Harper Lee: Taking A Stance

Harper Lee: Taking a Stance

Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, originally published in 1960, is the story of a young girl coming to terms with the racial injustice and hypocrisy of the post-Depression South. Knowing that Lee was a native of the South and was a child during the 1930s, the reader wonders how much of her own experiences are relived in the novel. Reading some of the literary critiques of the story, it becomes apparent that there are allusions to historical events that occurred after the fictionalized setting. There is also the interesting connection of the story line, being one of the complicated responses of White persons of a liberal bent to the racial injustices, to those of the mounting tensions of the 1950s. Noting then that the book was published in 1960, at the advent of the Civil Rights era, an exploration of use of an amalgamated historical setting as a literary device to serve the author's purpose in writing the novel seems warranted. In particular, this paper addresses the stance that Lee took as a Southern female author in addressing, and perhaps redeeming, the racial injustice she witnessed in her childhood and young adulthood.

Narrated from the point of view of a nine-year-old girl, Scout, the events of two story lines run in parallel throughout the novel, and then change course to meet only at the end. The first story line involves the trial of a local Black man, Tom Robinson, who is accused of raping a white woman named Mayella Ewell. While the Ewell's are considered to be a disreputable clan of 'poor white trash' in the fictionalized community of Maycomb, Alabama, they are still White. Their race protects them even when casting erroneous blame on a Black man who stands as the scapegoat for what is assumed to be the abuse generated by Mayella's father. Scout's father, Atticus, is the White lawyer who is called to defend Robinson in a trial that is decided before it is held, which is a historically accurate account of legal events in the Deep South during that historical period (Chura 18).

The second story line involves a neighbor named Boo Radley, an emotionally disturbed and intriguing character to Scout, her older brother Jem, and a summer friend named Dill. Their fascination with Boo leads them to 'wiggle at the loose tooth' of Boo's true character as they try to draw him out and learn more about his mysterious elusiveness. They do not readily realize that Boo is equally interested in the children and serves as their guardian and protector. Boo shows his interest first by leaving them presents in the tree that marks the boundary of the Radley property, and then displays his care for the children by sewing up Jem's pants to keep him from trouble, and most importantly, by defending the children from Mr. Ewell at the end of the novel.

The setting of the story, Maycomb, Alabama, has the feel of the rural South after the Great Depression. As Scout describes the town in the first chapter,

People moved slowly then...A day was twenty-four hours long but seemed longer. There was no hurry, for there was nowhere to go, nothing to buy and no money to but it with, nothing to see outside the boundaries of Maycomb County. But it was a time of vague optimism for some the people: Maycomb County had recently been told that it had nothing to fear but fear itself (Lee 6).

The quote alluded to in this section of text, "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself", is one made by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in his first Inaugural Address in 1933 (Graduate Center). This places the historical setting of the novel in a time where fear was highlighted as something to be battled. Lee elaborates on the racial context of this fear in Atticus' trial summation when he says (speaking of Mayella), "She did something that in our society is unspeakable: she kissed a Black man. Not an old uncle, but a strong, young Negro man. No code mattered to her before she broke it, but it came crashing down on her afterwards" (Lee 232). Later critics of the period cite the greatest fear of White people when considering the potential equality of Blacks; that of the unthinkable intimacy that might evolve if racial mixing is allowed in society (Chura 3).

The setting of the story, therefore, is a fairly accurate depiction of the economic and racial climate of the 1930's, which is both the fictional setting of the story and the actual time period in which Lee was a young girl in the rural South. Being born in1926 in Monroeville, Alabama (Petry xvi), Lee is writes from the background knowledge of events that were likely observed by her regarding racial interactions, being the daughter of an attorney and local newspaper editor (Petry xvi). As a reader, the authenticity of the narration makes the story feel both relevant and timeless. The book's publication in 1960, at the vanguard of the Civil Rights movement in the United States, makes both the fictional historical setting and the timeliness of its publication a compelling literary element.

Literary critics elaborate on the similarities between the story elements of Lee's novel and certain events that occurred just prior to her work on the manuscript in the late 1950's. Chura, who writes in 2000, expresses surprise that ties between the characters and events portrayed in the novel had not previously been made to certain legal events that were occurring in the mid 1950s, particularly that of the Emmett Till trial. He is convincing in aligning particulars of the trial of Tom Robinson to that of Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old boy who was murdered for allegedly whistling at a White girl in a store in the Mississippi Delta area in 1955 (Chura 4). He states, "Because the text's 1930 history is superficial, the novel is best understood as an amalgam or cross-historical montage, its 'historical present' diluted by the influence of events and ideology concurrent with its period of production" (Chura 1). He notes that some events that are reported by Scout actually occurred later than the 1930's, and may reflect Lee's literary decision to bring together important elements of legal and societal climate of the 1950's with the fictionalized 1930's setting, referring to this as prolepsis (Chura 2). The article devotes several pages to aligning similarities of the Emmett Till case with that of Tom Robinson, including the overwhelming evidence brought to bear that should have ensured an acquittal in the two trials. He continues to draw more symbolic ties between the novel and Lee's childhood, such as that of Scout and Lee's fathers' occupations, the presence of a male cohort in childhood imaginings, and the collusion of lawyer and judge in trying to exact a fair legal decision