1.) Context
Nelle Harper Lee was born on
April 28, 1926, in Monroeville,
Alabama, a sleepy small town similar in many ways to Maycomb, the
setting of
To Kill a Mockingbird. Like Atticus
Finch, the father of Scout, the narrator and protagonist of
To
Kill a Mockingbird, Lee’s father was a lawyer. Among Lee’s
childhood friends was the future novelist and essayist Truman Capote,
from whom she drew inspiration for the character Dill. These personal
details notwithstanding, Lee maintains that
To Kill a Mockingbird was
intended to portray not her own childhood home but rather a nonspecific Southern
town. “People are people anywhere you put them,” she declared in
a 1961 interview.
Yet the book’s setting and characters are not the only
aspects of the story shaped by events that occurred during Lee’s
childhood. In 1931, when Lee was five, nine
young black men were accused of raping two white women near Scottsboro,
Alabama. After a series of lengthy, highly publicized, and often
bitter trials, five of the nine men were sentenced to long prison
terms. Many prominent lawyers and other American citizens saw the
sentences as spurious and motivated only by racial prejudice. It
was also suspected that the women who had accused the men were lying,
and in appeal after appeal, their claims became more dubious. There
can be little doubt that the Scottsboro Case, as the trials of the
nine men came to be called, served as a seed for the trial that
stands at the heart of Lee’s novel.
Lee began
To Kill a Mockingbird in the
mid-1950s, after moving to New York to become
a writer. She completed the novel in 1957 and
published it, with revisions, in 1960, just
before the peak of the American civil rights movement.
Critical response to
To Kill a Mockingbird was
mixed: a number of critics found the narrative voice of a nine-year-old
girl unconvincing and called the novel overly moralistic. Nevertheless,
in the racially charged atmosphere of the early 1960s,
the book became an enormous popular success, winning the Pulitzer
Prize in 1961 and selling over fifteen million
copies. Two years after the book’s publication, an Academy Award–winning
film version of the novel, starring Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch,
was produced. Meanwhile, the author herself had retreated from the
public eye: she avoided interviews, declined to write the screenplay
for the film version, and published only a few short pieces after 1961.
To
Kill a Mockingbird remains her sole published novel. Lee
eventually returned to Monroeville and continues to live there.
In 1993, Lee penned a brief foreword
to her book. In it she asks that future editions of
To Kill
a Mockingbird be spared critical introductions. “
Mockingbird,”
she writes, “still says what it has to say; it has managed to survive
the years without preamble.” The book remains a staple of high school
and college reading lists, beloved by millions of readers worldwide
for its appealing depiction of childhood innocence, its scathing
moral condemnation of racial prejudice, and its affirmation that
human goodness can withstand the assault of evil.
2.) Plot Overview
Scout Finch lives with
her brother, Jem, and their widowed father, Atticus, in the sleepy
Alabama town of Maycomb. Maycomb is suffering through the Great
Depression, but Atticus is a prominent lawyer and the Finch family
is reasonably well off in comparison to the rest of society. One
summer, Jem and Scout befriend a boy named Dill, who has come to
live in their neighborhood for the summer, and the trio acts out
stories together. Eventually, Dill becomes fascinated with the spooky
house on their street called the Radley Place. The house is owned
by Mr. Nathan Radley, whose brother, Arthur (nicknamed Boo), has
lived there for years without venturing outside.
Scout Finch lives with
her brother, Jem, and their widowed father, Atticus, in the sleepy
Alabama town of Maycomb. Maycomb is suffering through the Great
Depression, but Atticus is a prominent lawyer and the Finch family
is reasonably well off in comparison to the rest of society. One
summer, Jem and Scout befriend a boy named Dill, who has come to
live in their neighborhood for the summer, and the trio acts out
stories together. Eventually, Dill becomes fascinated with the spooky
house on their street called the Radley Place. The house is owned
by Mr. Nathan Radley, whose brother, Arthur (nicknamed Boo), has
lived there for years without venturing outside.
