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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:
“Ethan Brand” is set on Mount Greylock in northwestern Massachusetts in the mid-1800s. The entire story takes place over the course of one night as a group of men gather around a lime kiln on the mountain. Early in the story, the narrator describes the purpose and presence of lime kilns in the area in the following way:
There are many such lime-kilns in that tract of country, for the purpose of burning the white marble which composes a large part of the substance of the hills. Some of them, built years ago, and long deserted, with weeds growing in the vacant round of the interior, which is open to the sky […] Others, where the lime-burner still feeds his daily and night-long fire, afford points of interest to the wanderer among the hills, who seats himself on a log of wood or a fragment of marble, to hold chat with the solitary man.
As the narrator notes, lime kilns “burn the white marble which composes a large part of the substance of the hills.” The quicklime (or just “lime”) powder that results from this burning process is used for a number of purposes, such as steelmaking and bricklaying. Hawthorne grew up in Massachusetts and is likely pulling from personal experience when he describes the “long deserted” kilns “with weeds growing in the vacant round of the interior” as well as the still-active kilns where a stranger can “seat himself on a log of wood or a fragment of marble, to hold chat with the solitary man.”
The lime kiln setting is symbolically significant—just as the fiery kiln transforms marble into lime, tending to the kiln alone for so many years transformed Brand from a loving person into a prideful, demonic one ("demonic" in the sense that he became obsessed with committing sins and lured others into sinning as well).
Related Themes:
