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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:
Gilead is set in the fictional town of Gilead, Iowa. Gilead is a small, rural town with roots in the abolitionist movement. The name of the town—and the novel—alludes to a biblical region east of the Jordan River. The land, which was mountainous and fertile, was considered to symbolize what God can provide to his people. This allusion contributes to the sense that the town of Gilead is a particularly godly or blessed place. Indeed, much of the novel centers around religious life and Ames’s church.
John Ames was born in 1880. John is writing his letter when he is 76 and 77, meaning the “present” of the novel is in the mid-1950s. But much of Gilead takes place through flashbacks to earlier in his life or the lives of his father and grandfather.
Through these flashbacks, events of American history are woven into the setting of Gilead. For one, Civil War and abolition efforts are often in the background, given the town of Gilead’s significance in the abolitionist movement. John Ames’s grandfather fought with the abolitionist John Brown in Bleeding Kansas, a series of violent conflicts about whether Kansas would be a slave or free state. World War I and the 1918 influenza pandemic, which Ames refers to as the Spanish Flu, are also present. The sermon Ames is proudest of, which he wrote but never gave, argued that the pandemic was a biblical plague sent to punish humanity for the war. Ames also mentions the poverty the people of Gilead were accustomed to during the Great Depression. These references ground Gilead in 19th and 20th century American history.
Related Themes:
