Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird (20 page)

Notes

1. See particularly Johnson's discussion in
Understanding
, especially pages 8–9. There she argues, for instance, that

the novel is unified by the fact that it opens and closes with Boo Radley. Furthermore, the Tom Robinson and Boo Radley sections are integrally connected, in that two characters and what they represent are united in their identification with the mockingbird of the title. Like the mockingbird, they are vulnerable and harmless creatures who are at the mercy of an often unreasonable and cruel society. (9)

2. For an early but still helpful discussion of the design of the novel, see Schuster, who emphasizes thematic motifs.

A number of critics have noted the use of parallels and contrasts in the novel, although I have discovered no one who focuses extensively on the contrast between Boo Radley and Bob Ewell, as I intend to do. Thus, Johnson (in
Understanding
) argues that the

characters are at times divided into opposing camps, according to age or race or social status. At times, for example, the children seem to be opposed to the adults, the African-American characters at odds with the white characters, and the lower-class Old Sarum characters set apart from the townspeople. At the same time, boundaries between these categories are often broken down momentarily, as when the children feel a kinship with the once-feared adult, Boo Radley. (Johnson 7)

These boundaries are also broken temporarily when Atticus urges Scout to step into Bob Ewell's shoes (
TKAM
249). For interesting passing comments on “dou
bling” in the novel, see Fine (70, 74–75). For a comment on two recognition scenes involving Scout, see Johnson (
Threatening
84). Johnson also mentions some other interesting parallels that help to support my basic contention that the novel is often structured around comparisons and contrasts (
Threatening
89 and esp. 102).

For a good recent overview of much commentary on the novel, including negative criticism, see Petry (“Introduction”). For an earlier overview, see Johnson (
Threatening
20–27).

3. I am indebted to Maggie Seligman for this suggestion.

4. Readers will remember several references to Sec'atary Hawkins's
The Grey Ghost
, Dill's viewing of film versions of
Dracula
, and the children's superstitious beliefs in Haints and Hot Steams.

Works Cited

Fine, Laura. “Structuring the Narrator's Rebellion in
To Kill a Mockingbird
.” In
On Harper Lee: Essays and Reflections
. Ed. Alice Hall Petry. Knoxville: U Tennessee P, 2007. (61–77)

Johnson, Claudia.
“To Kill a Mockingbird”: Threatening Boundaries
. New York: Twayne, 1994.

——
—.
Understanding “To Kill a Mockingbird”: A Student Casebook to Issues, Sources, and Historic Documents
. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1994.

Lee, Harper.
To Kill a Mockingbird
. 1960. New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2006.

O'Connor, Flannery.
The Habit of Being: Letters
. Ed. Sally Fitzgerald. New York: Vintage, 1979.

Petry, Alice Hall. “Introduction.” In
On Harper Lee: Essays and Reflections
. Ed. Alice Hall Petry. Knoxville: U Tennessee P, 2007. (xv–xxix)

Schuster, Edgar H. “Discovering Theme and Structure in the Novel.”
English Journal
52.7 (1963): 506–511.

Angela Shaw-Thornburg

1. Reading from the Margins

It has been fifty years since the publication of Harper Lee's
To Kill a Mockingbird
, and while neither the South nor the United States as a whole has managed to unravel the knot of the complex history of racial inequality and white privilege, with the election of Barack Obama we have arrived at a moment when we can honestly say that American democracy has moved a little closer to that ideal of fairness and equality before the law. Approaching the novel so many decades after its publication, I find myself wondering, what can a novel written in the midst of the modern civil rights movement have to say to a reader of today, particularly a young person—sixteen, seventeen, eighteen—who saw Obama elected? What does the landscape of race of today—still fraught with tensions, still riddled with clear instances of lethal unfairness, but nevertheless showing signs of progress in some areas—have to do with a town in which (evidence, able defense, and an apparently impartial judge notwithstanding) an African American man can have his life eaten up by the legal system unleashed upon him by the untrustworthy word of Bob Ewell and his daughter? Add to that conundrum the question of what to do with the clearly paternalistic and downright accommodationist approach to justice of Atticus Finch, figured as mostly heroic both by Lee's characterization of him and by many critical readings of the novel, and I begin to wonder if the novel is in fact too dated to even be taught in contemporary classrooms. Although it is a commonplace of literature classes to ask students to read with an eye to historical context, is there a moment when the context of composition and publication becomes so far removed from the context of reading that the novel becomes unintelligible as such, when it becomes historical document, as opposed to literature? In short, I find myself asking what would make this novel, beloved as it may be by many American readers, worth the class days it would take to historically situate and read it in the classes I teach?

At this point, I have a confession to make: It is one thing to teach a novel that students might be resistant to reading, and quite another to teach a novel that I find
myself
deeply resistant to reading, much less teaching. Unfortunately for me (African American
and
an Americanist), I often find myself in this position when I am preparing to teach a novel or work that represents African Americans as peripheral, incapable of self-representation, monumentally passive, and positively grateful for the small compensation of white guilt over injustices done to African Americans. It is not that I naïvely expect the black citizens of 1935 Maycomb to endorse strategies that would not even begin to gain traction in Alabama and other Southern states for many decades after that. It is not that I expect Atticus Finch to suddenly acknowledge the degree to which he is complicit in the racism that undergirds the legal system in Alabama. That is not the root of my resistance at all.

What gets me are those moments of struggle or, even worse, dreadful silence when we read
Huckleberry Finn
or even a novel like
To Kill a Mockingbird
, which was certainly seen as progressive in its day, when students who are people of color try to figure out why they feel unvoiced by the literature they are reading, or ask why we are reading
this
stuff. I currently teach at a majority minority institution, so such encounters can at times overwhelm my ability to keep students engaged. The often standard response in these cases would be, for example, to retreat to formalist readings of the text, or else to do more work to historically situate the novel as a product of Harper Lee's context. I have made it clear to my students, of course, that they can expect to read literature and view films that insult and offend them. That comes with the territory, given that literature and its ideologies are as various as its readers are, and that pedagogies that acknowledge and celebrate the multiple sources of American identity and literature in the classroom are really not that old in the larger scheme of how we teach literature in the United States. Suck it up, I tell them, bracket the stuff that impedes your ability to read critically for a minute or two, then come back to that thing that bothers you and unravel it from the cold, hard distance of what you know about that thing and what the author thought about that thing.

When students finally find an entrée into texts like
To Kill a Mockingbird
—they might note, for instance, how little we see of Tom Robinson, whose life and death would presumably be at the center of this story, or that Calpurnia seems to function as a maternal figure who can be hired and fired (that is, she is something akin to a mammy)—they are often reading on the margins and reading the margins. Although Scout's coming of age or Atticus Finch's moral quandary might, in the eyes of some, be at the center of the novel and such marginal reading a distortion of that threatened thing—the author's intention—there is something to be said for this strategy, as it makes literature that may have presumably lost some of its relevance or intelligibility more teachable, more readable in certain situations. Although proponents of the canon as great works that appeal to so-called universal literary values (Harold Bloom, anyone?) might look askance at such a strategy, it is not such a bad one if it generates critical reading where only resistance or refusal to read stood before.

Students are in fact in good company when they read the margins. It is a strategy used to great effect by Toni Morrison, for example, when she re-reads American literature by being attentive to what she calls the seemingly marginal Africanist presence that exists there, or Virginia Woolf when she imagines Shakespeare's sister, or Alice Walker when she reads a history of the creative self-expression of African American women by “looking low” in focusing on quilts and gardens. We are used to this kind of critical move, in fact, but not particularly accepting of it when students attempt to deploy its cousin in a literature classroom. By
cousin
I mean that students will often question why they have to read literature that marginalizes them, or else will zero in on the small spaces in the margins that are occupied by people of color in some of the literature they are reading to the exclusion of other spaces and themes in the works—attempting to deal with books by, for, and about white people, as one student bitterly remarked as we opened up our discussion of
Huckleberry Finn.

My training consistently leads me to push back against such readings because it is never enough to say that this text embraces a racist ideology and just stop reading; whole swaths of well-crafted literature would simply disappear if that were the litmus test of what we did and did not read. If I am honest with myself, though, I will admit that I do not read books like
Huckleberry Finn
—or
To Kill a Mockingbird
, for that matter—for pleasure in my spare time. When I begin my course prep for
To Kill a Mockingbird
by reading the novel, I finish up with a profound sense of alienation, a sense of bewilderment that Lee decentered the story of Tom Robinson so utterly. Because of that aftertaste, I only read such works because I am expected to teach them (especially in classes with students who will one day become teachers), just as my students frequently read them only because I have required them to. Parents of students in high schools have sometimes taken the stance that novels like
To Kill a Mockingbird
marginalize people of color to such a great degree that they should be removed from the curriculum.
To Kill a Mockingbird
was included in the American Library Association's list of banned books for 2008–2009 as a result of one parent's attempt to have it removed because it deprecated black people (Doyle 5). While I could never feel comfortable in preventing other people from reading a book, I am at last at a moment when I am having to consider, like those parents, whether or not I should teach a novel that neither I nor my students are interested in reading, and that endorses, with the best of intentions, ideologies and ideas about people of color that foreclose the possibility of agency.

2. Reading Whiteness

But then there is this: I am thinking about my response to the student who made the remark about
Huckleberry Finn
. I answered her by saying that yes, Twain had not necessarily envisioned an African American reader of his text, and that perhaps it would be better to think about what the novel sought to teach readers about white people, and proceed from there. The student didn't scoff as I expected but instead offered up a pretty good critical reading of Twain's continual pokes at the paradoxes of white American cultures. We got much better work done, in fact, when students focused more narrowly on what it was the novel was saying about the construction of white identity.

Although I didn't name this mode of reading as such at the time, my students were actually working through the lens of whiteness studies, a discipline that has its roots in multiple disciplines, including antiracist critiques by the likes of W. E. B. Dubois and Malcolm X and more recent work by writers such as Toni Morrison, Ruth Frankenberg, and Matt Wray. Gregory Jay and Sandra Elaine Jones have identified whiteness studies as being grounded in a “critical multiculturalism,” one that I believe can help me and my students read through the paradox of
To Kill a Mockingbird
's central message, that one has to and can walk a mile in a person's shoes to know that person, and Lee's refusal or inability to provide a conduit for the reader to acknowledge the centrality of Tom Robinson's story.

As I re-read
To Kill a Mockingbird
with an eye to what it tells me about Lee's vision of whiteness, I am particularly struck by other characters who, although identified as white, are on the boundaries because they don't conform to the dominant notion of whiteness, articulated in large part by Atticus Finch. I am not talking about Boo Radley, who seems to represent a whiteness that Atticus, at least, is content to let into the fold momentarily when he rescues his children from the threat of violence. I am thinking instead about the poor white characters in the novel, and most particularly of the story of Mayella Violet Ewell, whose big lie—that Tom Robinson raped her—putatively sets off the chain of events that leads to the death of Tom Robinson and both Scout and Jem's loss of innocence. I say
putatively
because one of the things the novel works hard to obscure is the degree to which what happens to Tom Robinson is less the result of the virulent racism of the Ewells and more the direct result of the way that white supremacy structures the legal system. Theodore and Grace-Ann Hovet have called this sleight of hand an example of “the white trash scenario,” in which responsibility for the lethal racism of the South and the failure of the law to function impartially is displaced onto poor, white working-class people, thus relieving middle-class and affluent whites of culpability for the aftermaths of white supremacy (70).

In doing my preparation for reading the novel, the Hovets' insight was invaluable because it got me to look more directly at Mayella Ewell. Hovet and Hovet argue in that same essay that Lee's choice of the “‘coming of age' and ‘beset American justice' formulas . . . position the reader to anticipate a positive narrative closure and to read over the darker strands in the story” (68). Although the choice of the word
darker
is infelicitous here, I take their point that some of Lee's choices make it quite difficult to examine certain characters critically, the chief example of which is Mayella. Mayella is thoroughly grounded in what Wray calls the
stigmatype
(“stigmatizing stereotype”) of the poor white Southern woman as a worker, barred by class from the idleness so key to the myth of the white Southern belle (Wray x, 29). In Wray's account, whiteness is socially constructed by boundary terms and boundary language that are deployed to control the threat that particularities of people identified as white pose to the concept of whiteness as positive, dominant, pure, and powerful. What is particularly noteworthy about Mayella is the degree to which everything about her poses a threat to notions of whiteness, and the degree to which her ability to claim her own whiteness is impeded by her gender and her class.

Mayella is first described when Scout sees her come to the witness stand. Scout describes her as “somehow fragile looking, but when she sat facing us in the witness chair she became what she was, a thick-bodied girl accustomed to strenuous labor” (
TKAM
203). After watching the trial, Scout further describes Mayella as being

as sad, I thought, as what Jem called a mixed child: white people wouldn't have anything to do with her because she lived among pigs; Negroes wouldn't have anything to do with her because she was white. She couldn't live like Mr. Dolphus Raymond, who preferred the company of Negroes, because she didn't own a riverbank and she wasn't from a fine old family. (
TKAM
218)

What both of these descriptions have in common is a certain ambiguity that middle-class Scout feels as she tries to negotiate her relationship to the abjectly poor Mayella. Scout's recognition of the fragility of Mayella is a moment of empathy in which Scout tries to imagine her as a victim, and the turn to describing Mayella as “thick-bodied” is symptomatic of Scout's burgeoning sense of class distinctions—clearly consolidated by the time the adult narrator recounts that day in court—a sense informed not only by her Aunt Alexandra but by the many talks she has with Atticus about the Cunninghams, the Ewells, and other residents of Old Sarum. Scout is in the midst of an attempt to understand racial prejudice, true, but the novel is also about her struggle to understand her relationship with a young woman like Mayella, who, while clearly white and female, is as distant from her and her community as a “mixed child.”