Harper Lee. 1989 [1960]. To Kill a Mockingbird. London: Arrow Books.

Normally, I stick to reading and summarizing contemporary literature. Harper Lee’s 1960 novel To Kill a Mockingbird does not fit into this category. So, the inclusion in this series came about accidentally. I was in a Bangkok bookshop where I first stumbled over Sally Rooney’s Normal People (2018). Since her new novel, Intermezzo (2024), was already on my pile of to-read books, I thought that I might as well first read the novel that made her name. Looking a bit more at the lower levels of the shelf holding English-language novels, I saw To Kill a Mockingbird. Being an old-school German, I had only recently heard about this novel and its controversial status as reading material for seventh and eighth graders in US schools. This made me curious enough to buy the book to get an idea what the controversy was all about (racism, the “N”-word). As the cover picture above shows, the publishers certainly thought that the book was still in demand, and that a bookshop in Bangkok put it on their limited shelf space with English-language novels also demonstrated that the staff assumed that there was still demand. A quick check at the Web shop of Kinokuniya showed that it had 15 versions of the novel and a few more books about Harper Lee on sale. In short, it does seem that the book is still considered relevant today.

The book was first published in 1960, received a Pulitzer Prize a year later, and was made into a film in 1962. Gregory Peck won an Oscar as best male actor for his portrayal of Atticus Finch. The novel is set in a small town in the U.S.’ deep South, Alabama. In the novel, this town is called Maycomb, the seat of Maycomb County. Harper Lee grew up in such a setting—Monroeville, Alabama. Her story reflects impressions from the time she was about ten years old, though she is five to eight years old in her text. It is the time of the Great Depression of the early 1930s. Even more importantly, it is the high time of racial segregation based on the “Jim Crow Laws” that were rescinded only in the mid-1960s. As a result, the white population lived in a world of their own, and the book’s story almost exclusively plays in this white social context. Maycomb’s black population lives in separate quarters. Thus, there are two socio-racial spheres that only very occasionally overlap.

The social center of the novel is the Finch family. After his wife died, Atticus Finch, a lawyer and member of the Alabama Congress, is a single parent for his son Jem (who moves from childhood to adolescence during the story) and Jean Louise, who is mostly called “Scout” throughout the text. She does not conform to the traditional female gender role, dresses in overalls and get into fist fights with the boys. Her father does not mind this deviation from the small-town normative ideas of how a daughter should think and act. Atticus is assisted in bringing up his kids by Calpurnia, the family’s black cook, who is in her late fifties. Scout is the narrator of the story, which occasionally makes her sound wise beyond her age (already before she started school, Calpurnia and her father taught her how to read and write, which draws the ire of her first-grade teacher). Atticus is presented as a person with unshakable wisdom, but also a certain portion of naiveté. Scout and her brother are very close. They mostly do activities together. During summers, their relationship is expanded by Dill, a boy who spends this time with a relative in Maycomb. Later in the book, however, due to Jem moving into adolescence, their spheres of life increasingly grow apart.

But the novel is not simply about a carefree childhood in a racially segregated small Alabama town in the 1930s. It is much more serious. On page 82, Scout relates that a boy at school “had announced in the school yard the day before that Scout Finch’s daddy defended niggers.” She asks her father, “Do you defend niggers, Atticus?” His answer is, “Of course I do. Don’t say nigger, Scout. That’s common” (p. 83). On page 116, Atticus tells his daughter:

“Scout,” said Atticus, “when summer comes you’ll have to keep your head about far worse things … it’s not fair for you and Jem, I know that, but sometimes we have to make the best of things, and the way we conduct ourselves when the chips are down – well, all I can say is, when you and Jem are grown, maybe you’ll back on this with some compassion and some feeling that I didn’t let you down. This case, Tom Robinson’s case, is something that goes to the essence of a man’s conscience – Scout, I couldn’t go to church and worship God if I didn’t try to help that man.”

“Atticus, you must be wrong …”

“How’s that?”

“Well, most folks seem to think they’re right and you’re wrong …”

“They’re certainly entitled to think that, and they’re entitled to full respect for their opinions,” said Atticus, “but before I can live with other folks, I’ve got to live with myself. The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience.”

