. It is dawn; the sun glows and shines down on the flowing, gleaming Pearl River. There is nothing in the setting that would ever prevent William from enjoying nature and being alive. The story would have played out in a much more joyless fashion if William wasn’t allowed to catch a fish straight out of the river, roast it, and eat it, or just jump in the river, looking for Hazel. As he “div[es] to the bottom” William sulks into a “clear world of deepness” no longer tainted by the “muddy world,” (Welty, 162). He ponders and thinks about Hazel even more, and in this almost enlightened state of immersion with the setting, can’t become gloomy, can’t drown in agony. This is what is so amazing about the setting of “The Wide Net”: you have this rich, deep, clear space that our characters can simply immerse themselves in, feeling alive, being freed: William Wallace we all know is on the verge of fatherhood, but does he really know it? Perhaps diving into the depths for Hazel (whom no-one really senses is actually drowned) is in essence a rite of passage for William, a time of elation that comes of “great hopes and changes” that William “reach[ed] and turn[ed]” for, now realizing what he could have ruined.
Setting is something that towers over other aspects in Welty’s warm and brilliant literature. The discrete, or individualized, moments of expanded setting are full of extractable meaning. Why don’t we do that now, as a way to pay respect to the fullness of an ingenious author like Welty?
In “Death”, the fact that this self-proclaimed memorized road that Bowman is driving on simply abruptly cuts into a ravine, being “the road’s end” (Welty 109) holds a lot of meaning in itself. I mean, this road that he is driving on could almost represent his life, with this sudden end being his death. As he keeps pushing, attempting to get his car back on the road by asking for help, all he can do is struggle in the face of his inescapable death. See how much the setting gave us there?
In “Livvie”, one thing that was not noted above was the “line of bare crape-myrtle trees with every branch of them ending in a colored bottle,” (Welty, 209). These bottles were meant to trap evil spirits. “Solomon had made the bottle trees with his own hands over the nine years, in labor amounting to about a tree a year.” (Welty 209). He did this to ward evil spirits away from Livvie, revealing his love even more. Solomon knew he die one day and wanted to preserve her life’s spring by dedicating himself to warding away spirits that would ruin her.
In “The Wide Net”, the crew had to deal with tons of local wildlife while searching along the river, finding a crocodile or even “The King of Snakes,” (Welty 164). By including such dangerous animals, Welty not only adds to the freedom of the setting, but also reveals the actual danger and reality of the situation. This isn’t some magical adventure of self-reflection for William, as he could have easily been killed by that snake if it didn’t choose to back off. Wallace has chosen to make this trek to search for his wife, even if he dies. He realized what may be lost and has made up his mind to do the most to atone for his mistakes.
