To Kill a Mockingbird is a 1960 novel by Harper Lee, winning the Pulitzer Prize the following year. The book has been widely read in high schools and middle schools in the US since as early as 1963 (I read it in Grade 10 English class in the mid-1980s in Canada); the choice of TKAM as a suitable subject for teen classroom study has been controversial, given its use of racial slurs, the topic of rape, and occasional mild profanity.
The novel was adapted into a film in 1962, starring Gregory Peck (who won a Best Actor Oscar for his portrayal of Atticus Finch) and Mary Badham, with Phillip Alford, John Megna, Frank Overton, Rosemary Murphy, Brock Peters, Estelle Evans, Paul Fix, Collin Wilcox, James Anderson, Robert Duvall, and William Windom. The film was also nominated for a Best Picture Oscar.
Despite the novel’s controversial subject matter of rape and racial prejudice against blacks, TKAM is famous for the warmth and humour of its narration. Finch, the lawyer father of Jean Louise “Scout” Finch–who narrates the novel as an adult and who as a child is played by Badham in the film–is a hero and model of integrity for lawyers, since it is Atticus who takes on the burden of defending Tom Robinson (Peters), a black man falsely accused of raping Mayella Ewell (Wilcox) in a town so prejudiced against blacks that there’s no way he’ll be acquitted, even though it’s established that his ‘raping’ of her would have been physically impossible.
There was a mixed response to the novel upon its publication. Despite the “astonishing phenomenon” (to use author Mary McDonough Murphy’s words) of TKAM, with many copies sold and its widespread use in schools over the years, there’s been surprisingly scant literary analysis of it. I hope what I write here won’t be little more than a repetition and variation of what others have already said about it.
An obvious theme in the novel is prejudice, though it isn’t limited to the prejudice against blacks. A major issue, at the beginning of the story, for Scout, her older brother Jeremy “Jem” Finch (Alford), and their friend, Charles Baker Harris (“Dill”–Megna), is their fear of reclusive Arthur “Boo” Radley (Duvall), who is perceived by the three kids as a dangerous, violent psychopath. They believe this because of horrific stories about him, based on the gossip of their neighbours, which is the basis of their prejudice against him.
Actually, Boo is a shy man who would like to be friends with the kids, and so he often leaves little gifts for them in the tree knothole by the Radley house. The kids are content to take the gifts, and while they find him fascinating and mysterious, they’re still scared of him, wanting to goad him into coming out of his house so they can see him while keeping a safe distance from him.
Like Tom Robinson, Boo is a “mockingbird” of the story, against whom it would be a sin to kill. These two are kind, gentle people who would never harm anyone (except in self-defence or the defence of others, as in the case of Radley defending Jem and Scout from an assault at night towards the end of the novel, an assault from a character who is a true danger to many: Bob Ewell (Anderson).
Ewell and his family are a personification of the ‘white trash’ stereotype in many ways. Apart from their virulent racism against blacks, there’s a general vulgarity about them that anyone would find repellent.
One would feel some sympathy for Mayella, Bob’s daughter and a target of much of his abuse, of which sexual abuse is strongly implied in the story, as well as physical and emotional abuse. Still, she helps to enable the charge of rape against Tom Robinson, when we learn that it was actually she who made sexual advances on him. (Lee, pages 259-260)
There’s another child in the Ewell family, a boy named Burris, who keeps failing the first grade in Scout’s class, because he shows up only on the first day of every school year. He’s filthy dirty, and Scout’s teacher, Miss Caroline Fisher, tells him to go home and wash the lice out of his hair. The boy demonstrates his vulgarity by calling her a “snot-nosed slut” before leaving the classroom. (Lee, pages 35-37)
Now, I mention this ‘white trash’ stereotype among poor people in the story, but this doesn’t mean that stereotypes are tossed around everywhere without any sensitivity in TKAM. On the contrary, Lee takes pains in her narrative to defy stereotypical thinking as much as possible. The Ewell family, as well as the ‘ladylike’ but hypocritical Mrs. Merriweather and her gossipy ilk, are exceptions to the rule.
To contrast a good (or at least relatively good) poor family against the Ewells, there are the Cunninghams, who are portrayed in a largely sympathetic way. Little Walter Cunningham is invited to the Finch’s house for a meal, since the boy is hungry; this is after he’s got into a fight with Scout at school. He helps himself to a generous amount of molasses during the meal, at which Scout frowns in disapproval, then she is reprimanded by Calpurnia (Evans in the film) for being judgmental about his indulgence. (Lee, pages 32-33) The Cunninghams are so poor, hit hard by The Depression, that they can’t pay in cash for anything.
The boy’s father, Walter Cunningham Sr., pays off his debt to Atticus for his legal services by giving him firewood, vegetables, and other supplies. As a poor farmer, Mr. Cunningham is a mix of good and bad. His willingness to give things in place of money in exchange for this or that good or service shows how honorable he is to respect others for what good they’ve done for him (on an individual level, what he’s doing is rather like gift culture).
His bad side, however, is seen when he is part of a mob intent on lynching Tom Robinson. A moral weakness of many among the poor is their tendency ‘to punch down,’ or to hurt those in a weaker social position than they’re in, as with poor white Cunningham as against poor black Robinson; this is equally true of Mayella and her false rape accusation. These people would do better ‘to punch up,’ or fight the rich capitalist class instead.
It is Scout’s sweet, innocent words to Mr. Cunningham that make him relent and take his would-be lynch mob back home (pages 204-206). She asks him about his entailment (<<< from legal 3rd definition) and his son, Walter Cunningham, Jr. In this relenting, Mr. Cunningham redeems himself a bit and thus rises above the ‘white trash’ stereotype.
Scout herself is the perfect embodiment of a character in TKAM who defies stereotypes, for she is a tomboy. She typically wears denim overalls rather than dresses, and she often gets into fights with boys at school; I mentioned above her fight with Walter Jr. She is a lovable contrast to the stereotypical gossipy ladies like Mrs. Merriweather (Chapter 24).
It’s important that the novel confront the problem of stereotypes and then defy them, for of course it is stereotypical thinking, with the sweeping generalizations it makes about this or that group of people (‘all blacks are like this,’ ‘all poor people are like that,’ ‘all women and girls do this or that sort of thing,’ etc.), that leads to prejudice against those people.
Prejudice, as we know, often leads to killing. Because of prejudice against Tom and the stereotyping of blacks, he’ll not only be found guilty of a crime he didn’t commit–a crime it should be easy to see he couldn’t possibly have committed–but also shot dead…with seventeen bullets…when trying to run and escape from prison (page 315).
Atticus decries the stereotyping of and sweeping generalizations made against blacks during his closing statement to the jury for Robinson’s trial (page 273). He speaks of “the evil assumption–that all Negroes lie, that all Negroes are basically immoral beings, that all Negro men are not to be trusted around our [i.e., white] women” (Lee’s emphasis). Atticus speaks ironically that this is “a lie as black as Tom Robinson’s skin”.
One ought to remember that such racist generalizing about blacks is not limited to poor, uneducated, ignorant ‘white trash,’ much to the dismay of the educated liberal. Even a philosopher as otherwise brilliant as Hegel was not above making unfair generalizations about “the Negro” (a word which, by the way, was once the polite word to use for black people, as was colored…back during such times as the Jim Crow years). One need only read the Introduction of Hegel’s Philosophy of History (“GEOGRAPHICAL BASIS OF HISTORY,” pages 91-99) to see what I mean.
He claims that Africa is “the land of childhood,” (page 91) that “The Negro…exhibits the natural man in his completely wild and untamed state” (page 93), and that among them “moral sentiments are quite weak, or more strictly speaking, non-existent.” (page 96) Thus, apparently, to paraphrase Hegel’s conclusion on page 99, Africa should be left out of a serious discussion of history as “movement or development”.
Apart from the general lack in Marx of the ugly racism we see in Hegel, my other reasons for preferring Marx to Hegel include how Marx’s theory of the base and superstructure can explain how it’s the social relations of production (the base) that result in the legal, political, and cultural realms (the superstructure) that are in turn used to justify the base, therefore perpetuating the entire system in a seemingly endless loop. In other words, Marx explains how class antagonisms result in the very racism Hegel so thoughtlessly rationalizes. It is not Hegel’s “World Spirit” that will bring mankind closer and closer to freedom, but Marx’s revolutionary overthrow of the system that will do so.
To get back to Boo Radley, the kids regard him as “a malevolent phantom” (page 10), a “haint” that lives in the Radley house. We imagine a ghost saying “Boo,” and this nickname that the kids have for him sounds like a short form for the racial slur “boogie,” which had already been used against blacks since the early 1920s (i.e., through its association with ‘boogie-woogie’). Though the use of “spook” as a racial slur for blacks was only first used in the 1940s, well after the setting of TKAM in the Depression-era 1930s, the book’s publication in 1960 means that Lee must have been aware of its use as a slur, and so the notion of regarding Boo as a ghost fits in with how prejudice against him parallels prejudice against blacks.
When we finally get a physical description of Boo Radley, we learn that his skin is a sickly white, his face and hands in particular–so white as to be far whiter than normal (page 362). There’s an irony in how this far whiter than white skin is on a man against whom the prejudice parallels that of a black man like Tom Robinson.
According to the gossip of Miss Stephanie Crawford (Dill’s aunt in the film, and played by Alice Ghostley), Boo took a pair of scissors and stabbed them in the leg of his father (page 10). This stabbing of phallic scissor blades in his father’s leg can be paralleled symbolically with Tom Robinson’s supposed rape of Mayella. It’s another apocryphal story used to reinforce prejudice against someone who’s actually gentle.
Jem gives “a reasonable description of Boo” on page 16. Actually, it’s a sensationalistic, exaggerated, and terrifying description. Apparently, Boo eats raw squirrels and cats, which explains his bloodstained hands. There’s a long, jagged scar going across his face. His teeth are yellow and rotten, of those he still has. His eyes pop, and he usually drools. Such an ugly description parallels that of any racist for the ‘ugly,’ dark appearance of black people.
As scared as the kids are of this supposedly terrifying man, though, they’re also fascinated with him, Dill in particular wanting to know what he looks like (page 16). They start daring each other to go up to the Radley house and get an up-close look at him (pages 16-19). This mix of fascination and fear of those one is prejudiced against can be compared to the human zoos of the past, where whites would look at, for example, Africans in enclosures; then there’s that opening scene in Office Space, on the commute to work, when Michael Bolton is grooving to hip hop in his car, but he gets terrified when a young black man approaches, so Bolton locks his car door and turns down his music.
Going against all of this prejudice are the words of wisdom that Atticus imparts onto Scout: “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view….until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.” (page 39) Put another way, empathy is the cure for prejudice.
Still, the kids persist in their fantasies about Boo Radley, even acting out dramas of the Radley family, with Scout playing Mrs. Radley, just sweeping the porch, Dill playing old Mr. Radley, pacing the sidewalk and coughing, and Jem playing Boo, who “shrieked and howled from time to time.” (pages 51-52) This is rather like how so many of us, even when told about the virtue of empathy, persist in our prejudices against blacks and other minorities, scorning empathy as “woke.”
Only in the case of Jem, Scout, and Dill, they’re all just little kids who don’t know any better. Unlike so many adults who persist in their bigotries, the three kids will learn the error of prejudicial thinking, thanks to their progressive-minded father and their closeness to Calpurnia, who helps humanize blacks for them by her example. Indeed, during Robinson’s trial, the kids will go up to the area of the courtroom to watch the trial with the blacks, including Reverend Sykes. This kids’ sitting with the blacks is a symbolic desegregation that will be very good for them, and it will help pave the way for Scout’s acceptance of Boo Radley by the end of the story.
The kids’ gradual learning of the evil of prejudice may be good for them, but it’s also painful, for in this process of learning, they will also lose their innocence. Jem’s loss of his pants while escaping from Boo can be seen as symbolic of that loss of innocence (Chapter 6, pages 72-73).
With the theme of the loss of innocence is all feigned innocence masking guilt, as well as imagined guilt hiding an actual innocence. We see the former in how the three kids seem all sweet and innocent, yet they’re being naughty in their repeated trespassing on the Radley property, which is based on their not-so-innocent prejudging of Boo Radley.
There’s also the seeming innocence of the charming Maycomb community, who seem all sweet, innocent, and Christian, yet they’re tainted with racial prejudice. This problem is by no means limited to the Ewells: others, including Mrs. Merriweather in the Missionary Society, put on hypocritical airs of Christian piety (Chapter 24), yet they display blatant racism towards blacks (Merriweather, for example, uses the word “darky” to refer to blacks on page 310). Then there’s the attempt, led by Mr. Cunningham, to lynch Tom Robinson. There’s also the gossiping of the community.
