Revisiting ‘To Kill a Mocking Bird’

HARPER Lee’s ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ is a world renowned classic novel. It is arguably the bestselling novel of the 20th Century.

For a long time, 55 years to be precise, it was Lee’s only book.

Word was that she was not expectant or prepared for the fame that came from her first book. From 1964 until recently before the publication of her second book ‘Go Set a Watchman’ in 2015, she refused to speak to journalists.

The book won a Pulitzer Prize and is famed for its social commentary on skewed race relations in America during the 1930s, where it is set.

In light of the recent alt-right, neoNazi, white supremacist protests and subsequent clashes in Charlottesville, Virginia last week, the subject of race has once again come to the fore in the USA and one could argue that very little has changed in real terms over the last century. The indiscriminate killing of black people of all ages by the police, the rise of neo-Nazism and white supremacist movements and the institutional targeting of Muslims by President Donald Trump as well as his sentiments on Mexicans illustrate that racism is rife in the so called free world.

Central to the plot of ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ is the trial of Tom Robinson, a black man who has been accused of raping a young white woman, Mayella Ewell.

He is defended in court by the protagonist Scout’s father, Atticus Finch. Despite Finch proving Robinson to be innocent and that Mayella, in fact, made sexual advances to Robinson the court finds Robinson guilty and he is convicted.

During the trial, Finch and his family are also victims of hate crime from the Maycomb, Alabama community in which they live. They are labelled ‘nigger-lovers’ and have to put up with a mob ready to lynch Robinson.

What one finds interesting is that despite the 57 years that ‘To Kill a Mockingbid’ has been in existence, the millions of copies it has sold and its revered place among race literature the attitudes of the society from whence it came have not been altered one bit.

True, the United States of America is not the same as it was in the 1930s, they even rose to the point of having a black president but one could argue that was the proverbial lipstick on a pig when considering how racist the society remains today.

In the book Lee writes, “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view... Until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it.”

This book written by a Southern white woman was considered an attempt to consider things from a different point of view and paint for that community the need for transformation in race relations.

Today however, young black men are still being falsely accused of rape in America while their guilty white counterparts are given reduced sentences for supposedly having a potentially bright future ahead of them.

With regards to race, one the wonders what it will take for there to be significant change in society, particularly American which although diversifying in racial composition is still heavily oppressive against non-whites.

An interesting analysis that one came across is that Atticus Finch himself was himself no saint despite the fact that he defends Tom Robinson.

The argument goes that in his defence of Robinson he paints Mayella to be a woman of highly questionable morals thus trying to make the court decide to be sexist or racist.

One thought it to be an interesting argument and one which applies in this century as it did in the last where sexual freedom is condoned for men and abhorred for women.

For years to come one is certain ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ will remain a critical piece of social commentary especially as the present continues to mirror the past.