To Kill a Mockingbird Analyzed: A Classic Novel's Modern Critique

[00:00:00]One of the trademark texts of the American  school system is Harper Lee’s 1960 novel To   Kill a Mockingbird. For decades it has been widely  read in high schools and middle schools an a key   anti-racist text. But how did this novel, with its  Southern Gothic and Bildungsroman elements become   a book that in 2006 the British said “every adult  should read before they die” ahead of the Bible.

[00:00:24]That’s a flex.

[00:00:29][Open] To Kill a Mockingbird was written by Harper  Lee and was loosely based on Lee’s real life   experiences, the book tells the story of  Jean Louise Finch, better known as Scout,   a young girl growing up during the Great  Depression in the fictional town of Maycomb,   Alabama with her older brother Jeremy aka Jem,  and her widowed lawyer father, Atticus Finch.   A name, that will be imprinted  on the world … forever.

[00:00:53]Atticus is appointed to defend  a Black man named Tom Robinson,   who is accused of sexually assaulting  a white woman named Mayella Ewell.   This causes a lot of racial harassment towards  the Finch family and at one point in the novel   Atticus has to stop an attempted lynching, with  the help of Scout and some of the other children.

[00:01:15]Scout and Jem watch the trial from the  Black section of the courtroom. It is   revealed that Mayella is lying and attempted  to seduce Tom, but was beaten by her father,   who has been sexually abusing his daughter.  Despite being labeled as “white trash”   Tom is convicted for the assault and is  later killed while trying to escape jail.

[00:01:34]Mayella’s father, Bob, tries to get revenge  on Atticus by attacking Jem and Scout,   but are saved by the town recluse Boo Radley.  Bob is killed by a knife wound from Radley,   but it is covered up and Scout is  forever changed by this experience.

[00:01:55]So who was the mind behind the mockingbird?

[00:01:58]Born Nelle Harper Lee in Monroeville, Alabama,  she was also the young daughter of a lawyer father   named Amasa Coleman Lee. One of her childhood friends,   and long time writing companion was Truman  Capote, who visited their town during the   summers. They would end up living near  each other years later in New York City.

[00:02:17]After publishing Mockingbird, Lee  went on a bunch of book tours,   worked on the film adaptation of her book,   and then just went on to lead the successful  life of someone who published one awesome book.

[00:02:28]Just one.

[00:02:30]One book.

[00:02:31]No sequels.

[00:02:32][oh fortuna] The success of To Kill a Mockingbird was instant  and surpassed the expectations of Lee tenfold.   Professor Alice Hall Petry  wrote in the introduction of   On Harper Lee: Essays and Reflections: “During the eighty-year period between  1895 and 1975, Mockingbird was the   third-best-selling novel in the United States,  and the seventh-best-selling book of any kind.   Sales have not fallen off in  the ensuing twenty-five years.   In 2001, for example, more than 1  million copies of Mockingbird were sold.” It has been kept alive through it’s pop  culture influence via the film adaptation,   and being a regularly included text  for middle school children. Of course,   just because a book is taught at school  doesn’t automatically make it popular.

[00:03:17]People aren’t this interested in  something like The Scarlet Letter,   and even that wasn’t as huge of  a success when it was released.

[00:03:23]UNC chapel hill Professor Emerita Doris  Betts ties it’s longevity to the very   simplistic morality of the text in her essay “The  Mockingbird’s Throat: A Personal Reflection”: “In Scout Finch, Lee has produced a girl  as appealing as Jo March of Little Women   but stopped her story sooner than Louisa  May Alcott stopped hers, and the point where   initiation became new maturity. By producing no  other novels, Lee also has left readers feeling   that this book has particular significance in that  it contains all she had to say, or all she could.” And with all of that symbolism and light  discussion of race it raises the question:   what exactly is the value of  teaching To Kill A Mockingbird   versus an actual book about  race written by a Black author?

[00:04:14]Gerald Early, professor of  African American Studies, states: “I read To Kill a Mockingbird the summer before  I read Richard Wright’s Uncle Tom’s Children,   a famous collection of stories by a  black writer about race in the South.   The difference was, of course, astonishing because  the perspectives were so clearly different[…] The Wright stories taught me two  contradictory but inescapable facts:   first, that books like To Kill a  Mockingbird were inadequate for me   as a black reader and failed, in their  fumbling literal way, to give me black   people as I knew them to be; and second, that  I needed books like To Kill a Mockingbird   if ever I were going to understand the South  as a construction of the white southern mind.” To Kill A Mockingbird offers some  semblance of safety for white readers   who do not want to feel alienated or  called out by an anti-racist text.   They can see Scout and her father, Atticus,  as a fair depiction of Southern progressivism   and put the legacy of racism and all  it’s terrors on “other white people.” But it does that, as Professor Isaac Saney writes  in “The Case Against To Kill a Mockingbird”   by making Atticus a white savior  and turning the Black characters   and their community into pawns on Scout’s journey.

[00:05:26]“Perhaps the most egregious  characteristic of the novel   is the denial of the historical agency of  Black people. They are robbed of their role   as subjects of history, reduced to mere  objects who are passive hapless victims;   mere spectators and bystanders in the struggle  against their own oppression and exploitation.” Which brings us to the complex  issues of Atticus Finch himself,   one of literatures great white heroes.  What does the role he plays in the books   actually say about the role white people  play as allies? Well, not much of anything.

[00:06:02]According to bad tweeter  Malcolm Gladwell in his essay,   “The Courthouse Ring: Atticus Finch  and the limits of Southern liberalism”: “Finch will stand up to racists. He’ll use his  moral authority to shame them into silence.   He will leave the judge standing on the  sidewalk while he shakes hands with Negroes.   What he will not do is look at the problem  of racism outside the immediate context   of Mr. Cunningham, Mr. Levy, and the  island community of Maycomb, Alabama.” Atticus delivering an inspired defense of Tom  Robinson and protecting him has positioned him,   especially in the eyes of white audiences,  as the perfect ally. Until Go Set A Watchman.

[00:06:44]And it is at this point I am obligated  to have to discuss Go Set A Watchman.

[00:06:51]Remember how Harper Lee only had that one  awesome book? Well, that changed in 2015   when Go Set A Watchman was released. The book’s  road to publication was a controversial one.

[00:07:02]The novel was “re-discovered” and Lee  released a statement with Harper Collins: "In the mid-1950s, I completed a novel  called Go Set a Watchman. It features the   character known as Scout as an adult woman and  I thought it a pretty decent effort. My editor,   who was taken by the flashbacks to Scout's  childhood, persuaded me to write a novel from   the point of view of the young Scout. I was  a first-time writer, so I did as I was told.   I hadn't realized it had survived, so was  surprised and delighted when my dear friend   and lawyer Tonja Carter discovered it. After  much thought and hesitation I shared it with a   handful of people I trust and was pleased to hear  that they considered it worthy of publication.   I am humbled and amazed that this will  now be published after all these years."

[00:07:49]Some argued that this “re-discovery”  was suspicious because there were   conflicting reports about the  state of Lee’s mental health   and if this was ever meant to be published.  But people were excited. I mean it is the   sequel to one of the most popular books  of all time … why wouldn’t they publish?

[00:08:07]And then it was bad. Like really, really bad.

[00:08:12]Alexandra Petri of the Washington  Post said in her review:   “It’s the Jar Jar of classic literature: It  takes place in a beloved fictional universe,   and it’s uncomfortably racist. It has, at best,  a scholarly interest. I can’t imagine that Lee   would want it to represent her in the world.  I don’t think it should have been published.” Michiko Kakutani for The New York Times  specifically addressed in her piece the big   point that got people upset: the fact that  their beloved Atticus Finch was … racist.

[00:08:44]“[...] Atticus is a racist who once attended a  Klan meeting, who says things like “The Negroes   down here are still in their childhood as a  people.” Or asks his daughter: “Do you want   Negroes by the carload in our schools and churches  and theaters? Do you want them in our world?” In “Mockingbird,” a book once described  by Oprah Winfrey as “our national novel,”   Atticus praised American courts as  “the great levelers,” dedicated to   the proposition that “all men are created  equal.” In “Watchman,” set in the 1950s in   the era of the Brown v. Board of Education  decision, he denounces the Supreme Court,   says he wants his home state “to be left alone  to keep house without advice from the N.A.A.C.P.”   and describes N.A.A.C.P.-paid lawyers  as “standing around like buzzards.” This was a really awkward moment to be an Atticus.

[00:09:36]People were betrayed. It was the last season  of Game of Thrones levels of distraught.   Their Khaleesi turned fascist so  quickly and without warning.   Some people, like Naa Baako Ako-Adjei, a  writer and educator, saw this as another   reason why To Kill A Mockingbird is not that  ideal of a text to teach about anti-racism.   Not simply because it was a very white voice  on Black oppression, but also elements of   classism on which kind of white people are to  “blame” for the situation in Jim Crow America: “...Lee is certainly not the first Southerner  to blame poor whites for racist violence in the   South; it’s a practice with its own long  history. In 1932, the well-known liberal,   Southern journalist, Gerald White Johnson, wrote  in the then influential North American Review   that “Southerners with money  in the bank do not lynch”   and that lynch mobs were usually composed of  “fellows who have not two nickels to rub together,   those inexpressibly forlorn outcasts known  in the South as the poor white trash.”...There are, however, moments in the novel  in which you see Lee falter in her attempts   to make only poor whites responsible for the  region’s race problem and absolve ‘fine families’   for the nature of things in the South when she  acknowledges that both rich and poor whites   mistreat black people. “As you grow older,”  Atticus tells Jem, “you’ll see white men   cheat black men every day of your life, but let  me tell you something and don’t forget it—whenever   a white man does that to a black man,  no matter who he is, how rich he is,   or how fine a family he comes from, that  white man is trash” (p. 233). But in the end,   Lee reverts back to scapegoating Bob  Ewell and other poor, ‘white trash.’” For so long, Mockingbird was able to give  white readers a story to teach them about   racism, but also remove them from any  accountability of perpetuating that system.   They had Atticus to show them that it wasn't  all of them, and Watchman took that away.

[00:11:38]When I finally read To Kill a Mockingbird,  for myself in college, I found it a very   readable novel and I got through it fairly  quickly. While well written, and definitely   good, I found myself glad I didn’t read it   for school because the question I found  myself asking is: who is this for?

[00:11:56]It is not without merit, but it doesn’t  center Black characters or Black experiences,   it simply observes them through Scout. It is  an introduction to empathy but at a distance,   and that layer of separation is deeply felt.  At least to me. I don’t think we need to stop   teaching To Kill a Mockingbird, but I think  it should be followed up with a Bildungsroman   that actually puts you in the space of a  Black person, rather than a white child.