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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
Key Examples in The Blithedale Romance
Chapter 2: Blithedale
Explanation and Analysis:
The Blithedale Romance takes place in the 19th century in Massachusetts, outside Boston. Hawthorne based the setting on a utopian farming commune called Brook Farm, of which he was a founding member (as he explicitly specifies in the Preface). Like Brook Farm, Blithedale was "occupied and cultivated by a company of socialists." It is first described in Chapter 2 (titled "Blithedale"):
[...]there can hardly flicker up again so cheery a blaze upon the hearth, as that which I remember, the next day, at Blithedale. It was a wood-fire, in the parlor of an old farm-house, on an April afternoon[...] The staunch oaken-logs were long ago burnt out. Their genial glow must be represented, if at all, by the merest phosphoric glimmer[...] Around such chill mockery of a fire, some few of us might [...] talk over our exploded scheme for beginning the life of Paradise anew.
Related Themes:
