My insights about To Kill A Mockingbird

Back in 2024,  I was on a reading spree of Southern American Gothic Literature. Naturally, one of the first books I read was To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee. Set in 1930s Alabama, the novel follows Scout Finch, a young girl whose father, a lawyer named Atticus Finch, defends a black man falsely accused of raping a white woman. I loved it and it’s one of my favourite books. Navigating the plot and the world through the point of view of the kids was such a clever choice and one of the things that most impressed me, as a literary device it allows us to discover along with Scout the racial, gender and class dynamics and tensions of the time. I am going to get back to this point later. 

One of the things that I enjoy after I finish a book, a movie or an album, is reading what other people have to say about it online. You always find very interesting observations and conclusions that perhaps you didn’t reach on your own, or that differ from ours and that enriches our understanding of the work. With To Kill A Mockingbird, I found that many USAians aren’t very fond of this book and with valid reasons. Especially Afro-descendants USAians, I get that things such as having to read the n-word or how the plot is in part about a white saviour figure characterized as Atticus Finch makes them uncomfortable. I get that these stories about racism have been told enough from white perspectives and it’s time to read them from the Black community.

But I am from Argentina. Here racial dynamics and tensions are far from those in the USA. Very far from that 1930’s Alabama town with its Jim Crow laws where To Kill A Mockingbird takes place. So I think -and appealing to the power literature has to involve us in an exploration of the perspective and lives of others- for us people outside the USA, this novel is deeply educational. It describes the cruel idiosyncrasies of racism, showing how structural and insidious is, aside from how irrational. In doing so, you come to understand more profoundly the actual situation of the Black community in said country. Obviously a novel is not enough educational material, but it sparks curiosity to look for more information.

Another thing that struck me was how otherness is always present in the novel, taking the form of different characters. Coming back to the point of view of the narration, Scout Finch is a girl of six years old at the beginning and at the end she is nine, a tomboy girl who lost her mother. She is an “other” for being a child, for being a female and one who doesn’t conform to gender roles in a society where they were heavily enforced. Her female role models are Calpurnia and Miss Maudie, characters who are othered. The latter is a white southern woman who doesn’t fit the submissive and meek ideal of a southern lady, she lives independently without remarrying and is one of the people in the town who sees the racial prejudice in the trial. Calpurnia, on the other hand, is a black woman who doesn’t belong to the white world, even though she works for the Finch family as their nanny and has an important place in the family, but neither belongs fully to her community: for some of them she is the nanny raising white kids and speaking like a white person. Scout notes this in a passage of the book “Calpurnia led a modest double life (...) she had a separate existence outside our household (...) having command of two languages”.

 Among the many subplots in To Kill A Mockingbird, one -which becomes central to the ending of the novel- is a childhood mystery about a strange neighbour, Boo Radley. The gossiping of adults make the children imagine creepy stories about him. In reality, he is a mentally ill person locked up in his home by his father out of shame. Despite being a white man, he is othered due to his mental condition, feared and misunderstood. His character shows that gender and race are not the only determinants of otherness. And then we have the mockingbird character of the novel: Tom Robinson. He is the black man falsely accused of raping a white woman. Regardless of all the evidence supporting his innocence and the brilliant defence of Atticus Finch, he is still condemned by a white jury, and later on, shot dead in prison by guards. As an “other”, long before the trial the town has already decided his fate out of racial prejudice and assumptions, out of fear and ignorance. The Mockingbird metaphor is introduced earlier in the book: “It’s a sin to kill a mockingbird” they are harmless birds, “they don’t do one thing but sing their hearts out for us”. The feared and misunderstood characters are mockingbirds, and the novel’s tragedy is that society kills them anyway, they physically kill Tom Robinson, but they can also kill with prejudice, fear, and silence. There is a universality in this tragedy, because in every society there is this “killing” of the perceived “other”. The mechanisms are the same: exclusion, prejudice, erasure, and ultimately, physical violence. 

In sum, To Kill A Mockingbird is such a complex and brilliant novel that it leaves no one indifferent. I have wanted to write about it for a while now, because the subject of otherness is an interest of mine and this book is an excellent display of said subject in literature. It is not handled in a violent or careless way, but with a lot of humanity. Besides, the polemic surrounding it makes the book more relevant to our current issues as a society and enriches the discourses and dialogues around it. If you have the opportunity, I promise you it will be worth the read.