How far has setting served to carry or underscore thematic concerns in fiction you have studied?

Practice IB English A1 Paper 2 essay.
Date: July 2011

In Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1899 semi-autobiographical short story, The Yellow Wallpaper (henceforth YW), the narrator, a woman who has recently given birth to her first child, is tormented by isolation enforced by her husband. Similarly, Ernest Hemingway’s 1933 semi-autobiographical short story A Way You’ll Never Be (henceforth Way) describes the tormented mind of Nick Adams, an American volunteer in the Italian army in World War One, as he tries to complete a propaganda mission. In both stories, setting is all-important in carrying and underscoring the themes presented, using the protagonists’ placements within their settings as well as their interactions with the physical setting. The identification of the microcosm settings with the larger world serves as warnings in both YW and Way, of the misguided nature of Victorian ideals and the danger of glorifying war, respectively.

In both YW and Way, the protagonists’ circumstances and placement within the setting reflect their unfortunate situations within society as a whole. In Way, the narrator is a young wife, recently having given birth, who is taken to stay at an isolated mansion by her husband and refused company and entertainment. The restraining and isolation nature of the mansions itself is representative of the restraints and expectations placed on women by traditional Victorian society. This confinement can be seen from the exterior of the mansion, with its “hedges and walls and gates that lock”, as well as another locking gate at the bottom of the stairs. The polysyndeton here emphasises the multitude of measures taken to secure the mansion, and in the context of this text, shows the multi-layered constraints Victorian society places on its women. In addition, the house is “three miles from the village,” further adding to the feeling of isolation, as the narrator is physically kept from society and company by distance, reinforcing her husband John’s adamant refusal to let her have company in the form of “Cousin Henry and Julia”. In particular, the room where John forces her to live in with him is on the upper floor, where “the windows are barred and there are rings and things in the walls.” Along with the bare nature of the room apart from the “immovable bed” which is “nailed down”, it conjures literal images of imprisonment, the upper floor placement even alluding to the imprisonment of women in fairy tales like Rapunzel, as well as the phrase of being ‘sent to the tower’ as was popularised from the use of the Tower of London as a prison for such figures as woman monarch Elizabeth I. Furthermore, the woman describes the mansion as “ancestral halls … a colonial mansion, a hereditary estate,” depicting the mansion as ancient and passed down through male heirs. This is clearly a reflection of the reality of the old traditions of male-dominated society, passed down through the generations. The narrator’s additional note of fancying the mansion a “haunted house” provides a hint of foreshadowing, heralding the increasing madness and suffering of the narrator as the story progresses. Of course, the key component of the setting is the eponymous yellow wallpaper. “It is dull enough to confuse the eye …, pronounced enough to constantly irritate [and the patterns] destroy themselves in unheard of contradictions”. The author makes a bold comparison of the yellow wallpaper that covers the room and surrounds the narrator to the Victorian ideals themselves, and directly accuses them of being irritating and contradictory. The visual imagery of it in the day being “a smouldering unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight” contrasts with its night image when “the moon shines in” and the image of a creeping woman is visible. The day-night imagery is symbolic of the male and female representations of the sun and the moon respectively, thus characterising male power as, like the yellow colour, “repellent, almost revolting, … smouldering[ly] unclean”.

The setting of Way is in a way even more graphic. The author describes the scene of a battlefield after a recent battle, leaving the reader with an image of the physical devastation caused by war, in order to leave a bitter perspective regarding wartime culture advocating war. For instance, the fallen soldiers lay with “their pockets out, and over them were flies. […] The hot weather had swollen them all alike regardless of nationality.” The visual image of looted and rotting corpses creates a corrupt impression of war, complemented with the equipment abandoned by the dead, including “stick bombs, helmets, rifles, entrenching tools, ammunition boxes, star-shell pistols”, listed in a long sentence that forms a paragraph of its own, which reinforces the melancholy sense of loss. Much attention is particularly paid to the “scattered papers” lying around everywhere. The “group postcards showing the machine-gun unit standing in ranked and ruddy cheerfulness” is juxtaposed against how “now they were humped and swollen in the grass”, provide a steep contrast of cheerful life with the pain of lifelessness, and various items like “small photographs of village girls …, the occasional pictures of children, and the letters, letters, letters” continue to hint at the hopeful lives and family ties of the soldiers before they were killed. This serves to confront the reader with the harsh life-ending nature of war. Among the papers are “propaganda postcards showing a soldier in Austrian uniform bending a woman backward over a bed”, an artistic depiction of rape meant to galvanise soldiers who had been sexually deprived for a long time; it can be inferred that the dead soldiers went into battle with such images, showing the power of propaganda. At the same time, the repeated descriptions of dead soldiers, such as “the new dead”, “groups of bodies”, “three bodies in the street [that] looked to have been killed running”, places emphasis on the lives of the soldiers lost due to following the orders of military command, compelled by propaganda depicting the glory of war.

