Mood
is the feeling an author deliberately creates through the use of language and
images, particularly in the treatment of the setting, the place or location
of the story. You can think of the mood of a piece as an effect that the author
tries to achieve through a consistent and repeated use of similar details in
describing the place and time in which the story takes place. Think of the ever-present
images of cold and snow slowly freezing the Newcomer in To Build a Fire or the
rise and fall of the waves which threatened the shipwreck survivors in The Open
Boat from American Literary Classics. Jack London captured the numbing feel
of the cold Arctic and Stephen Crane consciously developed a wavelike rhythm
in his prose, which captured the up-down and back-and-forth movements of the
helpless lifeboat tossing in the sea. There is almost a sense of seasickness,
combined with the exhaustion and desperation of the men in the boat.
While those stories developed a hyper-realistic sense of place, O. Henry's stories
successfully captured the spirit of the times in which they took place: the
Christmas setting in Jim and Della's squalid little apartment for The Gift of
the Magi, strategically situated during America's Great Depression, and the
nightlife in New York City in the early part of the 20th Century from The Green
Door, as well as the sense of community and collaboration of Greenwich Village
as it became the mecca for American artists around that same time in The Last
Leaf.
In Tales of Mood
and Mystery, authors such as Edgar Allen Poe and Shirley Jackson make much
more dramatic use of their settings: the cavernous catacombs of The Cask of
Amontillado and the frantic chaos of modern New York City. 