And How to Apply Them to Your Writing
Welcome back to our discussion about creating powerful settings. If you missed the first post in which I talked about how to write better setting descriptions, you can find it here. In this post, we’ll look at some settings that have lived on in readers’ memories long past the point at which they finished the book. Whether it’s a whole-book setting, or an individual scene. In each of these, we’ll talk about why the setting worked so effectively for that story. This will give us a better sense for how we can also create powerful settings that our readers will remember as some of the most memorable Gothic settings of all time.
Note: Though we’re examining Gothic writing in this post, everything we talk about will translate to other genres as well.
Whole Book Settings
The first category we’ll examine includes novels in which the entire book’s setting is overwhelmingly powerful. These probably won’t surprise you, but we’ll talk about each of these and why they play the role that they do.
Interview with the Vampire
One of Anne Rice’s greatest strengths was her ability to craft settings that immersed readers in her books’ time and place. This was one of the first things that stood out to me when I first picked up Interview with the Vampire. Alongside Louis’s angst, Lestat’s desperate search for community and history, and Claudia’s despair stands New Orleans. It surprised me at first – a southern town surrounded by swamps and bayous. Now it just makes sense.
For Louis, this town parallels his murky sense of his new identity as a vampire. The atmosphere of festering waters and sweltering heat reflects his new life – surrounded by those who, like him, live as a plague on mankind. A sickness that slinks through the dark alleys of the night, lying in wait to destroy or ensnare.
But in the midst of this, Rice portrays the lush opulence, the heady floral-scented air of the city in that era (the late 1700s, early 1800s) as something overwhelmingly enticing. It is the vampirism itself that neither Louis nor his readers can resist: that promise of everlasting health, vitality, comfort, and access to all of the best things of life…at least according to Rice’s presentation of the vampiric lifestyle.
New Orleans imbues the book with all of the rich color and depth that most locations would struggle to provide.
Wuthering Heights
Across the pond, we see a similar power in the moors of Yorkshire in Northern England. One of the most obvious elements in Emily Brontë’s classic novel is the restless spirit of both Heathcliff and Catherine. Throughout the early portion of the book, Heathcliff acts on his desperate need to prove himself and to rise above his sense of inferiority and his circumstances. Later he fights against those who oppressed him as a child and who have the things that he wanted and now wants for himself.
Catherine has a willful, rebellious spirit that finds a home in Heathcliff. Even her marriage to Edgar Linton is nothing more than a selfish desire to raise herself to a better situation. From early childhood on, she’s haughty, disobedient, and bossy. No matter her situation, she is unhappy. She wearies of her life at Wuthering Heights with her brother’s overbearing nature and Joseph’s self-righteous oversight of her. Later she tires of her dull life as Edgar’s wife and wants to be back in her childhood days of freedom with Heathcliff.
It isn’t surprising that Brontë set these characters amongst the wuthering heights of the moors. “Wuthering,” indicates a place that is characterized by strong winds. This reflects the restless unhappiness of the characters in the story. Their circumstances assail them with constant challenges and they themselves are a consistent force against one another. Their setting is as wuthering as they are.
Even so, I can’t imagine this book without the windswept, rocky barrenness of the moors. They embody a poetic nature that mirrors the story so perfectly that the scene, plot and characters are one.
Fevre Dream
Long before Game of Thrones, there was Fevre Dream. As far as I know, this is George R.R. Martin’s only vampire novel. As you would expect, it’s immersive and filled with colorful characters. The story is set on the Mississippi river in the mid-1800s – the days of the steamboat trade. Some of the book takes place in downtown New Orleans and on a nearby plantation. However, the bulk of the story, and its central focus is the river.
Martin brings the Mississippi river to life with all of the various types of cargo and passengers that traversed her, along with the necessary means of doing so: the wood yard businesses along the shore that supplied the fuel to run the boats. He portrays the frequent comparisons in the business between older and newer boats, slower and faster ones, those built simply for [or retired to be used strictly for] cargo versus the luxurious boats that the wealthy chose for transportation.
If those were the only things, the setting – the river – wouldn’t necessarily play anything more than a utilitarian role. But it does.
Martin weaves the river throughout the story as if she herself is a character. It helps that, though the main character, a steamboat captain, Abner Marsh, can travel by day, the vampires can only come out at night. [Doing so by day is possible but comes with the legendary consequences.]
Thus we see the river as if it is a black ribbon of a highway connecting all of the prominent towns along her banks. Her darkness hides dangerous sawyers that can tear up the hulls of the boat and constantly shifting sandbars that would beach all but the smallest vessels. Things that even the best captain would struggle to see by daylight and which are all the more obscure by night. But most of all, she acts as a connecting thread between the history of human and vampire – two races, as Martin envisions them, that have coexisted since the dawn of man.