On the other side of the coin, there’s the real innocence of Boo Radley and Tom Robinson, which is obscured behind all the prejudice against the two. It should be clear early on that Boo means no harm to the kids when he leaves the gifts in the tree knothole for them. Finally, his defence of Jem and Scout against Bob Ewell’s assault on them proves once and for all what a good man Boo is. Near the end of the story, when Scout sees him and says, “Hey, Boo,” then Atticus gently corrects her by saying, “Mr. Arthur, honey,” it’s like someone telling a racist not to use racial slurs when referring to blacks.
Speaking of blacks, Tom Robinson is clearly a kind, gentle human being who only wanted to be helpful to Mayella in doing little household chores for her, and with no remuneration for it. Her sexual advances on him, then her accusation of rape, were not only an attempt to hide her guilt behind a veil of innocence, but also a projection of lechery onto him.
Robinson, like Radley, is a “mockingbird,” a symbol of innocence. It’s a sin to kill, or otherwise harm in any way either of these men–or people like them–because they do no harm to anyone; they do only acts of kindness, just as how mockingbirds will just “sing their hearts out for us,” as Miss Maudie says to Scout (page 119), to explain to the little girl what her father meant by it being acceptable to shoot all the bluejays she and Jem want to shoot with their air-rifles, but never to shoot mockingbirds.
Never harm the innocent.
One of the biggest problems we have in this world is our inability to tell the difference between the innocent and the guilty. That inability is the result of our minds being tainted with prejudice–a loss of our own innocence.
Because of this taint of prejudice, Atticus’s job of defending Robinson, what should be a straightforward one of establishing a reasonable doubt that he raped Mayella, has become nearly impossible. The fact that Robinson’s left arm is useless and crippled, the result of an accident with a cotton gin when he was a child, demonstrates that he couldn’t possibly have given Mayella the facial injuries she got from the rape she accuses him of, injuries that in all probability came from the left hand of her assailant.
Bob Ewell, however, is left-handed, as he shows the people in the courtroom when he writes his name on an envelope for all to see (page 237). That it’s far likelier that a villain like Bob, who drinks and poaches to feed his poor family, is the one who hit and perhaps even raped Mayella, rather than Robinson, is completely lost on the prejudiced jury.
There are no lengthy debates between Atticus and Mr. Gilmer, the prosecutor (Windom) during the trial. Gilmer must imagine, correctly, that he’ll easily win this case simply because the defendant is black. The “witnesses [have] been led by the nose as asses are,” older Scout notes in the narration (page 252), which is an allusion to a soliloquy by Iago in Othello (Act One, Scene iii, lines 444-445), a play about a black man being manipulated by scheming, vengeful white Iago. Just as Othello is led to his destruction by Iago, so is Robinson being led to his destruction by the lies of a white supremacist society.
Because of all of these problems, what should be an easy defence for Atticus has become a near-impossible one. Not only will this job be as difficult for him to do as I’ve said, but he’ll also be hated as a ‘nigger-lover’ for doing it (e.g., Bob Ewell’s vengeful attempt on the lives of Jem and Scout). If he refuses the job, though, he won’t be able to live with himself, let alone give non-hypocritical moral guidance to his kids (pages 139-140).
His annoyance at having to deal with problems that shouldn’t exist when defending Robinson is rather like in the incident when he has to shoot the rabid dog (Chapter 10). Sheriff Hector “Heck” Tate (Overton) wants Atticus to shoot the dog because Atticus is a much better shot than Tate (page 127); similarly, Judge Taylor wants Atticus to take on the Robinson case. Shooting the mad dog is symbolic of ridding Maycomb County of racial prejudice. Here is an animal that should be killed…to protect the truly innocent.
Interestingly, TKAM also explores how racial prejudice can go in the opposite direction. In Chapter 12, Calpurnia takes Jem and Scout to the church of the black community, and a black woman there named Lula is annoyed to see two white kids in their church. Now it’s Calpurnia who has been put in Atticus’s shoes, telling Lula there’s nothing wrong with whites attending their church (page 158).
Lula’s the only one there who has this negative attitude, though, for as Zeebo, the garbage collector, says, the rest of the black community are all mighty glad to have Jem and Scout there in church with them (page 159). It’s in this church that the kids meet Reverend Sykes, who as we know later will have the kids with all the blacks in the balcony area of the courthouse for the trial. Of course, the kids have no prejudice against blacks, for Scout would like to go and visit Calpurnia at her home (pages 167-168), and Calpurnia would be glad to have them come over.
