Previous
Pathos
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:
Though grounded in Cora’s journey, The Underground Railroad weaves together a range of places and time periods to track the arc of slavery. The story begins in Georgia but never stays for long in any one place. Ajarry’s kidnapping into slavery takes her from Ouidah to Liverpool and then across the Atlantic. Cora’s journey takes her through as many states as hardships: she travels from the Randall plantation to South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Indiana. Forced by changes in enslavers or driven towards freedom, the characters embark on perilous journeys that reflect the itinerant nature of slave work and the fragile uncertainties of hope.
At the same time, the novel’s long chronicle of places speaks to the extensive, and perhaps inescapable, scale of slavery’s reach. Each of Cora’s stops—South Carolina and its “new system,” Terrance Randall with his Georgian bloodthirstiness—reveals its own set of troubling and violent practices. The dormitories and their dances are no less oppressive than Ethel’s urge to care for her own “savage” or Mr. Fields’s grossly reductive exhibits. Even as the most idyllic stop along Cora’s journey, the Valentine farm remains a fragile refuge at best, besieged and destroyed in the end by envious white neighbors. The landscape around Cora changes, but the deep awareness of racial injustice stays much the same.
Despite its focus on pre-Civil War-era slavery, The Underground Railroad moves through time to stress the ways in which the institution has lived on. Most of the novel portrays American chattel slavery in its heyday. Old Randall parlays his indigo enterprise into a sprawling cotton plantation, while Ridgeway has built his living off the Fugitive Slave Act. But the work incorporates other practices that emerge in later decades—mob violence, forced sterilization, or crude stereotyping, for instance—and extends beyond the strict limits of its time period. By creating this collage of injustices, The Underground Railroad draws a throughline from 19th-century slavery to the injustices that still exist today.
Related Themes:
