Previous
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:
Tess of the D’Urbervilles is set in England during the Long Depression—a period of economic recession from around 1873 through 1879, though some historians claim that the effects of this recession continued well into the 1890s. This period coincides with the Victorian era, a time period during which standards for sexual morality (especially for women) were quite high and strict. Victorian literary Realism was immediately followed by a period of experimental Modernism, during which literary convention, form, and style were all upended to produce haunting, stream-of-consciousness writing with undefined or apparently directionless plot arcs. Hardy's novel seems to preface this undoing of the modern world—the unsettling nature of oncoming modernity—and even mentions this haunting existentialism directly.
The novel itself is set in the English countryside, in what would be called a rural or pastoral environment. Hardy often takes care to compare his characters to various natural phenomena that surround them. And, though it is not played out to the extreme, Tess of the D'Urbervilles mirrors earlier gothic and sentimental literature in the sense that natural settings, at times, become characters themselves. Compared to modern Christianity with all its flaws and corruption, nature appears the more holy religion in Hardy's novel.
Related Themes:
