Present-Day Massachusetts

The main action in All's Well takes place at a small, unnamed liberal arts college in an unnamed Massachusetts college town. Although the year is not specified, readers can infer that the time setting is more or less contemporary day, and know that Miranda has been in her current situation for four years. Not much detail is given about the college or its location, but it is fair enough from Marblehead for Hugo to remark on the distance, yet close enough to the coast for Miranda to park and wander into the sea in a vaguely suicidal trance. The Bay State location in general is central to the novel's prime motifs about witchcraft and patriarchal power structures, such as converged in early colonial Puritan settlements like Marblehead and Salem. Miranda seems a native New Englander, but based on the attention she pays to the fact of Grace's...