When earlier in the summer, Joe Queenan in his article “Summer Bummer” (The New York Times Book Review, June 3, 2007), made certain critical remarks concerning To Kill a Mockingbird, I was prompted to reread Harper Lee’s masterpiece, which I had not read for twenty years. Queenan includes the novel among the “featherweight homilies” of our literary tradition, and describes it further as a “saccharine, historically implausible novel about the Nicest White Man Ever.” On the one hand, I do not think that Queenan’s statements are entirely wrong (which is not to say that I think they are entirely right). The novel is, after all, a kind of homily, though I think it more accurate to leave off the adjective; and Atticus is rather idealized, something that I doubt that anyone can credibly deny. On the other hand, the novel is also so much more that I think we do well to consider it further.
To begin with, it can be helpful to consider the book in terms of its date of publication, 1960, when American culture and society were much in need of nuanced homilies about race–and surely it would be only by a certain blindness and sentimentality that one could believe we do not stand in need of such homilies, along with the treatments of other genres, now. It may be that much of our literature, prose as well as poetry, does well to mix its genres, for to keep our genres segregated probably serves us no better in literature than it does in the workplace or in our schools. So I see nothing wrong with a good homily in novel form as long as the tale is well told. So let us call To Kill a Mockingbird a social and ethical homily–not a bad genre for a troubled time. It is of significance that Harper Lee’s novel appeared the same year that saw the serial publication of the articles, by John Howard Griffin, that the following year would become Black Like Me. As readers of Harper Lee will recall, a central point–perhaps the central ethical lesson–of the novel occurs when Atticus tells Scout about the importance of climbing into another person’s skin and walking around in it, a lesson that Scout puts into practice in her dealings with her brother, Jem, and then with other persons such as Tom Robinson and Arthur Radley, persons who have been marginalized, made “into ghosts,” as Atticus puts it when discussing Arthur Radley with his children. John Howard Griffin came perhaps about as close–which is not so very close–as any white person in American history to walk around in an African-American person’s skin when he undertook his 1959 experiment of traveling in the American South with his skin treated to allow him to pass as African American. It should be pointed out, though, that in Black Like Me and many of his other writings, Griffin emphasizes that there is no way that he could really experience the world from the subject position of an African American living in the racist United States. In fact, Griffin empahsizes that he has nothing whatsoever to teach African Americans; rather, he wrote the book to expose the workings of racism to other white Americans, workings that one can all too easily deny when it is comfortable to do so, as Griffin learned from his experience of confronting his own racism.
Even though Atticus Finch, representative of the more enlightened attitude of Maycomb County’s white population, is a rather idealized figure, he is neither perfect nor without complication, such as when he at times links racist attitudes with lower class status–when, for example, he attributes racist terminology to “ignorant, trashy people,” though such terminology has “slipped,” he says, “into usage with some people like ourselves, when they want a common, ugly term to label somebody.” Nor is a critique of such classist thinking without a basis in the novel, as witness the gentle satire in Jem and Scout’s conversation, at the end of chapter 23, about what the notion of family background could possibly mean. That Scout points out that Atticus, who at times falls back on a kind of class consciousness, once said “that most of this Old Family stuff’s foolishness because everybody’s family’s just as old as everybody else’s” serves to emphasize the relative complexity of Atticus’s character. As Charles J. Shields points out in his remarkable Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee (Henry Holt and Company, 2006), Harper Lee’s father “only gradually rose to the moral standards of Atticus” (121). In other words, Mr. Lee had to develop morally, like the rest of us. But as idealized as Atticus might be, there remain traces of his moral development, as well as of his blind spots calling for further development still. Perhaps his most pointed slip occurs during his otherwise marvelous closing statement at Tom Robinson’s trial. After listing the racist stereotypes that certain witnesses brought to their testimony, Atticus refers to the assumption of the truth of such stereotypes as “in itself a lie as black as Tom Robinson’s skin.” Certainly there is no malicious intent in this moment, and in itself the comparison seems to be one that someone might strike off in heat of the moment. A trial attorney I know once told me, in response to my commenting on a rather savvy moment of his closing remarks, when he seemed to pick up on the demeanor of a specific juror, that he is far too preoccupied when he is speaking before a jury to do any such thing consciously. But Atticus’s throw-away line comparing racist lies to Tom Robinson’s skin carries some rather devastating implications. I suspect that the association between lies, along with other forms of evil, and darkness arises from the sense of danger that comes with the setting of the sun, a sense of danger that many of us living in highly technologized centers tend to lose touch with. The few times that I have been in the dark away from artificial light, especially in the woods or on cloudy nights, have been quite disorienting; the darkness can seem almost palpable. Thus, I suspect that the association between darkness and evil, darkness and danger, arises in large part from experiences that have nothing to do with race. The association then becomes racist when it migrates to an association between evil and darkness of skin color. Such is the deeply unfortunate association that Atticus articulates in comparing racist lies to the darkness of Tom Robinson’s skin–by implication marking Tom Robinson himself with the very lie that Atticus seeks to deny. As I say, the this is a throw-away line in a passing moment of an otherwise marvelous speech, but it shows certain racist associations still rustling through Atticus’s discourse.