Scout goes to school for the first time that
fall and detests it. She and Jem find gifts apparently left for
them in a knothole of a tree on the Radley property. Dill returns
the following summer, and he, Scout, and Jem begin to act out the
story of Boo Radley. Atticus puts a stop to their antics, urging
the children to try to see life from another person’s perspective
before making judgments. But, on Dill’s last night in Maycomb for
the summer, the three sneak onto the Radley property, where Nathan
Radley shoots at them. Jem loses his pants in the ensuing escape.
When he returns for them, he finds them mended and hung over the
fence. The next winter, Jem and Scout find more presents in the
tree, presumably left by the mysterious Boo. Nathan Radley eventually plugs
the knothole with cement. Shortly thereafter, a fire breaks out
in another neighbor’s house, and during the fire someone slips a
blanket on Scout’s shoulders as she watches the blaze. Convinced
that Boo did it, Jem tells Atticus about the mended pants and the
presents.
To the consternation of Maycomb’s racist white community, Atticus
agrees to defend a black man named Tom Robinson, who has been accused
of raping a white woman. Because of Atticus’s decision, Jem and
Scout are subjected to abuse from other children, even when they
celebrate Christmas at the family compound on Finch’s Landing. Calpurnia,
the Finches’ black cook, takes them to the local black church, where
the warm and close-knit community largely embraces the children.
Atticus’s sister, Alexandra, comes to live with the Finches
the next summer. Dill, who is supposed to live with his “new father”
in another town, runs away and comes to Maycomb. Tom Robinson’s trial
begins, and when the accused man is placed in the local jail, a mob
gathers to lynch him. Atticus faces the mob down the night before
the trial. Jem and Scout, who have sneaked out of the house, soon
join him. Scout recognizes one of the men, and her polite questioning
about his son shames him into dispersing the mob.
At the trial itself, the children sit in the “colored
balcony” with the town’s black citizens. Atticus provides clear
evidence that the accusers, Mayella Ewell and her father, Bob, are
lying: in fact, Mayella propositioned Tom Robinson, was caught by
her father, and then accused Tom of rape to cover her shame and
guilt. Atticus provides impressive evidence that the marks on Mayella’s
face are from wounds that her father inflicted; upon discovering
her with Tom, he called her a whore and beat her. Yet, despite the
significant evidence pointing to Tom’s innocence, the all-white
jury convicts him. The innocent Tom later tries to escape from prison
and is shot to death. In the aftermath of the trial, Jem’s faith
in justice is badly shaken, and he lapses into despondency and doubt.
Despite the verdict, Bob Ewell feels that Atticus and
the judge have made a fool out of him, and he vows revenge. He menaces
Tom Robinson’s widow, tries to break into the judge’s house, and
finally attacks Jem and Scout as they walk home from a Halloween
party. Boo Radley intervenes, however, saving the children and stabbing Ewell
fatally during the struggle. Boo carries the wounded
Jem back to Atticus’s house, where the sheriff, in order to protect Boo,
insists that Ewell tripped over a tree root and fell on his own knife.
After sitting with Scout for a while, Boo disappears once more into
the Radley house.
Later, Scout feels as though she can finally imagine what
life is like for Boo. He has become a human being to her at last.
With this realization, Scout embraces her father’s advice to practice
sympathy and understanding and demonstrates that her experiences
with hatred and prejudice will not sully her faith in human goodness.
3.) Analysis of major characters:
Scout
Scout is a very unusual little girl, both in
her own qualities and in her social position. She is unusually intelligent
(she learns to read before beginning school), unusually confident
(she fights boys without fear), unusually thoughtful (she worries
about the essential goodness and evil of mankind), and unusually
good (she always acts with the best intentions). In terms of her
social identity, she is unusual for being a tomboy in the prim and
proper Southern world of Maycomb.
One quickly realizes when reading To Kill a Mockingbird that Scout
is who she is because of the way Atticus has raised her. He has nurtured
her mind, conscience, and individuality without bogging her down
in fussy social hypocrisies and notions of propriety. While most
girls in Scout’s position would be wearing dresses and learning manners,
Scout, thanks to Atticus’s hands-off parenting style, wears overalls
and learns to climb trees with Jem and Dill. She does not always
grasp social niceties (she tells her teacher that one of her fellow students
is too poor to pay her back for lunch), and human behavior often
baffles her (as when one of her teachers criticizes Hitler’s prejudice
against Jews while indulging in her own prejudice against blacks), but
Atticus’s protection of Scout from hypocrisy and social pressure has
rendered her open, forthright, and well meaning.
At the beginning of the novel, Scout is an innocent, good-hearted five-year-old
child who has no experience with the evils of the world. As the
novel progresses, Scout has her first contact with evil in the form
of racial prejudice, and the basic development of her character
is governed by the question of whether she will emerge from that
contact with her conscience and optimism intact or whether she will
be bruised, hurt, or destroyed like Boo Radley and Tom Robinson.
Thanks to Atticus’s wisdom, Scout learns that though humanity has
a great capacity for evil, it also has a great capacity for good,
and that the evil can often be mitigated if one approaches others
with an outlook of sympathy and understanding. Scout’s development
into a person capable of assuming that outlook marks the culmination
of the novel and indicates that, whatever evil she encounters, she
will retain her conscience without becoming cynical or jaded. Though
she is still a child at the end of the book, Scout’s perspective
on life develops from that of an innocent child into that of a near
grown-up.
Atticus
As one of the most prominent citizens in Maycomb during
the Great Depression, Atticus is relatively well off in a time of
widespread poverty. Because of his penetrating intelligence, calm
wisdom, and exemplary behavior, Atticus is respected by everyone,
including the very poor. He functions as the moral backbone of Maycomb,
a person to whom others turn in times of doubt and trouble. But
the conscience that makes him so admirable ultimately causes his
falling out with the people of Maycomb. Unable to abide the town’s
comfortable ingrained racial prejudice, he agrees to defend Tom
Robinson, a black man. Atticus’s action makes him the object of
scorn in Maycomb, but he is simply too impressive a figure to be
scorned for long. After the trial, he seems destined to be held
in the same high regard as before.
Atticus practices the ethic of sympathy and understanding
that he preaches to Scout and Jem and never holds a grudge against
the people of Maycomb. Despite their callous indifference to racial
inequality, Atticus sees much to admire in them. He recognizes that people
have both good and bad qualities, and he is determined to admire
the good while understanding and forgiving the bad. Atticus passes
this great moral lesson on to Scout—this perspective protects the
innocent from being destroyed by contact with evil.
Ironically, though Atticus is a heroic figure in the novel
and a respected man in Maycomb, neither Jem nor Scout consciously
idolizes him at the beginning of the novel. Both are embarrassed
that he is older than other fathers and that he doesn’t hunt or
fish. But Atticus’s wise parenting, which he sums up in Chapter 30 by
saying, “Before Jem looks at anyone else he looks at me, and I’ve
tried to live so I can look squarely back at him,” ultimately wins
their respect. By the end of the novel, Jem, in particular, is fiercely
devoted to Atticus (Scout, still a little girl, loves him uncritically).
Though his children’s attitude toward him evolves, Atticus is characterized
throughout the book by his absolute consistency. He stands rigidly
committed to justice and thoughtfully willing to view matters from
the perspectives of others. He does not develop in the novel but
retains these qualities in equal measure, making him the novel’s
moral guide and voice of conscience.
Jem
If Scout is an innocent girl who is exposed to evil at
an early age and forced to develop an adult moral outlook, Jem finds
himself in an even more turbulent situation. His shattering experience
at Tom Robinson’s trial occurs just as he is entering puberty, a
time when life is complicated and traumatic enough. His disillusionment
upon seeing that justice does not always prevail leaves him vulnerable
and confused at a critical, formative point in his life. Nevertheless,
he admirably upholds the commitment to justice that Atticus instilled in
him and maintains it with deep conviction throughout the novel.
Unlike the jaded Mr. Raymond, Jem is not without hope:
Atticus tells Scout that Jem simply needs time to process what he
has learned. The strong presence of Atticus in Jem’s life seems
to promise that he will recover his equilibrium. Later in his life,
Jem is able to see that Boo Radley’s unexpected aid indicates there
is good in people. Even before the end of the novel,
Jem shows signs of having learned a positive lesson from the trial;
for instance, at the beginning of Chapter 25,
he refuses to allow Scout to squash a roly-poly bug because it has
done nothing to harm her. After seeing the unfair destruction of
Tom Robinson, Jem now wants to protect the fragile and harmless.
