Harper Lee claims that To Kill a Mockingbird is not autobiographical and that should be respected. Events in the book take place during the great depression, a devastating economic downturn that lasted most of the 1930’s, and our narrator, Scout, is approximately eight years old, four years the junior of her older brother Jem. The setting is Maycomb, Alabama, a fictional town that many suspect is Miss Lee’s home town of Monroeville where she was born in 1926.
While the texture of this story is far different than Red Harvest, it is moderately interesting that we randomly segued from a book written in the late 1920’s to a book set in the 1930’s. I am relieved to say that through chapter 10, the only serious use of a gun has been to put down a rabid dog.
You have mentioned in a Red Harvest comment that the opening sentence in TKaM is proleptic but I am going to claim that it is simply real-time and the remainder of the narrative, or most of it from page 5 on, is analeptic. I suppose this depends on your temporal point of view.
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Chapter 13 contains some interesting rhythms. First in the introduction of Aunt Alexandra,
Even the prolepsis that let’s us know that Alexandra would be staying awhile has a little volume to it (The sound [of her suitcase hitting the bedroom floor] and a dull permanence about it.) And later the drumbeats continue with some alliteration (or repetitive onomatopoeias?) after Atticus’s defense of Calpurnia.
The imagery of stout and opinionated Aunt Alexandra is beautiful and her presence is used in an interesting way to contrast against Calpurnia. Perhaps it is a fear of Scout’s maturity, but I do not really understand why Atticus allowed his sister to become a rather permanent caretaker of the children. We are told that it was not so much Atticus’s doing as hers and I suppose I can see that as a family member she would be disturbed by Scout’s lack of lady-like qualities. I think her character may have been dropped in the screenplay.
TKaM has an abundance of strong themes. It is a story of innocent youth and unyielding racism, of growing up in the south seventy-two years after the emancipation proclamation and the social structure that emerged from that. There are the Ewells at the bottom white-trash layer of the social strata and the Finches close to the top. There are the Cunninghams, somewhere below the middle, who are poor but respectable, managing a living through hard work during the depression and wanting a good education for their children. A black person, any African American, living in 1930’s Alabama was below this strata entirely. Free and poor and chastised, just as Tom Robinson was, for presuming to have any sympathy for a white person.
We see the story through the eyes Scout Finch who in the span of the novel learns of the true strength of her father, Atticus. Scout and her brother Jem have been raised by an educated man who understands the importance of good education and walking in other people’s shoes. These children have not been constrained to their place in the social structure by the likes of their Aunt Alexandra who chooses not to see her own conflicted views of this local caste system.
As the title implies, the death portrayed in the novel is the death of innocence. The death of Tom Robinson, which in our time would likely be called suicide-by-cop, is a great loss. Here is a man whose only crime was to be compassionate to one of the Ewells in an era where the word of a white person, even white trash, is preferred to that of a black man. Atticus is wary of the dangers of trying a black man with an all white jury and his children are justified in their confusion at the unfortunate results.
When Boo Radley saves the lives of Scout and Jem by killing Bob Ewell, Boo’s tragic loss of innocence is ameliorated by the Sheriff’s decision to claim that Ewell fell on his knife in the struggle. A wonderful awareness comes to Atticus when he asks Scout if she understands.
Scout’s maturity is almost unbelievable but it is consistent with her world view evident throughout the story. Perhaps this is why Harper Lee’s novel appeals to many age groups.
I will start with my own observations, but I do also want to address some of the points you have made so far. I believe there are intersections among some of what follows and your own observations.
Once again, we have selected what is traditionally called a “first-person narrative.” And, as with those others we have read so far (Midnight’s Children, Lolita, and Red Harvest), issues over the reliability of the narration surface early in the telling. While it is easy—and perhaps even somehow self-satisfying—to envision a young narrator as precocious as Scout apparently is, we have to remember that the narrative of Jean Louise is that of an adult (or near adult) recalling events that occurred (past tense) during her sixth and seventh year of life. As observant as Scout may have been, as erudite as she appears in her own telling, no six or seven year old (regardless Huxley’s theories of Mind at Large) is as reflective or perceptive as our narrator is in the process of telling the story that is To Kill a Mockingbird. Consider the following (from Scout’s first day at school):
Evaluating only the text we are given, though it is clearly Scout’s perspective, this is not the voice of a child having just entered school for the first time. This is the phrasing and voice of an adult in the act of remembering. And, while Scout is—as she tells us, and shows us—a “reader” of apparently significant ability and breadth for her age, to suggest that she and her brother and friends were “immune to imaginative literature”—as she says—is disingenuous. She and Jem and Dill spend/spent a lot of time “reading” as well as staging and (re)creating highly imaginative stories (among them various Tarzan and Rover Boys and Tom Swift episodes). There is also their interest in and their imaginative recreations of the local folk legends, particularly the Radley family story. So, I cannot agree with the narrator that she (or her peers) were “immune to imaginative literature.” I suspect the truth was closer to the idea that they were familiar with larger, more engaging narratives than those the teacher chose to read them.
And, recall that at the end of the day, Miss Caroline “opened a book and mystified the first grade with a long narrative about a toadfrog that lived in a hall” (31). I was myself enthralled by the same story at about the same age . . . but I was, I believe, more affected by the oral telling of the story, as reading it again years later when I was able to read for myself I found it merely quaint. I was more affected later in life by the lovely illustrations by Arthur Rackham.
As one more example of the separation of narrator and central character through whom the story is focalized—and it runs throughout the book—consider the difference in Scout’s narrating voice (and the worldliness behind that voice) and her speaking voice in the course of recreating various recollected scenes for the reader. This separation is a crucial element in narratorial reliability. Though this is not to say that Scout/Jean Louise is at all like Saleem Sinai or Humbert Humbert with respect to reliability . . . it is a different sort of reliability “concern” that is raised here, one closer to the issues of verisimilitude and veracity in apparently autobiographical works, or in roman a clef (thinly veiled true exposes/memoirs).
Continuing . . . considering that this is the fourth first-person narrative we have read, why is it the first to have elicited such, and so many, strong emotional reactions from me? It took me several days to assimilate and bracket and not so much forget as file away for further reflection the reactions I went through: anger, revulsion, sadness, joy. Yet none of the books we read before this one affected me in any way even remotely similar to this range of emotions I felt on finishing this book. Why? Should they have?
This is just a start . . . more to follow as I get my head and hands around the story.
Scout’s vocabulary gave it away for me. Would this narrative have been as affective if it were told with the vocabulary of an 8-year-old? As a reader I am in awe of the maturity and insight of this 8-year-old but I know in my heart that the author has imbued the child with abilities that will allow her to communicate to me and keep me engaged throughout the story. Please don’t make me mistrust Scout, even if she sometimes talks like an adult.
Regarding emotions, I went through a little revulsion with Lolita, some anger with Midnight’s Children but, like you, it was a notably wider range of emotion with TKaM. Part of that has to be that we can relate to the subject matter.
You raise an interesting point: “Would this narrative have been as affective if it were told with the vocabulary of an 8-year-old?” My immediate answer is: NO. And I believe part of that answer is related to and lies within the reasonableness of your request that I not make you mistrust Scout. The affective quality of fiction lies, in part, in the vraisemblance (literally “semblance of truth,” it has become litspeak for verisimilitude) of the story elements. That Scout’s discursive voice is “adult” while her dialogic voice is that of a (peculiarly precocious and erudite) child is not so jarring as it sounds in analysis. In fact, Lee has found a way to blend the two in such a way as to (in my reading) feed on/off of one another to create that affective quality that leaves us laughing at one sitting and in tears at the next. And this is fueled further, as you put it, by the fact that “we can relate to the subject matter.” On Monday evening, I was watching PBS in its coverage of Martin Luther King-day related historical material. One of the stories recounted was that of the murder of young Emmett Till. Black & White (in more ways than one) film of scenes of the courtroom in which two white men were on trial for Till’s brutal murder could easily have been the courtroom from TKaM. A jury of twelve white men took two hours to find the white defendants NOT guilty, despite eye witness testimony. The one eye witness that had not been rounded up and put in jail was black. We “grew up” with this stuff in the background. We may not have been aware of it but our upbringing and education were affected and effected by events like it.
And let’s consider the other side of the affective/effective coin . . . could the story have been more effective if told in the voice of an eight year old child? James Joyce, in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, starts the first person narrative with the “voice” of a child narrator. As the story progresses and the narrator comes of age, the voice develops in to that of an adult narrator. It has been suggested that this narrative device is particularly effective in developing in the reader a sense of the growth and development of the narrator. We saw something like this in Lolita, with HH’s “voice” changing with circumstances. Faulkner is (in)famous for his character-narrators that speak in vernacular, whether they are young, old, ignorant, wise, retarded. And . . . it is an old trick/device learned—at least for the Americanists—from Twain. I’m not sure there is an answer, but the possibilities are fun to contemplate.
To further our discussion of the affective/effective “abilities” of fiction, consider the following article from PsyArt: http://www.clas.ufl.edu/ipsa/journal/2002_mellmann01.shtml.
Looking back over my notes (I carry about 5 different notebooks with me for recording thoughts about a variety of things: groceries, travel checklists, narrative theory, our reading project, my “diary,” miscellaneous thoughts—it is amazing how quickly one can go through pencils), I (re)discovered several points that I wanted to take on with respect to our discussion of TKaM. One that cries out louder than the rest is the notion of “titles” (what I actually wrote down was “origins and effects of titles of works”). [obtw, the other notions I wrote down are (1) Scout as narrator/narratorial position in time—which we have pretty well sussed out, and (2) where does titling fit into the creative process of written works?—so you can see why “titles” was the louder/loudest of the notions]
At one point in my degree program I had to take an “Ethnicity in Literature” class. It is a requirement for all persons pursuing MAs in English in New York—one of those state mandates a lot of teachers (and students) find it hard to work with in terms of a focused course of study. I entered the class with a lot of preconceived notions; I suspect we all would, regardless our racial, ethnic, religious, political, or whatever persuasion. I came away from the first evening with a head full of questions (not untypical of me). What started it off was the fact that the professor gave us a poem to read and “take apart” (close reading, theory, poetics, structural analysis, the usual stuff). The crux of the moment, though, was that he gave us the poem without either title or name of author . . .
In the past we have mentioned, mostly in passing, the paratextual debris attached to texts: things like the publisher provided “classification” of the book (e.g., MEMOIR, AUTOBIOGRAPHY, PHILOSOPHY, or—one of my favorites—THEORY/LITERARY CRITICISM, which shows up on a lot of texts having NOTHING to do with literary criticism but because someone has mapped the theories expounded onto literature it becomes literary criticism), the color of the book jacket, the photograph (or drawing/painting) “illustrating” the titular notion(s), the font(s) used, even the physical size of the book and the quality of the paper and the heft of the book in the hand. All of these are carefully selected and placed so as to trigger our response (or lack of it) to the text. The title of the work is a part of this “game” (as Wittgestein would call it). So, where am I going with this? Well . . .
Without foreknowledge of either the title of the poem or the author’s name (and, believe me, names are as revealing as titles of works—for example, did you ever consider what image your name conjures in the mind of the hearer without ever having met you?), it is astonishing the variety of “readings” the poem was subject to. If I recall—and I would have to go back to my notebooks to be certain—the poem involved a turtle and some other “critters” that induced me to lean in the direction of an Aesop-like parody. There were other equally reader-dependent interpretations in the class. After we all talked ourselves out, the professor revealed both the title and the author’s name. It has been a number of years since that class but here is what I recall: the author was Native American (the Canadians call them Aboriginals, a term I tend to prefer) and the title was inextricably linked to that heritage. Suddenly, the “meaning” of the poem changed for all of us . . . particularly when we learned that the Tortoise was a sacred symbol of the clan from which the author sprang.
So, in relation to the titling/naming of literary works . . . like To Kill a Mockingbird, how does that title affect us? What induced Harper Lee to select it as the title? To what extent did her editor influence the selection of a title? I know that Conrad struggled over the title to his masterful short(ish) story, “The Secret Sharer.” Given all of the alternatives he considered, I believe he finally settled on the best possible title; certainly a lot of academic capital has been expended and made analyzing the implications of that title. How much effort did Lee put into her title? We may never know . . .
But, as a reader, what does that title do to you? What does it do FOR you? What does it mean or convey or predispose you to expect? Being aware of the film ruins our ability/opportunity to approach it with no preconceived notions. So here is an exercise . . . walk into a book store, pick up any book you have never seen before (new bestsellers are good for this) and “guess” from the title what the book is “about.”
For example . . . Under the Net. Despite the crap on the cover telling us what the book is about, what does the title conjure up in your mind . . . I leave it to you to make the opening post considering that point.
I have a similar fascination with the process of writing a novel and all the moss that is collected along the path of publishing. I know nothing about mockingbirds except they are song birds and after reading the book I still wouldn’t recognize one. While this short part of the Finch family life unfolds, this title reminded me of the core tragedy of the story and just for that it is a great title. I would love to know what inspired the title, but it seems it would be a distracting one for a writer to write towards. Isn’t it more likely the title emerged during the writing process?
There is at least one book where the title influenced my desire to purchase it — Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things by George Lakoff — and at least one in which the title has a haunting side affect after you finish the book — Simisola by Ruth Rendell. You simply cannot fairly discuss the Simisola title with someone who has not yet read the book.
And don’t get me started about cover art! Now for Under the Net.