As Marsh traverses the river, his constant exploration of the river (particularly the southern section with which he is less familiar) mirrors his journey into the history of the vampire race. And his struggle with the river parallels his war against those who threaten humanity. Martin’s use of the river is subtle but masterful as he ties together the plot, character, and theme through his use of setting.
Single Scene Settings
There are also books in which the overall setting may or may not be as memorable as a given scene. I’ve chosen a couple of Gothic stories in which the overall setting is less than memorable, but within which a given scene is strikingly powerful. We’ll look at why this is the case for each of these.
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde
In this strange story of duality, an upstanding man, Dr. Jekyll, consistently battles with his dark, hidden nature, Mr. Hyde. Robert Louis Stevenson uses a chemical concoction as a Gothic trope that symbolizes Jekyll’s desire and ability to return to himself each day after indulging his dark proclivities by night. As you might expect, its potency wanes as the story progresses and he is compelled to double his dose and increase the frequency with which he takes it. This demonstrates Stevenson’s theme: that our dark side will always, in the end, win out over any goodness we might possess.
Or course, this is most strongly exemplified in a scene towards the end of Jekyll’s story in which he awakens unexpectedly, not as Dr. Jekyll, but as Mr. Hyde. This is when he realizes that his potion has lost something of its efficacy. Or his body requires more than it used to. The only remedy is to immediately increase his dosage, but the potion is in his laboratory, on the other side of the house. With servants moving from room to room, he doesn’t dare show himself as Mr. Hyde as they would think him an intruder. Simultaneously, he can’t bear the fact that his dark nature is now visible in the light of day.
He concocts a plan to access the potion, but that isn’t what makes this scene so memorable. Rather, it’s the horror of his condition – that what he embraced and fed by the darkness of night is so vile and shameful when he sees it by day. This scene is powerful because it nails the theme. Hyde is trapped in his bedroom – symbolic of the self that he indulges by night – and can no longer escape. His laboratory – symbolic of his righteous, upstanding public persona as Dr. Jekyll – lies so far from his reach that it may as well not exist.
Though he finds a workaround – temporarily – the reader feels the theme so deeply that it would be impossible to miss it.
The Turn of the Screw
In another example, The Turn of the Screw by Henry James, a governess takes over the care of two orphaned children who reside at their uncle’s country estate. It isn’t long before she discovers that all is not well with the two youths. Just prior to her arrival, Miles has been expelled from his school for violence against another child. The new governess also learns that the former governess, Miss Jessel, had had an affair with the former valet, Peter Quint. Subsequently, both had died suspiciously.
This novella deals with the loss of innocence and the role that adults play in this – either willingly or unintentionally. [If you want to know more, I wrote a book review of this one. Find it here.]
Thus, it’s fitting that the most memorable scene in this story is the one in which the young girl, Flora, goes missing. The new governess searches for her everywhere and finally finds her by the lake. From a distance, she sees that the girl is talking with the ghost of Miss Jessel, but when she arrives, the ghost is gone. Further, the girl lies and says that she wasn’t with the woman.
On the surface, this sounds somewhat innocuous, but within the context of James’s brilliant storytelling, it’s chilling. Readers instantly understand something that they had missed before: the children are not innocent. They were willing participants in the sexual activities between Quint and Jessel and are tainted by the abuse they suffered. But rather than traumatized, they have become evil and manipulative.
The setting of this scene, far from the house, within the trees, beside the lake, sets the scene beautifully. Here there is no shelter. No four walls to protect either the children or the governess. Instead, there are the trees that obscure her view of the truth and the lake that hides the secrets of the past. This scene has as much power as it does because the setting leaves readers feeling that lack of safety, that lack of sight, and the inability to plumb the depths of what is wrong with the two children.
Conclusion
As you can see from the whole-book settings that we discussed, those that are the most memorable are those that symbolize and parallel the entire story: plot, character, and theme. The authors have taken a setting – whether it’s the sweltering, heady fragrance of the deep south, the chill isolation of the northern moors, or the long, twisting route of the Mississippi river – and they have used that setting not just to advance the plot, but more importantly, to portray the state of the characters and the story’s theme.
Single scenes do this on a smaller scale, but they still accomplish all of the above: using the setting to advance the plot and to symbolize the character’s growth or devolution, and the story’s theme. Notice that the two scenes we examined are both pivotal moments in which the author is putting forth the theme in its richest, most tangible sense. This may or may not be the climactic point. [It isn’t for The Turn of the Screw.] However, this is the point in the story at which the theme is communicated most profoundly. They also show us most clearly who the characters truly are.
That’s the key to powerful settings. Authors who use them well, use them to say something in such a way that readers have a visceral response to the story. We can accomplish this in our writing by using our settings wisely!
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