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Personification
Definition of Setting
Setting is where and when a story or scene takes place. The where can be a real place like the city of New York, or it can be an imagined... read full definition
Setting is where and when a story or scene takes place. The where can be a real place like the city of New York, or... read full definition
Setting is where and when a story or scene takes place. The where can be a real place like the... read full definition
Setting
Explanation and Analysis:
The novel is set in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, a place that Faulkner returns to in many of his other works. Yoknapatawpha was inspired by the author's real hometown of Lafayette County, Mississippi.
The Bundren family at the center of the novel begins on their small farm and journeys toward Jefferson, the county-seat. They travel through a number of different rural and wilderness areas. The time period is around the early 20th century, as evidenced by the prevalence of gramophones (an early iteration of a record player) throughout the book. This was an important time period for the American South. It was a moment of economic turmoil, with an idealized but fading rural life contested with a growing emphasis on urban life. Characters in Faulkner novels often grapple with their roots in an agricultural and family-oriented world as they simultaneously try to carve out a place form themselves in this newly individualized urban society.
After Reconstruction (the period after the Civil War when the Confederacy rejoined the Union) ended, the whole region was left in a lurch, racially, socially, and economically. The problems that persisted after the end of the Civil War continued to develop, and Southerners of all stripes felt uncertain of what the new South would become. Faulkner's choice to set his novels in this contemporary time period reflects his desire to understand the emerging character of the post-Reconstruction South.
