SETTING AS CHARACTER

HUMBLE WRITERS’ ATTEMPT AT CRAFT: SETTING: NOT AS PLACE BUT AS CHARACTER
 
Setting as character? But isn’t setting just establishing place in time and space?  That was what I was taught as a young writer, speaking most specifically of the novel, Of Mice and Men, when John Steinbeck writes a novel in play form, establishing setting in each chapter before bringing in the character to function in that setting.

However, if I begin to think of setting as character, many novels come to mind, and what have never left memory, bringing back not only the theme, characters, and plot, but the essence of the setting itself as if character, because in many, it serves as a vital antagonist to the journey of the protagonist.
Specifically, these titles and their settings come to mind. Gillman’s "The Yellow Room." Shirley Jackson’s work, The Haunting of Hill House, We have Always Lived in the Castle, Steven King’s The Shining, Deliah Owens Where the Crawdad’s Sing, and my attempt at implementing this possible antagonist in The Madness She Knew.

In The Haunting of Hill House, the house is not only set as an agency for haunting, but as a personification of a character that is as lonely as the protagonist and will do anything to create a relationship. As many relationships can, the house begins to consume her, emotionally and psychologically. The house becomes an obsessive personality wanting to own the story’s protagonist, Ellenor. Jackson establishes this personality by using descriptives: sound, space, and observation. And in creating a vivid antagonist, she does this by giving the reader a space, like the personality of a villain, that is “wrong.” Angles are slightly off. Doors close by themselves. Hallways feel longer at night. The house leans. It listens. It isolates. “Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within... and whatever walked there, walked alone.” In Gillman’s The Yellow Wallpaper, the wallpaper takes on a twined persona, “Behind that outside pattern the dim shapes get clearer every day... like a woman stooping down and creeping about behind that pattern.” In Jackson’s We Always Lived in a Castle, she gives a sinister thought to their land: “All our land was enriched with my treasures buried in it, thickly inhabited just below the surface with my marbles and my teeth and my colored stones, all perhaps turned to jewels by now, held together under the ground in a powerful taut web which never loosened, but held fast to guard us.” When the estate changes, the protagonist Merricat changes. In other words, when setting shifts, character must respond. If the house burns and your protagonist doesn’t evolve, you’ve wasted an inferno. The houses and settings in these works are not just edifices, but web-creating wombs that have born and will act against the protagonist, and sometimes win if the protagonist doesn’t battle against the possession.
              Steven King writes an excellent example of offering setting as character in his novel The Shining.  The reader comes away with a profound memory of what happened to the characters placed within the hotel—and how the hotel itself manipulated the characters, like puppets on an antagonist’s strings. The Overlook Hotel is isolated in winter. Roads in aren’t passable; thus, there is no way out. The hotel itself has endless corridors, and a second floor offering a portal where no one but a small boy—fearless in his innocence—doesn’t want to tread. Here, King has offered a setting that mirrors the journey the protagonist, Jack, must face: his ego, explosive anger, and alcoholism. Our antagonist here doesn’t just spur on the protagonist, it is again like the womb that nourishes it into being. Just like the yellow wallpaper in the nursery in Gilman’s work, the Hill House in Jackson’s work reaches out to fulfill Elenore’s need of “emotional want,” The Overlook Hotel nourishes the protagonist’s weaknesses, hungrily devouring Jack until like a seriel killer wants to hungrily devour its victim.
How many readers, while terrified, have wanted to visit The Overlook Hotel? Been afraid of the building they have never visited, as much as they have fear The Haunting of Hill House like someone waiting for them in the dark. Going into any of these edifices is the epitome of an antagonist: opposing the protagonist. And how does Where the Crawdad’s Sing work in this way? But setting it isolates the protagonist socially. The town views the main character through the lens of the wild landscape— she is called,  “Marsh Girl” And the marsh becomes an antagonist that takes her in innocently, like a mother, but holds her like a prison.
Using setting like a character can be constructed in many forms. In my attempt, The Madness She Knew, I created a city called Paradise, which is like a black spider waiting quietly in a web. It is not Paradise for everyone—opposite of how we may think of small towns, having not the negative influences of a larger city— this small town and specifically for the protagonist, Willow because at the beginning of the protagonist’s jourey, she has no other identity but the house: the Harris girl—"He wasn’t just calling about Bly, she thought. And he wasn’t calling to reminisce about old times. He wanted something from her. Something from that Harris girl. That thought hit like a knife to the gut—familiar pain she’d pushed into the shadows, not erased. Memories didn’t disappear; they only waited for the moment life turned bleak for them to claw their way back.” I presented an edifice, The Harris House, that holds its protagonist by the memories buried deep within. It has already entrapped her, and Willow’s struggle is to survive not her only her human pursuer who wishes to become the last Harris, but also to survive the memories—The “The House” hasn’t forgotten, and it dares Willow to remember. “Two large double-hung windows stared back like questioning eyes. I thought you had left.” Every room holds a memory: the kitchen, the womb of every house where family gathers safely, and where some of Willow’s most terrifying memories occurred. “She let her mind drift to remembered innocent sounds. Bly washing dishes in the kitchen. Cooking. Pots and pans banging behind cupboards, opening and closing. Zelda singing one of her favorite songs in a high-pitched soprano voice, off-key, happy. But not happy in a way that would last. The Harris house had always been full of sound, even when no one spoke.” The rooms upstairs—a stairway she is resistant to climb, thinking she is not ready to face the monster of memory—and the shed in the backyard that captured so many with such a fear that they too might be linked to that “shed” forever. It is not until Willow releases herself from the house, cuts the umbilical cord of the child that remembers and becomes the person who dares to face the memories that birthed her that she can climb to the second floor, go out to face the shed and what happened in the back yard.
Setting as character? Not just as space and time, but becomes the antagonist to a protagonist’s journey? For those of us who write mystery and suspense, setting isn’t scenery—it’s pressure. It’s the silent witness who never leaves the scene. And if we do our job right—and keep working at it until we do—readers won’t just remember the protagonist. They will remember the ranch in Of Mice and Men and the wilderness where the story begins. They will remember The Hill House and Elenores and the houses’ loneliness reaching out to each other. Maybe, the reader will also remember the Harris House in Paradise, where Willow was meant to go inside to face herself in order to create her own identity.