Vince Tschirgi
Lit.
6/6/09
Fiction Essay

Setting Helps the Character

The main characters in a story can be displayed in any way that the author may choose. There is one thing that is the most important part of how the characters acts in a story, and that is the setting. The setting is the one thing that the characters have to feed off of. I saw this best in the story, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Once Jane was placed in the room, her character became something else that was created from the setting.
In “The Yellow Wallpaper” the setting is the most important part of the story, it is what brings everything together. The house being placed just outside of town is an important starting point for the setting. The house being isolated from the rest of the town already gives the character a feeling of isolation. This setting for a sick and suffering character only allows her to act in a way that only the people closest to her can see. Once inside the house, Jane is shown a room that produces the story. This setting of the house puts her in a situation that all she can do is look, think and talk about the house. She gets right into it, “So I will let it alone and talk about the house” (Kelly 112). Jane has nothing better to do than to look at her surroundings and let her mind do the rest. Without the setting in this story, how else would this story come alive?
The setting in the story is what controls the character. A house three miles away from the village would give an isolated feeling t anyone, and once she is in that room, the character almost completely changes on us. She sits and stares at the wallpaper, and it seems to dominate her thoughts. “It dwells in my mind so” (Kelly 117). This setting is what continues to drive the story. The yellow wallpaper in her room is shown as the supporting character. Without the wallpaper, there is nobody there to push her along, to give her something to do with her time. The setting of this story has crucial influence to how the character will act throughout the story, and this relationship grows as the story goes on. The more settled she gets in the house, the more intrigued she gets. “They have used a horizontal breadth for a frieze, and that adds to the confusion” (Kelly 117). This is a good indication that the setting and the character are inter twined. The character needs the setting, the room with yellow wallpaper, to feed off of. This enables her to express herself in ways that would otherwise confuse the reader to the point of putting the story to rest. Looking into the wallpaper and seeing patterns in one thing, but seeing people that are attempting to escape the wallpaper is a whole other story. Without the setting, this whole story would see, ridiculous to a reader.
The setting has a direct impact on the character in this story. A couple times she attempts to persuade her husband to move her into a different room. If she were to have been moved to another room elsewhere in the house, do you think the house would have had the same affect on her? There couldn’t have been something else that would have made her act the way she did. If the author were to describe something that could have taken the place of the wallpaper, I wonder what it could have been. The setting given was perfect for this character. She was an ill person who needed treatment, and she was given an isolated house to cure her. The wallpaper affected her mind in ways that could only be explained by the room itself. The room is where the story inside a story was created. The wallpaper, the women in the wallpaper, the windows, and what she can see from the window are all parts of the setting that tie the character together. Once she leaves the comfort of her room, all she is thinking about is the room and what else there is to figure out from that wallpaper. It is the setting of the story that controls her every thought. It seemed that there was always something new that she was able to pick out from the setting that gives the wallpaper some character in itself. “…A thing nobody seems to notice by myself, and that is that it changes as the light changes’ (Kelly 121). This is an important part of the setting because it gives the character more things to think about. It influences Jane to see different scenes inside of the wall. Which in return allows her to think about the situation that she and the women in the wall are in. The changes in the setting keep her on the look out for clues that will help her develop a better understanding of her surroundings.
The setting of a story directly affects the characters placed in it. Without the setting, what is there for the characters to feed off of. The setting is the most important part of a story because it is what creates the character, and allows them to act in ways that would further confuse the reader if it wasn’t for the setting.

Work Cited

Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. “The Yellow Wallpaper.” Joseph Kelly. The Seagull Reader: Literature. New York : Norton. 2005, Pg. 111-128

….for what it is worth, for the life of me I couldn’t find any sources that could back me up