【正文】 as an environment, it absorbs some and repels others of the characters: those who are absorbed achieve a somber integration with it, but those who are repelled and rebel suffer disaster. Sometimes an environment serves as more than a mere place to set the story. Often, it is inextricably entangled with the protagonist, and even carries strong symbolic meanings. Cathy as an image of the feminine personality, for example, in Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, is not supposed to possess the “wilderness” characteristic of masculinity and symbolized by the locales of Heathcliff and Wuthering Heights. In some fiction, setting is closely bound with theme. In The Scarlet Letter, even small details afford powerful hints at the theme of the story. At the start of the story, the narrator describes a colonial jailhouse: Before this ugly edifice, and between it and the wheeltrack of the street, was a grassplot, much overgrown with burdock, pigweed, appleperu, and such unsightly vegetation, which evidently found something congenial in the soil that had so early borne the black flower of civilized society, a prison. But, on one side of the portal, and rooted almost at the threshold, was a wild rosebush, covered, in this month of June, with its delicate gems, which might be imagined to offer their fragrance and fragile beauty to the prisoner as he went in, and to the condemned criminal as he came forth to his doom, in token that the deep heart of Nature could pity and be kind to him. Apparently, the author makes a contrast between the ugly jailhouse with a tangled grassplot overgrown with burdock and pigweed and something as beautiful as a wild rose. As the story unfolds, he will further suggest that secret sin and a pretty child may go together like a pigweed and wild roses. In this artfully crafted novel, setting is intimately blended with characters, symbolism, and theme. In addition to place, setting may crucially involve the time of the story—century, year, or even specific hour. It may matter greatly that a story takes places in the morning or at noon. The medieval background informs us differently from the twentieth century. Kennedy and Gioia note that in The Scarlet Letter, the nieenthcentury author Nathaniel Hawthrone, utilizes a long introduction and a vivid description of the scene at a prison door to inform us that the events in the story took place in the Puritan munity of Boston of the earlier seventeenth century. This setting, to which Hawthorne pays so much attention, together with our schemata concerning Puritan practice, helps us understand what happens in the novel. We can understand to some extent the agitation in the town when a woman is accused of adultery, for adultery was a flagrant defiance of church for the Godfearing New England Puritan munity, and an illegitimate child was evidence of sin. Without information about the seventeenthcentury Puritan background, a reader today may be perplexed at the novel. The fact that the story in Hawthorne’s novel took place in a time remote from our own leads us to expect different attitudes and customs of the characters, is strongly suggestive of the whole society, which is crucial to an essential understanding of The Scarlet Letter as a whole. Besides place and time, setting may also include the weather, which, indeed, may be crucial in some stories. 2. Local color writing /regionalism and the writer, a regional writer. When setting dominates, or when a piece of fiction is written largely to present the manners and customs of a locality, the writing is often called local color writing or regionalism and the writer, a regional writer. A regional writer usually sets his/her stories in one geographic area and tries to bring it alive to readers everywhere. Thomas Hardy, in his portrayal of life in Wessex, wrote regional novels. Arnold Bent’s novels of the “Five Towns” are markedly regional. Willliam Faulkner, known as a distinguished regional writer, almost always set his novels and stories in his native Mississippi. 3. The setting of a novel is not always drawn from a reallife locale. The setting of a novel is not always drawn from a reallife locale. Literary artists sometimes prefer to create the totality of their fiction—the setting as well as characters and their actions. …… The creation of setting can be a magical fictional gift in a novelist or storyteller. But whatever the setting of his/her work, a true novelist is concerned with making an environment credible for his/ her characters and their actions and in accord with the development of the plot. In some stories, a writer seems to draw a setting mainly to evoke atmosphere. In such a story, setting starts us feeling whatever the storyteller would have us feel. Thus atmosphere is a metaphor for a feeling or an impression which we cannot readily attach to some tangible cause. We say that an old farmhouse set among large maples, on a green lawn, has an atmosphere of peace. Here what we mean is that the house, by reason of the look of quietness and by reason of a number of pleasant associations we have with the kind of life lived there, stirs a certain reaction in us which we do not attach to any single incident or object, but generally to the whole scene. In the same way we may say that the setting of a story contributes to defining its atmosphere. For instance, in “The TellTale Heart,” Poe’s setting the action in an old, dark, lanternlit house greatly contributes to the reader’s sense of unease, and so helps to build the story’s effectiveness. Another example is Lawrence’s “The Horse Dealer’s Daughter,” the description at the beginning of which contributes much to the atmosphere of the story. 4. The importance of atmosphere in creating the setting But it is a mistake to say that the atmosphere of a piece of fiction depends on the setting alone. (As illustrated in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the dialogue at the very beginning of the play helps powerfully to establish th