Susan Rivers's Blog - Posts Tagged "setting-as-character"
When Setting Functions as a Character
Think of the novel Cold Mountain. Think of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. I’ve also been ruminating lately about Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, the novel by Nobel prize-winning Polish author, Olga Tokarczuk, which I just finished reading. What do these fictional works have in common? In all of them, the settings are so critically important that they become characters in their own right.
Setting is not just geography, of course. It’s also the specific time period designated by the author, a time that is explicitly stated or else implied, as well as the social, political or cultural construct that comes with the territory. But where setting is of primary importance, we feel, as readers, that the characters’ behaviors are influenced by these environs in key ways, and that their actions can be traced to elements in the setting that shape them, or even move them forward, as the Mississippi River does for Huck Finn.
Consider the deep woods and remote “plateau” in Poland on the border with the Czech Republic where Tarcyck’s novel is set. These forests seem to offer refuge for the protagonist, Janina Duszejko, a sixty-ish astrologer, William Blake enthusiast and some-time English teacher who dwells in a run-down cottage from which she caretakes the summer homes of weathy Poles. It is also a setting that represents much danger and death, for the forest is menaced by a tribe of hunters who slaughter wild animals indiscriminately, raise foxes for their fur under inhumane conditions, and who have killed Janina’s pet dogs for sport. It’s only in retrospect, after the unfolding of a series of mysterious deaths in the woods, that we understand what was going on inside Janina’s outwardly ordinary self, and realize that the clues to the mystery were there in plain sight, in descriptions of the landscape. As the protagonist tells us: “Before the war, our settlement was called Luftzug, meaning ‘current of air’… it’s always windy here, as waves of air come pouring across the mountains… in winter the wind becomes violent and shrill, howling in the chimneys.” Under the forests’ influence, Janina finds herself howling in the face of authorities indifferent to the atrocities committed against animals by the murdered men, and feels forced to take matters into her own hands. The setting of the novel serves as a Paradise Lost, for the main character as well as – by extension – for the rest of us.
Over the last couple of years since the Second Mrs. Hockaday was published, I’ve been writing a novel set in a cotton mill town in upstate South Carolina early in the twentieth century. This was the boom-time for most southern milltowns, when the economic malaise of the post-Civil War-era south was being dispelled by an industrial revolution, with textile manufacturing providing the bounce-back. With power to run the mills free for the taking in the form of fast-falling rivers traversing the Appalachian uplands, and with labor, in the form of poor whites barely subsisting on tenant farms or eking out livings in the Blue Ridge and Smokey Mountains, acquired cheaply, many opportunistic northerners came south to build cotton mills. They were joined by land-owning southerners who merely shifted the plantation system off the land and into the mills, and who were now empowered to exploit the labor of poor whites rather than enslaved African-Americans.
The concept of a company town captured my imagination because it is a strange, profit-based and therefore inorganic construct: the town is created by the mill owner for one reason, and that is to house workers who are obligated to work in his factory. In that sense, the community is created to support the business, rather than businesses supporting the community, as it is for most towns that develop naturally.
While there are many accounts preserved in written or oral histories of mill workers who thrived in their particular mill towns, and who recalled close relations with neighbors and many good times shared despite the low wages and typically difficult living and working conditions, mill towns could be harsh places to live. The individual’s behavior was regulated by mill management, whose representatives in the community reported on who was getting drunk on their time off, fighting, leading a ‘wayward' life, or otherwise breaking community rules. Breaking these rules could lead to expulsion, which was a severe sentence if one’s entire family worked in the mill and depended on the collective wages earned there to survive.
In one true account I researched, a mill worker suffered a heart attack on his day off, leaving his wife a widow with several small children to feed. A couple of days after getting the bad news, she was visited by the mill supervisor who gave her his condolences and then offered to drive her children to the orphanage. In southern mill towns, houses were assigned to families based on the number of able-bodied persons employed in the mill. As the supervisor explained to the widow, with her children too young to work, the house was needed for more productive tenants.
In upstate South Carolina, there are many former mill towns that have either decayed, disappeared, or have diminished over time, the massive factories at their centers shuttered or demolished. The withdrawal of owners began en masse as the industry retreated from the region during the 1960s, seventies and eighties, seeking better profit margins overseas or closing down altogether.
The mill town I used as a model for Troublefield, the fictional town in my story, is largely based on a town in the upstate I first stumbled on several years ago. Grafton* (not the actual name) is a virtual ghost town at this point, ruined cat-slide homes huddled on the damp, north-facing slope of the steep canyon that rises above the Pacolet River. Only about one in four of the homes appear to be occupied; there are some whose porches are so heaped with old furniture and debris that it is impossible to tell if they house living inhabitants.
