Lowood Institution.
Thornfield.
Moorhouse.
Ferndean.
When I think of creating a sense of place, Jane Eyre comes quickly to my mind.
As I watched the 2011 version of Jane Eyre I was transfixed by the power of setting. The filmmakers, in my opinion, had an excellent vision for capturing the sense of place. Each place throughout the movie is its own character.
I want to create settings so real that you merely have to name them and the reader can immediately bring them to mind.
When I think of Lowood I see a dank, dreary, dimly lit institution. Not a school, but an institution.
I think of alienation, loneliness, fear, rejection, and the single ray of light shed by Miss Temple and Helen Burns' loving kindness towards Jane.
Gateshead (the first house in which we find Jane) seems enormous and empty.
I picture the first scene of the book where Jane is boxed in the ears by her cruel cousin. I feel Jane's bitter anguish as she is sent away to Lowood to be educated into the ways of humiliation...then years later heartbreak as she finds her dying aunt has hidden away the fortune that rightfully belongs to Jane.
Yet there is an ultimate peace in Jane's forgiveness of her aunt and the fact that the estate of Gatewood becomes a chapter of her past.
Thornfield evokes complex emotions as only a great writer like Bronte could yield.
Loneliness is a force in Jane's life as she is isolated with few companions.
The moors outside Thornfield are mysterious and moody like a petulant child ready to throw a temper tantrum at any moment.
When Jane helps a coarse, brooding man on a horse in these moors this reader was terrified yet transfixed. Who is this mysterious man?
Thornfield brings intense fear of the unknown, a desperation to know the truth, an intense uniting of two souls, the joy of intellectual conversation and friendship, and tragedy.
In the eyes of Charlotte Bronte, each of these settings has become a character of its own. They immediately evoke not only a description of the setting, but bring an intense emotionally stirring to the reader.
I have read hundreds of books and even for many well-written books I cannot remember the name of the setting or bring it easily to mind. Even fewer bring emotions to mind.What is the setting of your story or a favorite author's story?
What emotions does your setting evoke?
