Lee is very subtle with the conservative slant of the novel. It takes several readings to figure his out. When Mrs. Dubose says horrible things to the kids, Atticus does not say anything to her but tells his kids she has the right to say what she wants. That is when we discuss the constitutionality of hate crimes. In his closing argument Atticus tells the jury that all men aren’t created equal, that some men are more talented than others, some ladies make better cakes, etc.; however, he does stress that it is the courtroom in which all men truely are equal. This is when we discuss hiring and college acceptance quotas. Lee is brutal on modern education methods, which Jem incorrectly refers to as the Dewey Decimal System. Miss Caroline tells Scout her father is not qualified to teach as he does not have her degree. Sound familiar? Jem’s treehouse experiment fails when his father severs his supply line. Jem would have stayed in his treehouse for days as long as Scout kept bringing him food and water and doing his chores for him. This incident comes right after we learn Bob Ewell’s kids starve because he drinks their relief check. Scout suggests he stop getting one but Atticus tells her people feel sorry for the kids. Lee exposes here how welfare accomplishes the exactly the opposite of its intent. Mr. Underwood can’t stand black people and won’t have one near him yet he helps Atticus defend Tom Robinson from the lynch mob. At this point we discuss that it’s okay to disagree with or not accept someone (think homosexuality or gun control), but that does not give us the right to harm somebody because of their beliefs. Only the most ignorant people in the novel use the derogatory “n” word, at which point we discuss its intent and use in modern hip hop. I also take the opportunity to explain who started the KKK and why it was started, as well as who supported civil rights and who didn’t. We talk about the injustice of the Duke case and the issues that surround the rape case at our own school. I could continue with the conservativeness of the novel, but I have to get dinner on the table.
Very interesting, thanks.
Thank you for being such a good teacher!
I don’t know why, but we never read TKAM in high school. My daughter read it when she was in 9th or 10th grade. She loves it and had to take her copy away to college with her. Hubby had a college professor who had been a high school teacher in Jackson, MS in 1960 or so. She kept a copy in her desk for students who wanted to read it. The book had been banned from the school. It may have been banned from the entire district. My aunt used the novel in her classes until she retired about ten years ago. She was a Bama grad, too.
You make some very good points.
You are obviously a very good teacher. You remind me of my 8th grade English teacher, I loved her.
I can’t understand why more conservatives don’t see “To Kill A Mockingbird” as a novel with many conservative values and themes. I read it many times and I love the movie version as well.
Rather than portraying “all white (especially Southerners) people bad – all black people good”, Lee’s novel and its characters are deeply layered and it doesn’t fall into mere stereo types. In fact I always thought it portrayed southerners in a rather good light overall. And Bob Ewell isn’t evil and a bigot simply because he is white, he’s evil because he is a very bad man, a drunk, a bully, lazy, shiftless and on the dole and a person who would rather see an innocent man hanged to cover up for his own crimes and failures as a father – he is not white but what southerners call, "white trash". I always found one of the themes of the novel was the importance of the Rule of Law and of standing up for what is right even if it is difficult and isn’t always the “popular” choice.
I think that Atticus shooting the rabid dog was a metaphor for the evil that exists among us and the need for sometimes putting down that evil; that Atticus, unknown to his children was the “best shot in the county” is telling in that Atticus wasn’t a braggart or a show off nor did he need to prove himself to anyone. And that it was Boo Radley who rescued Jem and Scout from the drunken and murderous Ewell and killed him in defense of the helpless and innocent children while being rather childlike and innocent himself, that even as a “simpleton”, he could differentiate right from wrong and stand up for what is right, is simply brilliant IMO.
Mr. Underwood can’t stand black people and won’t have one near him yet he helps Atticus defend Tom Robinson from the lynch mob.
I some ways both Atticus and Underwood remind me of my own father in some ways. My dad was very conservative but being a product of an older generation and his upbringing, had his prejudices; he wasn’t too fond of black people and occasionally used the N word. But when I was a kid in the late 60’s my dad worked with and was best friends with a guy who married a black woman. I recall that my dad tried to talk him out of it, didn’t think it was a good idea, but after they got married and shortly after they had a daughter together, my dad invited them to come to dinner at our house.
I vividly recall how upset my mother was. She was very fond of Conrad, he had spent a lot of time at our house, was like a member of the family and he was like an uncle to me and she didn’t exactly object to his wife being black or even having a black person in our home but she was very concerned with “what will the neighbors think” being that we lived in a very WASPY neighborhood.
I remember my father telling my mother that he didn’t give a good %*#$ what the neighbors think. “Conrad is my friend and she is his wife, they love each other and are married in the eyes of God and that’s good enough for me. If that upsets the neighbors, if they don’t want to have anything to do with us because of that, maybe I don’t want anything to do with them either. Maybe instead of merely pretending to be good Christians, they should start acting like one.”
I also remember around the same time when a bunch of hippy anti-war protesters came to our neighborhood and were going door to door handing out their anti-war literature and calling our US servicemen “baby killers” and “war criminals” and such. Next door to us lived a woman with four young sons and a husband serving in Vietnam, my mother and father befriended her looked after her as if she was their own daughter. My father, a WWII vet himself, stood guard in front of her house with his loaded shot gun to keep them from harassing her and told those creeps exactly where they could go.
FWIW, my father was not a highly educated man, he dropped out of HS to serve his country after Pearl Harbor, but he loved to read and was very well read. He instilled in me a love of reading and introduced me to the classic novels he loved as a child; Robinson Crusoe, Moby Dick, Last of the Mohicans, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Gulliver's Travels, The Three Musketeers and the works of HG Wells. My mother introduced me to Dickens, Austen, Tolstoy, Fitzgerald and P. G. Wodehouse. And yes, we had a copy of To Kill A Mockingbird on our book shelf.