More Than Human Setting

Rural 1950s United States

This novel has a very vague setting. It's as if the book is so busy keeping track of all the characters' out-of-order memories and mind-powers that the setting has to go on the back-burner. Don't worry. We'll make sense of it for you.

Where Exactly?

A few clues, such as references to Pennsylvania and the ROTC, show we're in the United States. But we don't know much more than that. We have woods. We have a mansion in the woods, and a cave-like thing that Lone turns into a shelter. There's a farm nearby that later becomes an anti-aircraft range, and there are lots of pretty paragraphs talking about how beautiful nature is. But that's about all we've got to work with.

Well, we can tell Miss Kew lives in some sort of city, because there are taxis, but we learn next to nothing about it. The only function of Miss Kew's house as a setting seems to be to point out how proper and tidy it is compared to the gestalt shelter in the woods, or how both her house and Mr. Kew's have libraries (see Alicia Kew's "Character Analysis" for more about that).

So why all this Mother Nature? Remember that the book is a sci-fi exploration of what the next step in human evolution might be. The back-to-basics rural environments provide a good laboratory, so to speak, to watch the gestalt life form grow and make meaning out of what we see. The rural environments, after all, keep it relatively isolated from outside influences.

It's only near the end of the book that we learn that Gerry worries about what government spies or military forces would do if they were to find out about the anti-gravity generator the gestalt invented. But such interference remains a mere possibility that's only briefly mentioned.

Okay, If Not Where, Then When?

The novel, written in 1953, seems set shortly after World War II, which formally concluded in 1945. A few clues, including brief references to German soldiers (1.19.8), Dwight Eisenhower (2.2.51), and atomic war (3.21.26), suggest that.

What's the big secret? Why doesn't the book just tell us? Again, maybe it doesn't because time doesn't make much of a difference, as long as the gestalt grows with few outside factors affecting it. The novel focuses on how the characters behave either alone or while belonging with each other. It isn't comparing, say, two different cities or different generations.

Anything Else?

We do have a pretty clear distinction between nature and indoor settings in this book. Over and over, the natural world is described as beautiful. Its beauty has a positive effect on the characters, like when it inspires Evelyn (1.2.9) or surrounds Hip's healing (3.3.19-20):

Outside an oriole made a long slender note, broke it, and let the fragments fall through the shining air. A stake-bed truck idled past, busily shaking the string of cowbells on its back, while one hoarse man and one with a viola voice flanked it afoot, chanting. In one window came a spherical sound with a fly at its heart and at the other appeared a white kitten. Out by the kitten went the fly and the kitten reared up and batted at it, twisted and sprang down out of sight as if it had meant all along to leave; only a fool would have thought it had lost its balance.

And in the room was quiet and a watchfulness which was without demand, except perhaps a guarding against leaving anything unwatched. The girl sat with her hands aslumber and her eyes awake, while a pipe-cleaner man called Healing was born in all his cores, all his marrow, taking the pose of his relaxed body, resting and growing a little and resting again and growing. (3.3.19-20).

The novel doesn't straight-up say that nature heals Hip, but we can certainly associate the two by placing them side by side.

So while outdoors in the novel is all trees and freedom, indoors is usually something else. Indoor settings include Hip's jail cell, Mr. Kew's fortress-like mansion, and Miss Kew's way-too-tidy house. Lone's shelter in the woods is a kind of halfway point between the two. But generally, indoors is opposed to outdoors in this novel. To oversimplify: outdoors good, indoors bad.

For example, when Hip is going into Mr. Kew's mansion to heal Gerry with philosophy, he thinks of the property as a "whole area [...] in prison" (3.6.4) and thinks of walking into the building as entering into "a great sick mouth" (3.6.12). Let's hope it brushed its teeth.

And check out where Hip and Gerry have their final philosophical showdown. It's in a room "like a giant greenhouse, fifty yards wide, forty deep; the huge panes overhead curved down and down and met the open lawn—it was more a park—at the side away from the house. After the closeness and darkness of what he had already seen it was shocking but it built up in him a great exhilaration" (3.16.59).

A greenhouse is indoors but lets sun in so the flowers can grow. Similarly, Gerry grows into a mature gestalt able to join the Homo Gestalt society in this "glass room," as the first line of the final section says (3.21.1).