But I suspect that for many the issue of whether Atticus is a complex character is largely beside the point, for the real problem with the novel is that the African-American characters lack agency; they seem to be waiting around for the benevolent white man to help them. Even in a social context, such as that reflected in this novel, where African-Americans are subjected to second- or third- or fourth-class status, such characters are not without agency. Characters such as Calpurnia, Zeebo, the Reverend Sykes, Tom Robinson, or Helen Robinson could not do what they do without tremendous depth of character and personal resources. In fact, it may be precisely because of their constrained circumstances that these characters would lend themselves to quite complex explorations of agency. As a critique of the novel, I believe that this one is quite fair. But then because Scout growing up would have been so little aware of the complex agency of the African Americans in Maycomb County, her story is not likely to explore such issues. The problem may be–and here is where perhaps I come closest to Queenan’s critique–that To Kill a Mockingbird continues to appear on so many high school reading lists. To say this is not to deny that the novel is a true masterpiece well worth reading and rereading, but rather that there is some real urgency in introducing our young readers to some of the marvelous writings of African-American authors, such as Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and Toni Morrison–to name only a few of the most painfully obvious authors who should probably be read much more than they already are.
So on the one hand, I think that we would do well to reshape some of our summer reading lists. As a former high school teacher, I know that doing so can be quite an undertaking. Any high school teacher who takes the job even halfway seriously is so busy during the school year, and so in need of some kind of diversion–if only the pleasure of reading for purposes other than school preparation– during the summer, that it can be quite a difficult task to alter the curriculum. But then it does not have to happen this year; perhaps it can happen next year or the year after. On the other hand, there remain other reasons to read the novel besides its value as a social and ethical homily featuring a somewhat idealized father figure. For example, the novel remains a marvelous portrait of childhood and the play of chidhood imagination, as well as a wonderful portrait of the growth and complication of childhood friendship.
Further, much of the novel sparkles with wit and good humor, as when the adult Jean Louise Finch informs us that, after being admitted to the bar, her father’s “first two clients were the last two persons hanged in the Maycomb County jail. Atticus had urged them to accept the state’s generosity in allowing them to plead Guilty to second-degree murder and escape with their lives, but they were Haverfords, In Maycomb County a name synonymous with jackass.” There is of course some stereotyping of the Haverfords here, but one can also hear this moment as one in which the voice of the adult Jean Louise Finch merges with that of her childhood self, channeling as it were one of the town’s widespread attitudes. I’ve read that some have criticized the way the voice of the novel shifts and merges this way, begining here from the stance of the child, merging there with the attitude and vocabulary of the adult, speaking now and again simply as the adult looking back on those long past years, then speaking again simply as the child; but I find this shifting of voice to be part of the novel’s sophistication, part of the way it moves with the dynamics of human memory and understanding.
Then there is also that marvelous scene at the end, after Jem and Scout have been attacked, and Scout enters her brother’s bedroom: “The man who brought Jem in was standing in a corner, leaning against the wall. He was some countryman I did not know. He had probably been at the pageant, and was in the vicinity when it happened. He must have heard our screams and come running.” Of course, this man turns out to be “Boo” Radley–the boogeyman of Jem and Scout’s childhood, the demon of their dreams, past whose house they always run. Not only is he a man, just a man, but he’s also the man who saved their lives from Bob Ewell’s attack. It’s lovely the way all the adults in the room call him Arthur, how Atticus formally introduces him and Jean Louise, how she leads him out onto the porch to have a talk, and how she walks him home. Perhaps there is a maudlin moment or two in the scene, but even if there is, I cannot care, I simply do not and cannot care, for it is all so lovely and real to my imagination. In an interview with Ronald Spatz, William Gass describes how “when I listen to Bach…my mind moves as those notes move, and when reading a great poet, my mind moves as those words do.” I am pleased to have my mind move with Harper Lee’s marvelous words.