“La vita e un viaggio. Chi viaggia vive due volte.”
Life is a journey. Those who travel live twice.
Italian proverb
Foreign settings allure and entice. They whisper of things unknown, exotic, and enriching. The Italian saying quoted above proposes a second life for traveling characters. Not only are they exposed to other languages, customs, and cultures but more importantly they are released from the binds that inhibit their conduct or hold them to their native mindset. Moreover, in reinvention stories, these protagonists can seek to change or reinvent themselves—to recreate an essential part of their core—to become someone else.
From a craft point of view, what does an author need to consider when moving a protagonist abroad? What factors need to be appraised and addressed when portraying a character reinvention so that the reader can comprehend the process and evaluate the success of the change? How do authors create settings that facilitate their depiction of character reinvention?
As a writer drafting a novel about a woman attempting to reinvent herself in Rome, I combed reinvention literature seeking foreign settings—specifically focusing on Italy—for insight on how to use setting to enhance and elevate my own work.
The most significant and practicable lesson I took away from my findings was the importance of depicting protagonists in their existing lives/settings/home environments before moving them to a foreign setting. This allows writers to ground their characters by providing a glimpse of their roots—community, history, culture, and social norms. Readers can then perceive the protagonists’ intentional reinventions once they move beyond the border to a new setting where they are unknown and can begin casting themselves into whomever or whatever they want to be.
A second lesson gained from the reinvention literature was the need to convey the reason for the characters’ perceived need to reinvent themselves.
Two works of literature stood out as particularly striking in the way the authors drew setting to evoke emotion as well as inspire and facilitate character reinvention: Francesca Marciano’s short story, “The Other Language” and Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel, Whereabouts. My close reading revealed the following observations on how Marciano and Lahiri skillfully leveraged setting in their stories.
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In “The Other Language,” Marciano establishes that a young Italian girl’s mother has died, and her father has taken her and her siblings on holiday from their home in Rome to a small, remote Greek village in order to lift their spirits. Within this foreign setting, away from the press of well-intentioned but smothering relatives, neighbors, and teachers who won’t let her forget the recent tragedy in her life, the author uses setting to inspire the girl’s desire to reinvent herself to get through her pain. Marciano’s selection of the secluded village for the beginning of Emma’s self-styled transformation reflects Emma’s emotional isolation since her mother’s death. The author’s use of the setting emphasizes the child’s loneliness, which helps to evoke emotional empathy for the girl by the reader.
Marciano’s choice of third-person close point of view—a technique that immerses the reader into the story by providing access to the character’s thoughts and motivations—enhances the protagonist’s vulnerability and allows the reader to understand the girl’s desire to become stronger, independent, and unconventional.
The author sets the family’s Greek visit in the bright days of summer casting a glow of hope over the activities that take place. The sandy shore, the azure water, and the bracing smell of seawater elicit Emma’s growing aspiration to abandon her culturally and socially constrained behavior and to throw off the shadow cast by her mother’s suicide. Sunlight promotes growth. The reader can see Emma developing a desire to grow away from the familial trappings of her current life and culture—which she views as inhibiting. She is forbidden to swim to the island, but she wants to develop the skill and strength that a pair of English brothers exhibit when they swim there daily.
The villagers and tourists speak Greek and Italian, but when the British arrive, the sound of articulated English attracts Emma’s attention because of its “authoritative” tone. She equates this with strength, and it becomes clear that Emma is starting to associate strength with things foreign—with things not Italian.
Back in Rome after the holiday, Emma dedicates herself to learning English. She returns to the island the following summer and makes love with the older English brother on the island to which she was forbidden to swim. Marciano’s choice of the “forbidden” island for Emma’s first sexual experience not only echoes Emma’s surrealistic feelings during the encounter. Additionally, arriving at the island after a long, challenging swim through choppy, slapping waves illustrates not only the risk involved and foreshadowed potential danger ahead but also her burgeoning strength.
