To kill a mockingbird

To kill a mockingbird / [sound recording] by Harper Lee ; performance by Sissy Spacek.—

Prince Frederick : Recorded Books, 2006.

11 sound discs (12 hr., 30 min.) : digital ; 4 3/4 in.

Unabridged ed.

Compact disc.

1. Alabama – Fiction. 2. Fathers and daughters – Fiction. 3. Girls – Fiction. 4. Prejudices – Fiction. 5. Race relations – Fiction. 6. Trials (Rape) -- Fiction.

813.54

Scout Finch and her brother Jem are the children of Atticus Finch, a lawyer and state legislator in a small Alabama county seat in the mid-1930s. They and their summer friend Dill are obsessed with getting the Finchs’ eccentric and reclusive neighbor “Boo” Radley to come out and show himself to them. In spite of Atticus’s stern disapproval, Scout, her brother and their friend spend the next two summers constructing elaborate scary fantasies about him while concocting plots to lure him out into the open.

Their childish fantasies are overshadowed by the harsh racial climate of the first half of the twentieth century when Atticus is assigned to defend a black man who’s been falsely accused of raping a white woman. The courtroom drama takes up most of the rest of the novel, until the end when the author ties all her themes on the evils of prejudice together. It is little wonder that this 1960 novel has become part of the cannon of American literature.

Another theme that particularly stood out to me in re-reading the book this time was Gentility. Without a hereditary aristocracy, nominally egalitarian American society has substituted the models of meritocracy or manners as a way of defining social standing. The model strongly presented in To kill a mockingbird is that of manners. If you behave as a gentleman, then you are one. Atticus Finch is the prime example of a gentleman, and the reader following his daughter’s reports cannot help but admire him. Unlike his older sister, Alexandra, Atticus gives no sign that decent from the county’s first settlers is a measure of social position, and he refuses to heed her pleadings to dismiss his black cook and housekeeper, Calpurnia. He describes her as, a faithful member of this family, and praises her for the good moral education that she has given his children after the death of his wife. He treats all he encounters with empathy and courtesy, whether it is the reclusive Radleys, the black members of the community, a viciously haranguing morphine addicted old woman, the man he defends, or his accusers. His polar opposite is Bob Ewell, the father of the alleged rape victim, the poorly behaved patriarch of a brood of a half-dozen or so ill kempt, uneducated, unfed, and frequently beaten children, living next to the town dump, just around the bend from the black community. Bob Ewell personifies “white trash.”

“Trash” is the opposite end of the white community in Macomb County from the Finch family. While Atticus does most of his child rearing by example in an unusually didactic passage from chapter 23 he lectures his children:

“As you grow older, you’ll see white men cheat black men every day of your life, but let me tell you something and don’t you 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.”

Atticus was speaking so quietly his last word crashed on our ears. I looked up, and his face was vehement.