What happened was that Atticus was assigned by the judge to defend a crippled black father of three who was accused by a white man to have beaten up and raped his daughter. The court procedure forms a key part of the book. After having observed the proceeding while sitting in the section for the black audience, Jem is convinced that his father has won the case. Obviously, the father had beaten up his daughter. No medical test had been done confirming that rape had indeed taken place. And the daughter must have been beaten up by a left-hander (her father is left-handed), while the accused man’s left arm was crippled and unusable. The daughter insisted that she had fought tooth and nail against her assailant. Yet, the defendant had only one arm that he could have used in committing his crime. Consequently, Jem thought that the all-wight jury had to set the accused free. Yet, after a considerable time of deliberation, the jury returned a guilty verdict. This would have meant death on the electric chair since rape was a capital offense in Alabama at that time.

Atticus tries to convince Tom Robinson that an appeal would have promising prospects, given the obvious distortions in the original trial. Tom is brought to a penal camp, tries to flee, and is shot dead with 17 bullets in his body.

After I finished reading the novel, I did what I usually do when I wanted to know what has been written about a particular subject: I opened Google Scholar. It listed 29,300 entries. Now, my main interest was reading this novel, not writing a paper of literary analysis. Nevertheless, given that the text has become controversial, I deliberately selected a handful of references and downloaded them to see what their authors had to say on this novel.

The first text is by Dr. Girija Suri of Amity University, Gurgaon, India: “The Experience of ‘Othering’ and Possibility of Social Justice: An Analysis of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, Veda’s. Journal of English Language and Literature, 11 (3):78-82, 2024. She emphasized “Othering” and marginalization. In her view, the novel is “a text of enduring value that exemplifies the futility of legal change if not accompanied by fundamental shift in prejudiced mindsets that sow the seeds of institutionalized ‘othering’ and oppression of those different or opposite to oneselves” (p. 79). She identifies Atticus’ court performance as a “catalytic moment in the story that propels the people in Maycomb to introspect and reflect their innate prejudices against the society’s ‘others’” (p. 81). This is an astonishing remark since the court proceedings were like a carnival in which the great majority of the white audience wanted Tom to be found guilty. Even his death did not lead to “introspection.” On page 265 of the novel, we read, “Maycomb was interested by the news of Tom’s death for perhaps two days…” I spare readers the following few lines of the quote. Suffice to say that the whole event reinforced the views that the white population held about Blacks rather than make them examine those views.

The second text is by the Chinese academics Gao Fen and Zhang Shanming: “The Ethical Stance in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird.” Forum for World Literature Studies 16 (4):601-612, 2024. The authors do not doubt that the purpose of Harper Lee’s writing of this novel was “to expose and criticize racial discrimination in the southern society” (p. 605). However, her novel “reveals the limitations of her class perspective” (p. 603). This is shown in how she treats crucial issues race relations at that time. First, she “vulgarizes the underclass whites” (601, 603). The father and daughter who bring the rape accusations against Tom Robinson belong to that class. Harper Lee does not problematize the harsh economic realities that this class suffered through the Economic Depression. In Lee’s novel, the motivational context of Mayella Ewell’s accusation is a conflict with her violent father who lives on welfare assistance. The authors of this analysis seriously write, “Mayella Ewell serves as a representative of the underclass whites. She succumbs to her animal instincts by violating ethical taboos to seduce a black man” (p. 603). Second, Harper mutes “the collective voice of black individuals” (p. 602). This is said to become apparent when, before the court case starts in the courthouse, the white population of Maycomb turns the event into a carnival-like event, while “the Negroes sat quietly in the sun …” (p. 604, authors’ italics). This is taken as denying the Blacks the possibility of collective agency. “…black people were silent, and their suffering was reduced to evidence of the high morality of whites in mainstream society” (ibid.). Third, Harper Lee created a “moral myth.” Atticus Finch becomes “the spokesman of the white ideology of the upper-class in the American South…” (ibid.). The context of all this was a crisis of “Americanness” brought about to the double phenomena of the Civil Rights Movement and the Cold War. In this sense, “The publication of To Kill a Mockingbird did not happen in a vacuum” (p. 608). The authors repeatedly claim that the case of the “Scottsboro Boys” was an important event underlying Harper’s motivation in writing her novel. From this perspective, they conclude, “Harper Lee turns the real history into a story that foregrounds class ideology. She attributes the virtues of human goodness to the mainstream white characters, casting them as ‘saviors’ in resolving racial conflicts…” (p. 610f., author’ italics).