Years later, Emma travels by train, meets a young American man, and follows him to New York City where she is delighted by Americans and their casual behavior and carefree habits like eating in the car or working in bed. In addition to Marciano’s symbolic use of the train—a known symbol for journey and fatalism (a one-way, pre-laid track) that serves as a foreshadowing device—this travel setting also allows a conversation to take place and a relationship to begin—advancing Emma’s evolving reinvention.
She talks by telephone to her sister and brother back in Rome about the wonders and conveniences of America while implying that they, who remain in Rome, are living in the Middle Ages. The choice of New York as Emma’s first American city of residence allows Marciano to compare two globally renowned cities that most readers will be somewhat familiar with and realize that Emma’s view of Rome seems myopic as she focuses mostly on her native city’s inconveniences and formal traditions.
Proud of her almost accent-free English, her job with an architectural firm, and her green card, she embraces her newfound American-ness and evolves to the point where she no longer feels bound by Italian culture and social traditions. On a trip back home to Rome, she realizes that since she now lives in a different country, she no longer feels responsible for nor humiliated by Rome’s graffiti, street garbage, potholes, traffic, and cheap tourist menus. Again, the reader wonders at Emma’s myopia because Marciano has portrayed her as blinded to the fact that New York has some of the same big-city issues as Rome.
While waiting for an old friend, Emma runs into the younger English brother in a tourist-filled piazza. She learns that the older brother has died from drug use and is surprised by the jolt of pain the news delivers. Marciano’s setting choice—the crowded, active piazza—is exceptional for the cinematic quality it lends the story as Emma is struck by the death of her first lover and with the realization that all that she was chasing and changing herself for was a self-created illusion. Life as an English speaker was not a panacea, and her reinvention did not protect her from the misery that pervades across cultures.
At the story’s end, Emma is riding in a car with her American husband in Arizona. Marciano’s selection of the quiet, cacti-dotted, isolated Arizona desert is striking in its contrast to vibrant, noisy, crowded Rome, and the desolate setting serves the story’s ending well. Functioning as navigator while her husband drives, Emma holds a map while trying to discuss her meeting with the grown-up English boy in Rome and the effect the brothers had on her life. Her husband doesn’t grasp the significance of her pontifications, brushes them off, and is more concerned with directions and the road. The story ends with him impatiently flapping his hand at her and asking for the map.
The car ride through the desert and the desert itself can all be interpreted symbolically as the life she has culled for herself away from the richness and traditions of her family, culture, and country. And the miscommunication, misread map, and missed turn can be viewed as symbols of the misguided belief that English was the key to a less painful life.
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Set in an unidentified Italian city, Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel Whereabouts portrays a year in the life of an academic female protagonist who has arrived in her mid-forties without strong emotional bonds and questioning her place in the world. The novel, told in first person point-of-view, comprises forty-six short chapters or vignettes that are named for the different setting in which each of the individual stories takes place: “In the Office” (8), “At Dinner” (79), “In My Head” (77).
Each of these little stories within a story provides context that characterizes the novel’s unnamed protagonist and helps the reader to understand her need for reinvention–so that she can develop meaningful connections. For example, in “On the Street” (5) she runs into a friend’s husband to whom she is attracted but chooses not to take it further. Both longing and restraint are evident as well as a desire for connection. A carryover of self-loathing from childhood appears in the chapter “At the Cash Register” (73) where the protagonist recalls an incident when she was thirteen years old. Her parents, who were careful with money, had given her some cash to spend on an outing in the city with her cousin. At a lively open market that mirrored her joyful mood, she was swept up with its vitality and purchased a pair of dangling red and black earrings that had caught her eye. When she returned home, her mother railed against her for her purchase. She could never again look at the earrings without hating herself.
In a chapter entitled “In the Hotel” (51), Lahiri sets the vignette in a hotel crowded with strangers. The selection of a hotel is especially adroit because one often feels alone in an impersonal hotel room decorated with typical hotel paraphernalia.