The idea that Jem resolves his cynicism and moves
toward a happier life is supported by the beginning of the novel,
in which a grown-up Scout remembers talking to Jem about the events
that make up the novel’s plot. Scout says that Jem pinpointed the
children’s initial interest in Boo Radley at the beginning of the
story, strongly implying that he understood what Boo represented
to them and, like Scout, managed to shed his innocence without losing
his hope.
4.) Themes, Motifs & Symbol
Themes
Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas
explored in a literary work.
The Coexistence of Good and Evil
The most important theme of
To Kill a Mockingbird is
the book’s exploration of the moral nature of human beings—that
is, whether people are essentially good or essentially evil. The
novel approaches this question by dramatizing Scout and Jem’s transition
from a perspective of childhood innocence, in which they assume
that people are good because they have never seen evil, to a more
adult perspective, in which they have confronted evil and must incorporate
it into their understanding of the world. As a result of this portrayal
of the transition from innocence to experience, one of the book’s
important subthemes involves the threat that hatred, prejudice,
and ignorance pose to the innocent: people such as Tom Robinson
and Boo Radley are not prepared for the evil that they encounter,
and, as a result, they are destroyed. Even Jem is victimized to
an extent by his discovery of the evil of racism during and after
the trial. Whereas Scout is able to maintain her basic faith in
human nature despite Tom’s conviction, Jem’s faith in justice and
in humanity is badly damaged, and he retreats into a state of disillusionment.
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The moral voice of
To Kill a Mockingbird is
embodied by Atticus Finch, who is virtually unique in the novel
in that he has experienced and understood evil without losing his
faith in the human capacity for goodness. Atticus understands that,
rather than being simply creatures of good or creatures of evil,
most people have both good and bad qualities. The important thing
is to appreciate the good qualities and understand the bad qualities
by treating others with sympathy and trying to see life from their
perspective. He tries to teach this ultimate moral lesson to Jem
and Scout to show them that it is possible to live with conscience
without losing hope or becoming cynical. In this way, Atticus is
able to admire Mrs. Dubose’s courage even while deploring her racism.
Scout’s progress as a character in the novel is defined by her gradual
development toward understanding Atticus’s lessons, culminating
when, in the final chapters, Scout at last sees Boo Radley as a
human being. Her newfound ability to view the world from his perspective
ensures that she will not become jaded as she loses her innocence.
The Importance of Moral Education
Because exploration of the novel’s larger moral questions
takes place within the perspective of children, the education of
children is necessarily involved in the development of all of the
novel’s themes. In a sense, the plot of the story charts Scout’s
moral education, and the theme of how children are educated—how
they are taught to move from innocence to adulthood—recurs throughout
the novel (at the end of the book, Scout even says that she has
learned practically everything except algebra). This theme is explored
most powerfully through the relationship between Atticus and his
children, as he devotes himself to instilling a social conscience
in Jem and Scout. The scenes at school provide a direct counterpoint
to Atticus’s effective education of his children: Scout is frequently
confronted with teachers who are either frustratingly unsympathetic
to children’s needs or morally hypocritical. As is true of
To
Kill a Mockingbird’s other moral themes, the novel’s conclusion
about education is that the most important lessons are those of
sympathy and understanding, and that a sympathetic, understanding
approach is the best way to teach these lessons. In this way, Atticus’s
ability to put himself in his children’s shoes makes him an excellent
teacher, while Miss Caroline’s rigid commitment to the educational
techniques that she learned in college makes her ineffective and
even dangerous.
