Setting in Soldiers Home, the Hand, and Miss Brill - Essay Example

Setting in Soldier's Home, The Hand and Miss Brill One of the most over-looked literary devices is that of setting. The physical grounding of a story is usually one of the most subtle ways in which an author reflects and expresses their characters – although different stories, naturally, make different uses of setting. In The Yellow Wallpaper, for instance, a nineteenth-century semi-autobiographical short story, the setting provides the basis of the plot: the narrator focuses on the wallpaper to distract herself from her depression, and becomes obsessed with destroying the paper as an outlet for her frustration with her overbearing husband. In other stories, particularly children’s books, setting hardly plays any role at all. The setting of three short stories – Ernest Hemingway's Soldier's Home, Colette's The Hand and Katherine Mansfield's Miss Brill – will be discussed in this essay. I will look at the public and private aspects of each setting to show that even when setting is not integral to the plot, it can reveal important truths about the characters.              Soldier's Home, from its very title, alerts us to the setting of the story (Meyer). However, it is not so much the physical positioning of the story that the title refers to as a genuine philosophical question, which can be asked of anyone whose travels irrevocably change them, war or no war: when a person changes, how can their home still be good enough? The Hand, alternately, is one of those stories mentioned above in which the setting is almost irrelevant, as the action is almost entirely internal, externally restricted to the couple's bed. In Miss Brill, the protagonist focuses on and is enchanted by the setting. The three authors imbue their setting with different levels of importance: the seaside park features as a place of enjoyment in Miss Brill's routine, and her presence there directly causes the climax of the plot. Krebs' house in Soldier's Home exacerbates his feeling of despair without actually causing it; Colette's protagonist remains unaware of her physical surroundings as she focuses exclusively on her new husband's “monstrous” hand (reference). In each story there is a public setting and a private setting. This essay will define these settings for each story before contrasting the ways in which this literary device is used.              In 1925, Ernest Hemingway published a collection of short stories called In Our Time, one story of which was Soldier's Home. This story features Krebs, a young man who returns to America from World War I in 1919, a year after the war has ended and long after other local soldiers have returned home. He “did not want to leave Germany” (Hemingway), and now feels like an outsider. The public and private dichotomy of settings in Soldier's Home is complicated, because Krebs experiences degrees of privacy: in his bedroom, he admits to himself that “he did not really need a girl”; when on the front porch, he “liked to look at them” but when in town, “their appeal to him was not very strong” (Hemingway). In the privacy of his bedroom and the pool room, Krebs can escape the changes and simply be, thoughtlessly. In the public areas of his house and the local town, he must come face-to-face with manifestations of how the war changed him.              In the settings beyond his private bedroom, Krebs is unable to handle other people, their needs and personalities. He is unable to participate in a romantic relationship because he “did not want any consequences” – the German and French girls, possibly prostitutes, with whom he fraternized in Europe characterize “simple” relationships (Hemingway). This crisis runs so deeply within him that, in the kitchen, he tells his mother that he does not love her, by which he means he cannot love anyone. The war has taken so much of him that he cannot deal with other people.              In Krebs' bedroom, however, it becomes clear that even his own self is too complicated for him. Alone, the soldier can reminisce about the war, although his thoughts are confused: he idealizes the relationships he participated in whilst at war, yet admits that he was “badly, sickeningly frightened all the time” (Hemingway). He sleeps, or rather hibernates, closing himself off not just from the world but from his own memories. It is telling that Krebs' attempt to understand the war by reading a history of it, is something he only engages in publicly, and only “until he became bored” – in private, all he wants to do is sleep and play pool, in the “cool dark” of the pool room (Hemingway). Krebs' public setting reflects the motif of depression, and the overarching theme of how change can affect one's public behaviour; in private, he immerses himself in this shameful change, distancing himself from his current surroundings. In neither setting is the soldier of Soldier's Home truly at home.              Colette's The Hand records a young woman's revelation that her new marriage may not be all she had expected. The protagonist lies in bed with her sleeping husband, musing on the difference between her marital bedroom and her bedroom in her parents' house – this suggests that she is very young, and has moved straight from her childhood home to her husband's. Colette compares their courtship to a “kidnapping”, as the two only met a month before their wedding (Colette). As the young woman lovingly contemplates the “animal”-esque look of her husband's hand, it spasms, and suddenly she is transfixed by its monstrosity, overwhelmed with the sense that she has made the wrong decision to spend her life with a “young widower” whom she barely knows (Colette). The setting is little more than a backdrop, rather like a children's story – appropriately, given that it can be interpreted as an inverted-morality (for the time) fable for young women on the dangers of marrying.              The temporal setting shifts over the course of the short story, from night to morning, and it is telling that the wife's perceptions of the “ghastly” hand are not dismissed, by daylight, as the fabrication of nightmare (Colette). Colette's point is that women are forced into marriage without proper knowledge of the consequences, which can be terrible for them, particularly when they are young. The woman compares her setting to her habitual setting, that of the “room where she had slept as a little girl” – she is accustomed to seeing the dawn through pink curtains, not the unfamiliar blue ones of her marital chamber (Colette). This is another reflection of her husband's power over her, using stereotypically gender-designated colors to emphasize the authority of his color preferences over hers.              