One prevalent motif in To Kill a Mockingbird is the tendency of the citizens of Maycomb, like the inhabitants of many a small town, to label people. In the small neighborhood of the Finches, for instance, there are several neighbors who are labeled by Scout, Jem, Dill, and others. One such neighbor is, of course, Boo Radley, a "malevolent phantom" whom the neighborhood gossip, Miss Stephanie Crawford, claims is a "Peeping Tom" because, she says, he tries to look into her bedroom window. The children think of him as some kind of a reclusive monster who has tried to kill his father with a scissors. The "foot-washing baptists" condemn Miss Maudie for her brightly colored garden, and two doors up the street from the Finches is Mrs. Henry Lafayette Dubose,
neighborhood opiion was unanimous that Mrs.l Dubose was the meanest old woman who ever lived.
When it snows in Maycomb, the children fashion a snowman that is a caricature of Mr. Avery, the neighbor across from Miss Maudie who sits upon his porch in the evenings, sneezing and making odd noises.
Finally, a prejudice surfaces as Cecil Jacobs, who lives on the far end of the street, tells Scout that her father is a "nigger-lover." When she asks Atticus about his defending of a black man, he replies that other lawyers have done the same. Later that night, Scout overhears her father as he responds to his sister's request for him to refuse to defend Tom Robinson. He tells her,
Do you think I could face my children otherwise?...I hope and pray I can get Jem and Scout through it without bitterness, and most of all, without catching Maycomb's usual disease.
Scout overhears Atticus, but figures out only years later that he has intended that she overhear. For, Atticus wants his children to "walk in other people's shoes" so that they will not have such myopic views of others who are different from them; so they will not have "Maycomb's usual disease."
No comments:
Post a Comment