The Existence of Social Inequality
Differences in social status are explored largely through
the overcomplicated social hierarchy of Maycomb, the ins and outs
of which constantly baffle the children. The relatively well-off
Finches stand near the top of Maycomb’s social hierarchy, with most
of the townspeople beneath them. Ignorant country farmers like the
Cunninghams lie below the townspeople, and the white trash Ewells
rest below the Cunninghams. But the black community in Maycomb, despite
its abundance of admirable qualities, squats below even the Ewells,
enabling Bob Ewell to make up for his own lack of importance by
persecuting Tom Robinson. These rigid social divisions that make
up so much of the adult world are revealed in the book to be both
irrational and destructive. For example, Scout cannot understand
why Aunt Alexandra refuses to let her consort with young Walter
Cunningham. Lee uses the children’s perplexity at the unpleasant
layering of Maycomb society to critique the role of class status
and, ultimately, prejudice in human interaction.
Motifs
Motifs are recurring structures, contrasts, and literary
devices that can help to develop and inform the text’s major themes.
Gothic Details
The forces of good and evil in
To Kill a Mockingbird seem
larger than the small Southern town in which the story takes place.
Lee adds drama and atmosphere to her story by including a number
of Gothic details in the setting and the plot. In literature, the
term Gothic refers to a style of fiction first popularized in eighteenth-century
England, featuring supernatural occurrences, gloomy and haunted
settings, full moons, and so on. Among the Gothic elements in
To
Kill a Mockingbird are the unnatural snowfall, the fire
that destroys Miss Maudie’s house, the children’s superstitions
about Boo Radley, the mad dog that Atticus shoots, and the ominous
night of the Halloween party on which Bob Ewell attacks the children. These
elements, out of place in the normally quiet, predictable Maycomb,
create tension in the novel and serve to foreshadow the troublesome
events of the trial and its aftermath.
Small-Town Life
Counterbalancing the Gothic motif of the story is the
motif of old-fashioned, small-town values, which manifest themselves
throughout the novel. As if to contrast with all of the suspense
and moral grandeur of the book, Lee emphasizes the slow-paced, good-natured
feel of life in Maycomb. She often deliberately juxtaposes small-town
values and Gothic images in order to examine more closely the forces
of good and evil. The horror of the fire, for instance, is mitigated
by the comforting scene of the people of Maycomb banding together
to save Miss Maudie’s possessions. In contrast, Bob Ewell’s cowardly
attack on the defenseless Scout, who is dressed like a giant ham
for the school pageant, shows him to be unredeemably evil.
Symbols
Symbols are objects, characters, figures, and colors
used to represent abstract ideas or concepts.
Mockingbirds
The title of To Kill a Mockingbird has
very little literal connection to the plot, but it carries a great
deal of symbolic weight in the book. In this story of innocents
destroyed by evil, the “mockingbird” comes to represent the idea
of innocence. Thus, to kill a mockingbird is to destroy innocence.
Throughout the book, a number of characters (Jem, Tom Robinson,
Dill, Boo Radley, Mr. Raymond) can be identified as mockingbirds—innocents
who have been injured or destroyed through contact with evil. This
connection between the novel’s title and its main theme is made
explicit several times in the novel: after Tom Robinson is shot,
Mr. Underwood compares his death to “the senseless slaughter of
songbirds,” and at the end of the book Scout thinks that hurting
Boo Radley would be like “shootin’ a mockingbird.” Most important,
Miss Maudie explains to Scout: “Mockingbirds don’t do one thing
but . . . sing their hearts out for us. That’s why it’s a sin to
kill a mockingbird.” That Jem and Scout’s last name is Finch (another
type of small bird) indicates that they are particularly vulnerable
in the racist world of Maycomb, which often treats the fragile innocence
of childhood harshly.
Boo Radley
As the novel progresses, the children’s changing attitude
toward Boo Radley is an important measurement of their development from
innocence toward a grown-up moral perspective. At the beginning
of the book, Boo is merely a source of childhood superstition. As
he leaves Jem and Scout presents and mends Jem’s pants, he gradually
becomes increasingly and intriguingly real to them. At the end of
the novel, he becomes fully human to Scout, illustrating that she has
developed into a sympathetic and understanding individual. Boo,
an intelligent child ruined by a cruel father, is one of the book’s most
important mockingbirds; he is also an important symbol of the good
that exists within people. Despite the pain that Boo has suffered,
the purity of his heart rules his interaction with the children. In
saving Jem and Scout from Bob Ewell, Boo proves the ultimate symbol
of good.
