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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 Lesson” is set in Harlem and Midtown Manhattan (neighborhoods in New York City) in the 1960s. The story opens in Harlem, a neighborhood that became majority Black in the 20th century during the Great Migration, when a large number of Black people in the South moved north in order to avoid Jim Crow laws and forced racial segregation.
While the story begins and ends in Harlem, the middle part of the story takes place at FAO Schwarz, an expensive toy store in Midtown Manhattan. The following passage—in which Sylvia reacts to her new surroundings after emerging from the subway—captures this element of the setting:
Then we check out that we on Fifth Avenue and everybody dressed up in stockings. One lady in a fur coat, hot as it is. White folks crazy.
In this passage, Bambara highlights the differences between the majority-Black (and low-income) Harlem and the majority-White (and wealthy) Midtown. She does this by having Sylvia note, confusedly, how “everybody dressed up in stockings,” with one woman even wearing a fur coat “hot as it is.” Her conclusion that “white folks crazy” communicates to readers that, even though both neighborhoods are in the same city, there is a wide gulf between a life in Harlem and a life in Midtown Manhattan, due to the racial wealth divide.
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