Setting of a Story Can Reveal Important

¶ … setting of a story can reveal important things about the narrative's larger meaning, because the setting implies certain things about the characters, context, and themes that would otherwise remain implicit or undiscussed. In their short stories "The Lottery" and "The Rocking-Horse Winner," Shirley Jackson and DH Lawrence use particular settings in order to comment on the political and socio-economic status of their characters without inserting any explicitly political or socio-economic discussion into the narrative. In the case of "The Lottery," the setting transforms the story from a one of simple horror to a more nuanced critique of American society, and particularly its dedication to arbitrary, destructive beliefs. Lawrence's "The Rocking-Horse Winner" makes a similar point, but in this case the setting serves to implicitly critique the consumerism encouraged by capitalist hegemony in England. Comparing and contrasting these two settings allows one to better understand how each story makes an identifiable ideological point without having to make explicit that ideology.

The earlier of the two stories is Lawrence's "The Rocking-Horse Winner," and it takes place in or around London, as evidenced by the fact that some of the characters visit Richmond Park, which is located in London (Lawrence 236). However, the story does not concern itself with the hustle and bustle of the city, but rather the quiet, almost mundane existence of a family living "in a pleasant house, with a garden," who "had discreet servants, and felt themselves superior to anyone in the neighbourhood" (Lawrence 230). Despite their relative financial and social comfort, "they always felt an anxiety in the house," because "there was never enough money," as there was "not nearly enough for the social position which they had to keep up" (Lawrence 230). This introduction to the story's setting sets the stage for the entire narrative to follow, because it reveals a number of important things about the ultimate meaning to be gleaned by Paul's eventual death (in the service of winning his family more money by correctly guessing the name of winning racehorses ).

Most crucially, Lawrence's decision to set the story in a relatively well-off house in a middle class neighborhood forces the reader to reconsider the relationship between poverty and class. Lawrence could have easily set the story in a poor neighborhood and focused on a poor family, and the larger narrative would not have changed substantially; Paul would still likely have internalized his parents' constant need for more money, and thus would have still likely died after frantically riding his rocking-horse. However, if Lawrence had set the story in a poor neighborhood, Paul's death would have far more tragic and arguably noble, because he would have been helping his family to overcome real hardship. By setting the story in a well-off neighborhood, and making the family's money dependent not on a lack of basic necessities but rather the cost of maintaining their social status, Paul's death becomes arbitrary and almost comical (as much as the death of a child can be). His desire to raise money for his family is not some noble quest, but rather indicative of a neuroses born out of deference to ultimately meaningless class signifiers, and Paul is simply too young to recognize this. Lawrence uses the story's setting to demonstrate the process by which deference to arbitrary standards of social worth is transferred from generation to generation, how that transfer is accompanied by the increasing mental destruction of each generation.

Jackson's story was written just over two decades later, but she confronts some of the same underlying problems, albeit by focusing on slightly different symptoms. "The Lottery" takes place in a small unnamed American town. The precise location is never given, but the town's agricultural economy, regular get-togethers, and hints about the pronunciation of foreign last names suggests that it is supposed to represent a kind of Anytown, USA, during the middle of the twentieth century (Jackson 291-292). This ambiguity is actually conducive to the story's larger meaning, because if the story were set in a specific town (regardless of whether it was real or fictional), the story's ultimate condemnation of commitment to arbitrary, religious beliefs would not have the same kind of resonance. By leaving the setting ambiguous, Jackson allows the story to take on the character of a fable or fairy tale, which ultimately makes it message more universal. The particular town in the story believes that a yearly sacrifice is necessary to ensure a good harvest, and although this may appear barbaric, cruel, and patently ridiculous to contemporary readers, it is no more barbaric, cruel, or ridiculous than the religious beliefs held by millions of people, and that motivated American foreign and domestic policy at the time of the story's writing all the way to today. By setting the story in an ambiguous town in middle America, Jackson was able to dramatize the frequently hidden violence and cruelty perpetrated every day in America.

Obviously, the two stories take on slightly different topics, but they both deal with the same underlying problems. Lawrence's story examines the destructive effect that deference to arbitrary standards of social and economic success can have by setting the story in a well-off neighborhood, and Jackson examines the destructive effect that deference to arbitrary religious and political beliefs can have by setting the story in an ambiguous American town. Though Lawrence deals with socio-economic standards and Jackson deals with religious and political ones, in both cases the authors are confronting the arbitrary dictates of hegemonic authority. This is why despite all of their differences in plot, characterization, and narration, the two stories have a natural kinship based on their use of carefully-selected settings in order to explicitly condemn implicit ideologies and hierarchies. Had the settings of either story been different, it would have been too easy for the audience to miss the larger social critique, because the simple, mundane settings of either story forces the audience to relate them to their own lives, such that the events of either story represent a barely-dramatized version of actual existence.