Setting
Along with characters and plot, setting is one of the three main elements of a story. Setting is the place and time of a story, but it is also more. In a different setting, the characters would be different people with different personalities, beliefs, and lifestyles. Scout would not be the same Scout we see in To Kill a Mockingbird if she were born and raised in New York City, or San Francisco, or Salt Lake City. The town and house where she is growing up in Maycomb, Alabama, have shaped and formed her into the person she is just as much as Atticus and Calpurnia have.
How is this true? Several things in a setting contribute to how a story and characters take form, including weather, location, economy, and history.
Weather determines what kinds of plants grow and how people spend their winters and summers, their days and nights. People are likely to have a different attitude about a climate with frequent, heavy rainfalls than they do concerning one with long, hot, dry summers and cold, bleak winters. They wear different clothing, eat different foods, and spend their leisure time doing different things.
Life in a small town in Alabama in the 1930s was very different from life in a large eastern city of the present day. Streets were narrow and often made of dirt where children played ball and an occasional car chugged by; today, wide boulevards are filled with blaring taxis and lined with shops. In the small town of the book, neighbors knew each other’s deep, dark secrets. They were not strangers living side by side, one in millions of city dwellers.
People in a rural, small-town economy think differently about what material goods are important. In l930s Maycomb, most people cared most about having enough to eat and a protective home. Much of what they ate they grew themselves or traded with others. They had no need for supermarkets or shopping malls. In fact, none existed. They also shared a history. Unlike a large city where people come together from somewhere else with different backgrounds, languages, and ideas about what is important in life, the people of Maycomb shared most of those things in common.