Two red-brick mills once stood beside the shoals at different bends in the river, both rebuilt after the flood of 1903 which swept portions of them downstream, but pulled down permanently in the 21st century. A portion of the mill tower remains at Grafton #2, and the river still roars over the mill dam in the rainy season, giving the observer a vague sense of how the factory and the town might have once appeared in 1912, when 4,000 people lived and toiled here, working six days a week for twelve hours a day, at wages rarely topping four dollars a day for skilled work. At Grafton #2 they tended looms, stripped cards, and ran sides in the spinning room through the deafening clatter of machines and the stifling air, thick with cotton dust.
There is a palpable sense of desolation in this river canyon, now. Almost no one was about on the winter's day of my first exploration of Grafton. On the steps of one crumbling house perched high above the river-road, a pajama-clad girl sat dangling her bare feet over the abyss, absorbed in the image on her smart-phone. At the tiny post office where I pulled in to read my maps, an elderly woman passed my car clutching her pocketbook and went into the building. A few minutes later, no more enlightened about my route, I looked up to see the woman stationed at the post office window, regarding me with deep suspicion. It felt as if, in seeking Grafton out, I had driven off the map and out of time, as if the community existed in a bubble, set apart from change or progress and resisting intrusion from outsiders.
I used this sense of dead-ended isolation in my novel, writing at the opening of the story that “Tomahawk County, South Carolina, is shaped like a cat’s head if the cat is strung upside-down from the tree. In the cat’s right ear, in the deep folds and creases, is where the Pattaqua River runs through, and in the deepest bend of the Pattaqua’s canyon is where the Troublefield Cotton Mill once stood.” My protagonist, Calla Stout, is a spinner at the mill who longs to leave Troublefield and start a business of her own. She’s clear that it must be “In a town on the way to somewhere else. Troublefield don’t suit because it ain’t on the way to anywhere. Folks only end up here if they’re born here, they marry someone who was born here, or they come to work here. And I don’t want a boarding house, like Bonnie Abernathy’s got. Those men ain’t going nowhere – just to the mill and back again.”
All of the characters whose lives intersect with Calla’s have private objectives, along with failings that they are not always willing to admit. But their most formidable adversary may be the town of Troublefield itself. In pursuit of their goals, each one of them, including Calla, must contend with an environment that works to bend them to its own purpose, and will not easily relinquish its control.
Setting is not just geography, of course. It’s also the specific time period designated by the author, a time that is explicitly stated or else implied, as well as the social, political or cultural construct that comes with the territory. But where setting is of primary importance, we feel, as readers, that the characters’ behaviors are influenced by these environs in key ways, and that their actions can be traced to elements in the setting that shape them, or even move them forward, as the Mississippi River does for Huck Finn.
Consider the deep woods and remote “plateau” in Poland on the border with the Czech Republic where Tarcyck’s novel is set. These forests seem to offer refuge for the protagonist, Janina Duszejko, a sixty-ish astrologer, William Blake enthusiast and some-time English teacher who dwells in a run-down cottage from which she caretakes the summer homes of weathy Poles. It is also a setting that represents much danger and death, for the forest is menaced by a tribe of hunters who slaughter wild animals indiscriminately, raise foxes for their fur under inhumane conditions, and who have killed Janina’s pet dogs for sport. It’s only in retrospect, after the unfolding of a series of mysterious deaths in the woods, that we understand what was going on inside Janina’s outwardly ordinary self, and realize that the clues to the mystery were there in plain sight, in descriptions of the landscape. As the protagonist tells us: “Before the war, our settlement was called Luftzug, meaning ‘current of air’… it’s always windy here, as waves of air come pouring across the mountains… in winter the wind becomes violent and shrill, howling in the chimneys.” Under the forests’ influence, Janina finds herself howling in the face of authorities indifferent to the atrocities committed against animals by the murdered men, and feels forced to take matters into her own hands. The setting of the novel serves as a Paradise Lost, for the main character as well as – by extension – for the rest of us.
Over the last couple of years since the Second Mrs. Hockaday was published, I’ve been writing a novel set in a cotton mill town in upstate South Carolina early in the twentieth century. This was the boom-time for most southern milltowns, when the economic malaise of the post-Civil War-era south was being dispelled by an industrial revolution, with textile manufacturing providing the bounce-back. With power to run the mills free for the taking in the form of fast-falling rivers traversing the Appalachian uplands, and with labor, in the form of poor whites barely subsisting on tenant farms or eking out livings in the Blue Ridge and Smokey Mountains, acquired cheaply, many opportunistic northerners came south to build cotton mills. They were joined by land-owning southerners who merely shifted the plantation system off the land and into the mills, and who were now empowered to exploit the labor of poor whites rather than enslaved African-Americans.
