What is the setting of The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making by Catherynne M. Valente?

There are two levels of setting worth noting in the book. The first is the location in time and place of the human world, the world September leaves behind in the first chapter and to which she returns in the last. Here also there are also two components. The first has to do with the place she comes from - Omaha, Nebraska. As previously discussed, there are clear echoes here of another novel about a young girl whisked off by a wind to a magical land - "The Wizard of Oz", in which the heroine is taken from her home in Kansas, Nebraska's geographical and environmental neighbor. The second component of the human world setting is its placement in time. While the narrative offers no explicit commentary on the subject, there are a couple of very clear hints, both having to do with September's parents. Specifically, the facts that her father has been drafted into fighting a war and her mother works in a factory clearly suggest that the narrative is set during World War II, a time when women working outside the home was, in America at least, still the exception rather than the rule.

The second noteworthy level of setting at work in the narrative is, of course, the setting of most of the action - Fairyland. Again, there are several points to note. A primary one is how the Fairyland in this book seems to have several aspects of other lands in other works of literature that are not necessarily called "fairyland" but function in similar ways such as Oz, Narnia, Wonderland, and Neverland. Also, and perhaps more importantly, Fairyland functions here on a metaphorical, archetypal level related to The Hero's Journey. Since The Hero's Journey is a symbolic journey through the self and the soul as well as a physical journey through a strange land Fairyland, as is the case with the previously discussed other magical lands, is essentially a metaphor for the central character's inner spiritual landscape. The beauty of Autumn, the wildness of the Worsted Woods, the unpredictability of the Perverse and Perilous Sea - all can be seen as manifestations of September's essential inner identity, aspects of self that she has to integrate into the new, mature, selfless Self that is the result of all such Journeys.