Now, just after Scout has asked to see Calpurnia in her home, Scout looks over at the Radley Place, “expecting to see its phantom occupant”, but it isn’t there. She still needs to get over her hangups about Boo.
Older Scout as narrator observes “a caste system in Maycomb, where the people “took for granted attitudes, character shadings, even gestures, as having been repeated in each generation and refined by time.” (page 175) Examples of such “character shadings” and stereotypes are then given for the gossipy Crawfords, the morbidity of one third of the Merriweathers, the dishonest Delafields, and the idiosyncratic walk of the Bufords. Here are examples of Maycomb prejudices and stereotypical thinking that have nothing to do with race or ethnicity.
Another such example of prejudice is in Aunt Alexandra and her attitude toward the Cunninghams. She won’t have little Walter Cunningham over to the Finch’s house because, in her opinion, “he–is–trash, that’s why” (page 301). We know the Cunninghams, for all of their faults, are nowhere near as bad as the Ewells, but they’re poor enough to be “trash” in Aunt Alexandra’s eyes.
To get back to Robinson’s trial, when Mr. Gilmer is cross-examining him, it’s clear that the prosecutor is relying a lot less on examining the evidence for or against Robinson than on using anything about him to reinforce stereotypical thinking about him, to get an easy conviction. Gilmer begins his cross-examination by mentioning Robinson’s having gotten thirty days for disorderly conduct, implying that Robinson had beaten up “the nigger” really badly, when actually, it was Robinson who got badly beaten (page 262).
Next, Gilmer links Robinson’s being strong enough to bust up chiffarobes and kindling with one hand, “to chok[ing] the breath out of a woman, and sling[ing] her to the floor.” (page 263) It doesn’t matter if there’s any actual proof of Robinson doing that to Mayella…just establish the possibility (however unlikely) of him doing that, just because he’s black. Gilmer also reverses the sense of appearance vs reality with Tom by saying he’s “a mighty good fellow, it seems” by helping with the Ewells’ chores “for not one penny” (page 263).
Gilmer is shocked to hear Robinson say he helped Mayella for free because he felt sorry for her (page 264). It doesn’t matter how poor or ‘white trash’ the Ewell family are, or how it should be obvious that Bob Ewell abuses her. Robinson has every reason in the world to feel sorry for her, but such an idea is unmentionable, since she is white and he is an ‘inferior’ black man.
Yet the whole problem with such things as racial and ethnic prejudice, class conflict, sexual abuse, and the mistreatment of women is that there’s a lack of feeling sorry for people, a lack of empathy, the presence of which would be the beginning of a cure to these problems. We’ll notice how in this trial there’s no real concern with getting justice for Mayella–not even she is really concerned with it, so indoctrinated is she with the prejudices of her community. It’s all about finding a scapegoat in the form of a black man, to rid the Maycomb community of its sin.
What’s deeply saddening is how, in Atticus’s real hopes that an appeal of the guilty verdict will lead to an acquittal, “the shadow of a beginning” (page 297), Robinson still ends up shot and killed.
Yet another example of the liberal hypocrisy in the Maycomb community is when, in Scout’s class with Miss Gates, the teacher contrasts the “DEMOCRACY” of the US with Hitler’s fascism and persecution of the Jews (pages 328-329); yet Scout has also seen Miss Gates leave the courthouse after the Robinson trial, and she’s talking with Miss Stephanie Crawford about how the blacks in their community should learn a lesson from the trial about “gettin’ way above themselves, an’ the next thing they think they can do is marry [white people].” (page 331)
Jem and Scout have come to a better understanding of people by the end of the novel. Scout figures “there’s just one kind of folks. Folks.” (page 304) Jem can understand that idea, but he’s upset about how that “one kind of folks” always “despise each other”. He can understand that it’s this contempt for one’s fellow man that makes Boo Radley want to stay shut up in his house all the time.
In a conversation earlier with Jem on page 196, when the boy mentions the Ku Klux Klan, Atticus dismisses the idea, saying “It’ll never come back.”
After the attempted lynching of Robinson that Atticus saw, one wonders how he could be so sure of there being no return of the Klan.
Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird, New York, Grand Central Publishing, 1960
Infinite Ocean 