The concept of a company town captured my imagination because it is a strange, profit-based and therefore inorganic construct: the town is created by the mill owner for one reason, and that is to house workers who are obligated to work in his factory. In that sense, the community is created to support the business, rather than businesses supporting the community, as it is for most towns that develop naturally.
While there are many accounts preserved in written or oral histories of mill workers who thrived in their particular mill towns, and who recalled close relations with neighbors and many good times shared despite the low wages and typically difficult living and working conditions, mill towns could be harsh places to live. The individual’s behavior was regulated by mill management, whose representatives in the community reported on who was getting drunk on their time off, fighting, leading a ‘wayward' life, or otherwise breaking community rules. Breaking these rules could lead to expulsion, which was a severe sentence if one’s entire family worked in the mill and depended on the collective wages earned there to survive.
In one true account I researched, a mill worker suffered a heart attack on his day off, leaving his wife a widow with several small children to feed. A couple of days after getting the bad news, she was visited by the mill supervisor who gave her his condolences and then offered to drive her children to the orphanage. In southern mill towns, houses were assigned to families based on the number of able-bodied persons employed in the mill. As the supervisor explained to the widow, with her children too young to work, the house was needed for more productive tenants.
In upstate South Carolina, there are many former mill towns that have either decayed, disappeared, or have diminished over time, the massive factories at their centers shuttered or demolished. The withdrawal of owners began en masse as the industry retreated from the region during the 1960s, seventies and eighties, seeking better profit margins overseas or closing down altogether.
The mill town I used as a model for Troublefield, the fictional town in my story, is largely based on a town in the upstate I first stumbled on several years ago. Grafton* (not the actual name) is a virtual ghost town at this point, ruined cat-slide homes huddled on the damp, north-facing slope of the steep canyon that rises above the Pacolet River. Only about one in four of the homes appear to be occupied; there are some whose porches are so heaped with old furniture and debris that it is impossible to tell if they house living inhabitants.
Two red-brick mills once stood beside the shoals at different bends in the river, both rebuilt after the flood of 1903 which swept portions of them downstream, but pulled down permanently in the 21st century. A portion of the mill tower remains at Grafton #2, and the river still roars over the mill dam in the rainy season, giving the observer a vague sense of how the factory and the town might have once appeared in 1912, when 4,000 people lived and toiled here, working six days a week for twelve hours a day, at wages rarely topping four dollars a day for skilled work. At Grafton #2 they tended looms, stripped cards, and ran sides in the spinning room through the deafening clatter of machines and the stifling air, thick with cotton dust.
There is a palpable sense of desolation in this river canyon, now. Almost no one was about on the winter's day of my first exploration of Grafton. On the steps of one crumbling house perched high above the river-road, a pajama-clad girl sat dangling her bare feet over the abyss, absorbed in the image on her smart-phone. At the tiny post office where I pulled in to read my maps, an elderly woman passed my car clutching her pocketbook and went into the building. A few minutes later, no more enlightened about my route, I looked up to see the woman stationed at the post office window, regarding me with deep suspicion. It felt as if, in seeking Grafton out, I had driven off the map and out of time, as if the community existed in a bubble, set apart from change or progress and resisting intrusion from outsiders.
I used this sense of dead-ended isolation in my novel, writing at the opening of the story that “Tomahawk County, South Carolina, is shaped like a cat’s head if the cat is strung upside-down from the tree. In the cat’s right ear, in the deep folds and creases, is where the Pattaqua River runs through, and in the deepest bend of the Pattaqua’s canyon is where the Troublefield Cotton Mill once stood.” My protagonist, Calla Stout, is a spinner at the mill who longs to leave Troublefield and start a business of her own. She’s clear that it must be “In a town on the way to somewhere else. Troublefield don’t suit because it ain’t on the way to anywhere. Folks only end up here if they’re born here, they marry someone who was born here, or they come to work here. And I don’t want a boarding house, like Bonnie Abernathy’s got. Those men ain’t going nowhere – just to the mill and back again.”
All of the characters whose lives intersect with Calla’s have private objectives, along with failings that they are not always willing to admit. But their most formidable adversary may be the town of Troublefield itself. In pursuit of their goals, each one of them, including Calla, must contend with an environment that works to bend them to its own purpose, and will not easily relinquish its control.
