Ways of Reading Third Edition - Martin Montgomery, Alan Durant, Nigel Fabb, Tom Furniss, Sara Mills 2007

6.1 Describing places
Unit 6 Language and place
Section 2 Language variation

Texts can create a sense of place in two main ways. First, they can describe places, incorporating many different sorts of detail. Where this occurs in fiction, the effect is what we think of as ’setting’. Second, place can be represented in how characters (or a narrator or poetic persona) are made to speak. This second way of representing place relies on connections we typically make between distinctive properties of voices and places with which they are conventionally associated. The two means of representing place work together to express complex beliefs, desires and fears about how human life fits into the natural and social environment. Evaluative contrasts within a text, between the country and the city, are an especially common device in creating a celebratory or critical sense of place; but there are also whole literary genres, such as the pastoral, which have established changing but recognizable conventions for achieving this (see Unit 4, Recognizing genre).

6.1 Describing places

Consider description first. In each of Thomas Hardy’s novels, the author precisely describes aspects of ’Wessex’, Hardy’s fictional name for the Southwest of England. In The Mayor of Casterbridge(1886), for example, the arrival in Casterbridge of Henchard’s wife Susan, while searching for Henchard, provides an early opportunity for description of the town. Casterbridge, Hardy writes, is a place ’at that time, recent as it was, untouched by the faintest sprinkle of modernism’; and he continues:

It was compact as a box of dominoes. It had no suburbs - in the ordinary sense. Country and town met at a mathematical line.

To birds of the more soaring kind Casterbridge must have appeared on this fine evening as a mosaic-work of subdued reds, browns, greys, and crystals, held together by a rectangular frame of deep green. To the level eye of humanity it stood as an indistinct mass behind a dense stockade of limes and chestnuts, set in the midst of miles of rotund down and concave field. The mass became gradually dissected by the vision into towers, gables, chimneys, and casements, the highest glazings shining bleared and bloodshot with the coppery fire they caught from the belt of sunlit cloud in the west.

From the centre of each side of this tree-bound square ran avenues east, west, and south into the wide expanse of corn-land and coomb to the distance of a mile or so. It was by one of these avenues that the pedestrians were about to enter.

Note in this passage different kinds of detail that build Hardy’s description: presentation of two viewpoints (eye level and bird’s eye view); mapping of directions and layout (’east, west, and south’); the topography of the land (’rotund down and concave field’); and references to specific plants (’limes and chestnuts’) and to colours (’reds, browns, greys, and crystals’), as well as close attention to architectural detail (’towers, gables, chimneys, and casements’). Note also, however, a further dimension of the fictional sense of place - contrasts and boundaries that potentially contribute to the novel’s moral and political themes: the boundary here, for example, between country and city (the two meet in Casterbridge, ’at a mathematical line’) and social changes that affect places over time (Casterbridge even at that recent time was, ’untouched by the faintest sprinkle of modernism’) - themes we now expect to find explored in the narrative. As in much fictional writing, Hardy’s description of Casterbridge here provides the novel not only with a specific geographical background or setting but also with important thematic or symbolic underpinning.