Autumn A. Allen. 2020. “‘Whose Side Are You on?’ Moral Consequences of Young Readers’ Responses to To Kill a Mockingbird.” Research on Diversity in Youth Literature 2 (2), article 5. 20 pages. This article has two parts. The first is an experiment in inducing the responses of young readers when reading the book, about the plot, analyzing its characters, etc. The second makes general points about how the novel is constructed. It is the second point that should concern us here. Fundamentally, one needs to keep in mind that the narrator is a young white child who deeply cares about her father. When Scout worries about the situation, she worries about her father, not about Tom Robinson, whom she objectifies in her descriptions of his appearance when she sees him in court. “Most readers can infer Tom’s hopelessness, but it is merely a plot point; the focus of their empathy is the White savior, who tires himself defending the downtrodden” (p. 13). This also applies to Scout’s relationship with Calpurnia. She “is no more than a one-dimensional prop in Scout’s growth. Scout’s realization that Calpurnia has a community and a life outside of caring for Scout’s family does not come with an understanding that Calpurnia’s life and culture are equal to her own” (p. 14). From this perspective, Atticus’ Finch supposed heroism is rather problematic. He is seen as embodying “a different kind of racism” since he does not defend Tom Robinson based on an understanding of the equality of Whites and Blacks, but merely because he cannot stand that a low-class White takes “advantage of a Negro’s ignorance” (p. 16). “Tom is the test of Atticus’s commitment to justice, and Atticus’s commitment to justice is based on the kind of person he strives to be, not based on his belief in the equality of Black people” (ibid.). “Every time Atticus explains why he is defending Tom Robinson, he talks about himself, not about Tom. … The book is about how White people constructed their own identities relative to Blackness in the early twentieth century” (ibid.). Thus, one question would be why contemporary school children needed to learn through literature how White middle-class people in a small racially segregated town in Alabama constructed their identities vis-à-vis the Black population. In sum, should teachers still use Harper Lee’s book in the curriculum? Allen writes, “Ultimately, given the barriers the text poses to living through and developing empathy for Black characters (and, by extension, Black people), teachers could better harness the power of literature by assigning books that center the dilemmas, choices, feelings and concerns of Black people, either in place of or alongside books such as To Kill a Mockingbird” (p. 19). From this perspective, on the one hand, Harper Lee’s novel has constructive defects that are so serious as to make the use of this novel in teaching middle-school students inadvisable, not the least because teachers would be hard-pressed to provide sufficient historical and literary context. On the other hand, it is precisely the weaknesses of the novel that should encourage analytical teaching in classroom settings. In fact, schoolchildren can learn from good examples just as well as from problematic examples, perhaps even more from the latter. In any case, the weaknesses of To Kill a Mockingbird cannot mean that the novel should be purged from school libraries.

Isaac Saney. 2003. “The case against To Kill a Mockingbird.” Race and Class 45 (1):99-110. He provides a Canadian perspective. He takes on one of the central sentences in the novel, namely, “Mockingbirds don’t do one thing but make music for us to enjoy. They don’t eat up people’s gardens, don’t nest in corncribs, they don’t do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That’s why it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird” (quoted on p. 101f.). The author continuous, “Is not the mockingbird a metaphor for the entire African American population? … Harper Lee’s motives notwithstanding, they are not a paean to the intrinsic equality and humanity of all peoples, nor do they acknowledge that Blacks are endowed with the same worth and rights as whites” (p. 102). Like Allen, Saney takes issue with the passive character of the Blacks in the novel: “Perhaps the most egregious characteristic of the novel is the denial of the historical agency of Black people. They are robbed of their role as subjects of history, reduced to mere objects who are passive hapless victims; mere spectators and bystanders in the struggle against their own oppression and exploitation. There’s the rub!” (ibid.). The novel, the author says, simply ignores the movements of black people that was going on at the time the novel is set. “To Kill a Mockingbird gives no inkling of this mass protest and instead creates the indelible impression that the entire Black community existed in a complete state of paralysis” (p. 103). Instead, other literary sources should be used in teaching schoolchildren, such as Invisible Man (Ralph Ellison), Native Son (Richard Wright), Their Eyes Were Watching God (Zora Neal Hursten), The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Beloved and The Bluest Eye (Toni Morrison), Whylah Falls (George Elliot Clarke), and Consecrated Ground (George Boyd).