The setting of The Hand is interesting in that it is both public and private – it begs the question, how can a woman have a private place in her husband's house? Hopefully, for many women, this is a dilemma which has been rendered virtually irrelevant now, so many years after Colette wrote about it, although for others the lack of privacy remains one of the many horrors of a real loveless, disrespectful marriage. The duplicity now necessary in the unhappy young wife's life is reflective of the dichotomy of the setting: the couple's marital bed is the scene of her personal revelation, as well as the place where they breakfast together and where she feels obligated to kiss “the monstrous hand” (Colette) – and, presumably, have sex with him (and his hands). This “lowly, delicate diplomacy” (Colette) effectively transforms her setting by dividing it: she is both publicly happy and privately disgusted with her new husband.              One could interpret the protagonist's duplicity in one of two ways: does the physical setting reflect her total submission to her husband, or does the fact that she maintains a secret, inner life represent a triumph over him? Is this a victory over a powerful man whose hand “really is bigger than [her] whole head” (Colette), or is it her surrender? The setting remains ambiguous rather than illuminating on this: for example, we could say that the blue curtains reflect one of the husband's many victories, but the fact that they are “brand-new” suggests that the couple could have chosen them together (Colette). At the climax of the story, the couple are essentially on equal terms – although he is physically stronger, he is also asleep and therefore vulnerable – and the woman clearly makes a choice to submit. The reader is left hoping that she will reverse this hasty decision at some point.              The two settings of Miss Brill are the seaside park where she spends her Sundays people-watching, and her home where she retreats after overhearing a cruel comment. The audience is brought into Miss Brill's world as she arrives at the park, anticipating her weekly people-watching session; after a young couple accidentally and callously ruins not only her day but her self-perception, we return to her home and to a final image of a middle-aged woman sitting on her bed, sad and alone, vaguely aware of the sound of crying (which obviously comes from her). The intense pleasure that Miss Brill feels in the public setting contrasts greatly with the detached misery of the private scene.              Miss Brill herself enhances the gloominess of the private setting: her fanciful speculation earlier that some of the other people sitting alone “come from little dark rooms, or even – even cupboards” is echoed in the final paragraphs of the story, which describes “her room like a cupboard” (Mansfield), her pity for those strangers intensifying her pathetic and empathetic situation. The young couple giggling to each other “who wants her?” upsets Miss Brill so deeply that she cannot even glean pleasure from her fur, which she earlier called “Dear little thing!” (Mansfield). That she is so detached from her own misery as to be unable to realize that she is crying – Mansfield instead reports that Miss Brill “thought she heard something crying” (my italics) (Mansfield) – highlights a theme of privacy closer to Krebs' experience than to that of the protagonist of The Hand. Like Krebs, Miss Brill uses her private setting to wallow in grief without acknowledging it. Unlike Krebs, who deals with his change by hibernating, but similarly to the duplicitous young wife, Miss Brill simply separates her sadness from the rest of her consciousness.              By contrast, in the public setting, Miss Brill feels deeply connected with the world and the background props of the story. She believes that her Sunday trip to the park is to participate in a play of some sort, and reassures herself that “no doubt somebody would have noticed if she hadn't been there” (Mansfield) – a sentiment very revealing of her loneliness, which the young couple so callously and obliviously highlight for her shortly afterwards. She feels so in-tune with the setting that she speculates that “the whole company would begin singing” (Mansfield) as if in a musical, in which this lonely older woman would be given a part – a purpose. The mere fact of being in the Jardins Publiques reveals that Miss Brill, although she lives a conventionally tragic life, at least tries to be happy – confirmed in the brightly colored “red eiderdown” in her apartment (Mansfield). Perhaps she is happy, but sadly this happiness is so fragile that an off-hand remark from the young couple – her hero and heroine of the play – can decimate her cheerful attitude. The haunting image of the short story, an older single woman trying to find happiness, is emphasized in chiaroscuro through the settings: the “great spots of light like white wine” in the park represent joy, whereas the “little dark room” in which Miss Brill lives is expressive of her hurt (Mansfield).              The public setting of each of these stories reveals its character's deepest fears and, in various ways, enhances the motif of secrecy and the theme of irreparable change. Krebs, the young woman and Miss Brill are all changed drastically by certain events – Krebs before the story, the two women during – and the effects of these changes are demonstrated within different settings. The young wife feels more in touch with herself in her private, internal setting; Miss Brill is happier in the public setting; Krebs is comfortable nowhere. The dichotomous settings of these three short stories emphasize the ways in which the characters connect and disconnect from the world around them, by presenting different behaviours in different arenas.              In the public arenas, the fears of the characters are highlighted. Krebs is scared of women, simply because he is expected to have a relationship with one – although he finds no comfort in male company, he feels less awkward around men because no one expects him to share his soul with one. The young woman in The Hand forces herself to hide her disgust at her new, strange husband in public; Miss Brill, although she enjoys being outside in the company of strangers, is easily brought to a crisis with the chance comment from one stranger that she is alone and that her fur “looks like fried whiting” (Mansfield). In these stories, Hemingway, Colette and Mansfield use, or imply, dichotomous settings to reveal the characters' true natures to the reader. Privacy is an important aspect of life, and that the audience is invited into these private arenas is a privilege, as well as a shorthand way for the author to reveal the inner feelings of the character. By contrasting these with the characters' behaviour in public, the audience receives a rounded view of the individuals, making the author's messages much more dramatic and clearer to understand. Works Cited Colette, Sidonie-Gabrielle. (n.a.). “Symbolism: The Hand.” Literature to Go. Ed. Michael Meyer. 2010. Web. http://ebooks.bfwpub.com/littogo1e.php Hemingway, Ernest. (1925). “Setting: Soldier's Home.” Literature To Go. Ed. Michael Meyer. 2010. Web. http://ebooks.bfwpub.com/littogo1e.php Mansfield, Katherine. (1922). “Theme: Miss Brill.” Literature to Go. Ed. Michael Meyer. 2010. Web. http://ebooks.bfwpub.com/littogo1e.php Read More