Setting Influences Society

Setting can make or break a story; if the setting works then all other parts of the story make sense and fall into place, but if setting has no correlation with any aspect of the story then it lacks intelligibility. A story that takes place in a modern, bustling city should not have horse drawn carriages and unpolluted air in it. That is why in “Axis”, by Alice Munro, the setting she gives is crucial to the story. In “Axis” the setting of a small town fifty years ago that follows two young women to adulthood directly supports the theme of women conforming to set roles given by society.

Munro picks a specific setting of small country town around the 1950s to set up the start of how women conformed to societal roles, especially in small towns. She immediately starts off with a description of where young Grace and Avie live. They sit on a bus that “take them north, through the dark, thinly populated countryside, to their homes” (Munro 122). The word “dark” is implying a negative tone to the town that has a small population, and suggests that Grace and Avie have very little cultured experience. Grace lives on “her parents’ farm” where “‘the cows are boss around [there]’’ and this is much different from the university city life, as well as that Grace is never the boss and just does the duties she needs to, such as taking care of the farm cows (Munro 124-125). The small town sets up the perfect place to write about the image of women fifty years ago.

Women went to college, not because of intelligence, but to search for a man to settle down with. Grace and Avie attend university in the city outside their rural town for the same reason other women went to college: to meet a husband. Women at universities “were there to meet men” and “they enrolled [there] to find somebody to marry”, and that itself is clear that their education is valued much less than male education (Munro 122-123). Avie “quit college just before her exams” (Munro 124). She went through all the hard work and money of college, but after meeting a man she decided there was no need for it. Though she could have done well on the exams, she found the purpose for going to university and education had not been it. She goes back to the campus to retrieve books from her boarding house and sell them, but finds “that she didn’t really want to” (Munro 132). She does not want to completely surrender her education, but she is expected to in her surroundings as “male members of both families had joked that they ought to be able to nab somebody” (Munro 123). The family never asks how classes are going or what the girls are studying. The environment the girls are raised in effect how they view everything they do.

The taboo of women and sex is very prominent in the story Munro writes, especially in the religious rural living scene created, which is the reason Grace is so shy about the physical part of her relationship. The precautions Grace takes around her home to have secret sex with Royce are major. She plans every little detail, and for good reason because she is severely shunned when she gets caught. She even “push[es] the bike around to the back of the house, to hide it”, when she comes back to her own house that she is not supposed to be at alone with Royce (Munro 130). Royce thinks she is a “good girl” for being clever enough to hide the bike (Munro 130). Not only is that demeaning, but also a clear indicator that he knows sneaking around is the only way to have sex. Her mother is disgusted and outraged when she catches them. The time this story is written is highlighted when “sleep together, or have sex, as people would say later” is defined (Munro 124). That time period specifically did not use the term sex as if it were a dirty word. It makes Grace feel as if she is doing something wrong and Avie does it to try and fall in love. “If [Hugo and Avie] slept together, [Avie] thought, she might fall in love with him” (124).  Avie is also terrified of pregnancy scares because giving birth out of wedlock is very frowned upon. The stigma around the topic influences the girls in their homes to be quiet about sex.

The setting that Munro puts her story in is crucial for the plot to make sense. Munro acknowledges the way women are viewed in the setting she chose:

When the great switch came in women’s lives--when wives and mothers who had seemed content suddenly announced that it was not so, when they all started sitting on the floor instead of sofas, and took university courses and wrote poetry and fell in love with their professors or their psychiatrists or their chiropractors, and began to say “shit” and “fuck” instead of “darn” and “heck”--Avie was never tempted to join in (Munro 133)

But she ends with Avie not joining. It is the way and where she was raised. From Grace’s final letter, it sounds as if she never joined either. The older time and rural place Munro picks juxtapose with later times and city universities intricately weaves together the issue of women’s societal roles of living on a farm after she marries a man that she is ashamed she has sex with.    

Munro’s setting is one of the most important aspects of the story. Without the time period, there would less plausible reasons that women are treated as only wife material and not true scholars. The small town religious setting is crucial for the type of family farm living that is expected of Grace and Avie, as well as the way they act. The story gives an outlook into women’s lives in the 50’s rural towns. Munro’s purposeful pick of place is the root of integrity in “Axis”.