Moreover, the authors of both YW and Way describe the protagonists’ and others’ interactions with the physical setting to show the trials that they go through because of the presence of the ideas presented by the setting – Victorian ideals and the glorification of war in military culture, respectively. In YW, the narrator is principally focused on the yellow wallpaper, trying to decode its patterns and finally remove it. We can thus see the yellow wallpaper as an extended metaphor for the subjugation of females into “patterns”, what society deems proper roles. The narrator realises that behind the “bars” of the pattern, there is a woman who “seemed to shake the pattern, just as if she wanted to get out.” This bold visual image once again demonstrates the entrapped state of women in Victorian society. Similarly, the efforts of the narrator herself to rip the paper off finally getting “all the paper I could reach”, demonstrates her increasing understanding of her own situation trapped within the room – thus within the wallpaper. From the metaphor, the reader gets a vivid image of the woman actively attempting to rip the societal constraints away. Also, it can be seen that the narrator’s tormented mental state is not unprecedented. “The floor is scratched and gouged and splintered [and] the plaster itself is dug out here and there”, the room’s condition lending itself to supporting the idea of generations of women past struggling with their subjugated situations, causing damage to the room they are imprisoned in. Similarly, the wallpaper is stripped off “in great patches all around the head of my bed, about as far as I can reach, and in a great place on the other side of the room low down”, matching the places a woman like the narrator can reach and thus perhaps representing attempts of other women in the past attempting to break free from their confining societal role, as the narrator herself tries to do.

Contrastingly, Way prominently features the protagonist Nick Adams’s reactions to the setting as a result of his war-altered mentality. Because of his earlier experiences in the war, he has become jaded to normally horrible things like rape and murder. This is illustrated in the opening scene when he passes through the physical setting of the battlefield. Nick’s perception of the corpses and abandoned equipment is portrayed through the distant tone as neutral, such as in the instance of the surgically analytical remark that “Nicholas Adams saw what had happened by the position of the dead,” and his detached noticing that “our own dead … were surprisingly few”. The reader is thus given the impression that Nick has seen such sights enough times to become desensitized. This desensitised mindset is further exemplified by Nick’s cynical reflection that the propaganda postcards are “very attractively depicted and had nothing in common with actual rape in which the woman’s skirts are pulled over her head to smother her, one comrade sometimes sitting upon the head.” The disturbing visual image described suggests that war has forced Nick and other soldiers to witness acts considered in peacetime as perhaps even more morally questionable than rape, as an example of the consequences of war. As Nick arrives at battalion headquarters, this new setting sparks old war memories in Nick, as he muses that it is “not as large a dugout as the one where that platoon … got hysterics”. The memory of the bombardment that is stirred suggests that the trauma of the experience has not faded, but instead plagues Nick’s mind, serving as a notice to the readers of the lasting mental impact of war despite the transience of the propaganda glorifying it.

Additionally, the effect of the thematic elements on the protagonists of YW and Way is depicted through the abstract portrayal of settings from the characters’ own perspectives, showing the mental impact on them. In YW the shift in the narrator’s thoughts is most obvious when she herself becomes part of the metaphor of the yellow wallpaper. The setting is significant in this transition as the narrator first describes seeing the woman, whom she sees in the wallpaper at night, “creeping by daylight … on that long road under the trees”, continuing the extended metaphor of the yellow wallpaper; then, the narrator explains, “I always lock the door when I creep by daylight”, suddenly transporting herself into the position of the creeping woman being trapped by the wallpaper. This break in reality signifies a break in the narrator’s sanity, as she can no longer deal with the strain of the Victorian expectations of a proper woman. Toward the end of the story, the physical setting of the room is altered, as the furniture is moved back out of the room. The narrator describes, “there is nothing left but that great bedstead nailed down”, and the barrenness of the room reflects the barrenness of her mind after she begins to lose her sanity. The futility of the narrator’s efforts to escape from the wallpaper whose metaphor she enters is displayed by her voluntarily “[locking] the door and [throwing] the key down into the front path” and then fastening herself by a “well-hidden rope”, altering the environment to be even more restricting even as she symbolically tears down the wallpaper. This is reflective of the beginning of the short story, where the narrator feels urges contrary to what her husband advises and yet tries to suppress them, indicating to the reader the inescapable situation of female-subjugation.

Unlike in YW, Nick in Way does not increasingly lose his sanity. Afflicted with post-traumatic-stress-disorder (PTSD) from his war experiences, when battalion headquarters, the surroundings cause Nick to recall past events. One major setting in his memory is the disjointed image of the “low house painted yellow with willows around it and a low stable and there was a canal” with a “boat lying there quietly in the willows”. The stream-of-consciousness style used in the portrayal of the flashback causes the reader’s perception of the repeated recollection to become blurry, reflecting Nick’s difficulty in controlling his mental condition. The war-related imagery of the memory, of “holding rifles high until they fell with them in the water,” suggests that a major battle had taken place in that setting, implying the common selective memory-loss associated with PTSD. The reader is thus confronted with the horrific mental repercussions of war on soldiers from Nick’s incoherent perspective. As Nick departs back along the road his memories remain uncertain, wondering if it was where a memory had occurred, and questioning himself, “Where was that?” The significance is thus to express that, similar to YW, the mental issues caused by war is everlasting.

Both The Yellow Wallpaper and A Way You’ll Never Be recruit the dynamic settings as images reflecting the thematic concerns of Victorian societal ideals and wartime societal values. In The Yellow Wallpaper, the setting of the isolated mansion and the prison-like room represents the status quo of female subjugation in Victorian society, with the narrator’s futile attempt to escape demonstrating the infallible power males. Similarly, in A Way You’ll Never Be, the wartime setting with the battlefield littered with bodies acts as an image representing the entire war situation, and Nick’s traumatised psyche, as seen from both his reaction to the former setting and to the setting he repeatedly dreams of, serves as a warning of the consequences of war on the minds of those involved. Gilman’s and Hemingway’s skilful manipulation of settings serves to critique the misguided marginalisation of women and remorseless glorification of war prevalent in their time periods, reminding the reader of the dangerous extremes of dogmatic belief human beings are capable; the lessons they impart continue to carry weight in the world as the issues highlighted still linger in elements of society today.