Noreen wrote:
I wonder what it is that authors and readers want out of an Alpine setting?
An extremely good question. AS regards authors, I presume that EBD and Johanna Spyri would give vey different answers: Spyri spent much of her life in rural Switzerland and so the Alps was just her normal environment (according to the short bio in my copy of Heidi) and may have envisaged readers with similar familiarity. EBD, of course, saw the Alps as a holiday-maker and must have assumed that the vast majority of her readers had no first-hand experience. EBD gives much longer descriptions of Alpine meadows, perhaps reflecting a sense that this would be an exotic selling point of the series.
As others have noted, the attraction of the Alpine setting must be its natural features. It offers both the beauty of summer flowers and the bleakness of a winter. Heidi covers both seasons but in any individual CS book you tend to get one or the other depending on which term it is.
so, I'm about 40% of the way through Heidi, and, obviously, anything I say now is subject to revision as the story goes on. It is very much a book which opposes nature to culture. Heidi spends her days in the pastures and, at age 8, has never been to school. her grandfather doesn't hold with such things, and nor indeed does she, because when she is yanked off to the city she hates it and is just waiting to go home. She is consistently described as, or associated with, the local animals. Since Nature is always a positive idea here, there have so far been none of the dramatic storms, flashfloods etc which punctuate EBD's Tyrolean books. I don't know where this is going to end. Either Heidi will head out of town, get back to the pastures in an uneducated state (validating nature over culture) or perhaps she'll achieve a synthesis of both.
Chalet girls, I think, are expected to be such a synthesis of nature and culture, demonstrating understanding of both. That isn't laid on too thickly, but tends to become a theme when the school is contrasted with others. Online discussion about the difference between the CS and the Saints tends to deal with the cultural issues (celebrating the internationalism of the CS with the parochialism of the Saints) but the difference between them is also about nature. The CS understands the natural environment around them. The Saints don't bother to learn. They wear inappropriate footwear on rambles and their ignorance of the differences in ice thickness in different parts of the lake nearly leads to disaster. Then (and I suggest this only tentatively. I really should read it again before making large assertions) there's Eustacia. When she enters the series, she is the most cultured person we have yet seen (Oxford, Classics) but is a terrible person. Only by meeting Nature in a similarly-escalated form can she achieve her proper self and become a proper Chalet girl, taking the name Stacey. Heidi, in a very EBD touch, is also caught between a long, formal name - Adelaide - and the shorter one which she prefers and which is tied to her 'authentic' persona.