Lahiri builds tension and a sense of exasperation through a long list of affronting hotel room objects, and one imagines the protagonist on the verge of spiraling out of control. By ensconcing the narrator in a cluttered space so anxiety-provoking that it makes her “hate the world” (52) and feel as though she could throw herself out the window with the rest of the clutter, Lahiri signals the protagonist’s alarming psychological state and discloses the depth of her despair. She takes the reader from a perception of viewing the protagonist as disgruntled and unhappy to understanding how untethered she is to anything or anyone in her life. Moreover, through this scene, Lahiri uses setting to provoke the reader into considering how the protagonist views herself. Does she see herself as meaningless as the objects filling the room? Or as offensive as the room’s clutter? The protagonist seems to imply a lack of self-worth or a meaningful existence by considering throwing herself out the window as though she were just another piece of the clutter to be tossed out. This pivotal chapter strikes the reader with the realization that the protagonist could be on a path to self-destruction unless she reinvents herself.
The author offers some relief within this setting through a closet that is spare and offers a moment’s respite to both the narrator and the reader. Lahiri’s contrast of night and day also serves the story. Nights in the room with the clutter and no other distractions are what the protagonist really dreads. One wonders if she could bear it better with someone by her side.
For the protagonist in Whereabouts, the road to reinvention—the impetus to change—builds slowly as the novel progresses. As the need for reinvention becomes clear, the protagonist requires some kind of push to evolve, or she will die as she is. Lahiri offers the protagonist a new setting in the form of a fellowship abroad thereby constructing an opportunity for the character to reinvent herself in a new country. The protagonist waivers. She has never left her city, she explains to her barista “At the Coffee Bar” (129) who wonders why she would even consider not going. Leafing through a discarded newspaper, the protagonist sees a photo of a scholar she had encountered at the conference in the hotel earlier that year. She pauses to think about him, remembering his curly hair, his smile, his gaze, and thinks this could be a sign. Her eyes reach for the article, and she discovers it is his obituary.
Lahiri could have placed this staggering revelation in a number of settings. Situating it in a familiar, calm, and cozy coffee shop setting makes the news more jarring by contrast. This scene is crucial to the overall story because the death serves as a catalyst for the protagonist to accept the fellowship—before she runs out of time.
One of the novel’s more emotionally searing vignettes is set in “At the Crypt” (145). The location and the flinch-worthy title itself prime the reader for something haunting. The protagonist has accepted the opportunity abroad. She visits her dead father at his crypt and bitterly accosts him for the distance he maintained from both her and her mother—with whom she constantly quarreled. She also berates him for refusing to step in and defend her against her mother’s criticism. She recalls a time she and her father were to go to the theater together. He and she were to depart early in the morning to travel to a theatrical performance out of town, but he developed a high fever that night and the next day in the hospital his organs began to die. The reader can almost hear her unspoken gasp of pain. But then she informs her dead father that she mourned the wasted tickets more than she mourned him.
The fitting placement of this one-sided confrontation in the crypt allows the protagonist to kill off her father’s influence psychologically and symbolically and to release her anger and profound disappointment in him.
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Just as setting is key to launching a reinvention story—to provide the reader with a view of the protagonist in his native surroundings before taking him abroad—setting can also be used to enrich a story’s ending. Both authors use setting symbolically in their endings to infuse an emotional aura that readers carry away. Lahiri’s protagonist riding a train away from her hollow life toward her fellowship abroad swaths the reader in hope; and Marciano’s depiction of Emma, lost on a deserted highway in the Arizona desert, delivers a blow that stuns the reader with its sadness.
Whatever way an author concludes a reinvention story—whether by setting location to reflect a character’s mood, intention or fate or to paint symbols into the scene—setting offers outstanding opportunity to not only add emotional and psychological depth to a story but to elevate a character’s change on the page.
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