Introducing To Kill a Mockingbird
To Kill a Mockingbird has often been described as America’s most beloved novel. Since its 1960 publication, Harper Lee’s tale of small-town, Depression-era Southern life has transcended the status of fiction and achieved enshrinement as a kind of “secular scripture.” The novel—Scout Finch’s first-person, childhood account of the events surrounding her father’s legal defense of Tom Robinson, a Black man wrongly accused of raping a white woman—has sold tens of millions of copies, and remains a staple of English curricula in the vast majority of American schools.
For several decades following its publication, Mockingbird maintained a fairly uncontested reputation as an ethical lodestar. Taken in the most general, uncomplicated terms, Lee’s novel offers a simple message. “You never really understand a person,” says Atticus, Scout’s father and the moral center of the novel, “until you consider things from his point of view, until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.” Many readers, as the author Diane Johnson describes, saw Mockingbird as “an eloquent plea for racial harmony and civil rights.” In a 2010 encomium, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie declared that “Lee writes with a fiercely progressive ink, in which there is nothing inevitable about racism and its very foundation is open to question.” The novel, she wrote, questions “the larger system…in which being black was synonymous with guilt.”
In recent years, however, Mockingbird has been subject to new rounds of analysis and evaluation, occasioned by its fiftieth anniversary in 2010, the publication of its controversial follow-up Go Set a Watchman in 2015, and Harper Lee’s death the next year—all of this in a contemporary intellectual atmosphere that encourages us to reassess “classic” novels, particularly those focusing on race. Indeed, although Mockingbird engages a range of themes—class, gender roles, childhood, parenthood—critical interest has largely narrowed to a discussion of its racial politics, particularly those held by the character of Atticus.
It did not take long for Atticus Finch to attain a saint-like status in the popular imagination (Gregory Peck’s iconic performance in the novel’s 1962 film adaptation undoubtedly contributed to this ascendence). Monroeville, Alabama, the real-life counterpart of Mockingbird’s Maycomb, commemorated the fictional lawyer with a bronze and stone memorial; President Obama quoted Atticus in his farewell address; and participants in a 2016 poll voted him “the most inspirational character in literature.” In opinion pieces with titles like “Can books change the world?”, editorialists confidently exhorted their ethically-vexed readers to “just ask yourself: What would Atticus Finch do?”
What would Atticus Finch do? Legal scholars, writing in the 1990s, were the first to produce some disconcerting answers to this question. In Alabama Law Review, Monroe Freedman challenged the ethical efficacy of Atticus’s reaction, in Mockingbird, to the lynch mob that comes after Tom Robinson:
Walter Cunningham, a leader of the mob, is “basically a good man,” [Atticus] teaches [his children], “he just has his blind spots along with the rest of us.” It just happens that Cunningham&#8217;s blind spot (along with the rest of us?) is a homicidal hatred of black people…Finch condescendingly explains to [Jem]: “[S]on, you&#8217;ll understand folks a little better when you&#8217;re older. A mob’s always made up of people, no matter what. Mr. Cunningham was part of a mob last night, but he was still a man.”
What are we to make of this fatuousness? That a lynch mob is not a lynch mob because it’s “made up of people”? That because Cunningham is “still a man,” he has no moral responsibility for attempted murder?
A few years later, Steven Lubet buttressed Monroe’s argument by pointing out, in Michigan Law Review, that Atticus “only defends Tom Robinson because he is forced to do so by the court, that he willingly participates in the segregation of his society, and that he insists on the human decency of even overt bigots.”
In more recent appraisals—particularly those written after the publication of Watchman, which presents an older and thoroughly prejudiced Atticus—the character is increasingly identified as an accommodationist and a gradualist. Malcolm Gladwell, writing in 2009, argued that Atticus is “not Thurgood Marshall looking for racial salvation through the law…[but rather] through hearts and minds…[this] approach is about accommodation, not reform.” “A book that we thought instructed us about the world,” he concluded, “tells us, instead, about the limitations of Jim Crow liberalism.” In the critic Adam Gopnik’s 2015 assessment, Atticus’s defense of Tom Robinson is part of “a paternal effort to help a minority that, in [his] view, cannot yet entirely help itself.” Some commentators have attempted a middle-ground judgment of the character, one that condemns his views on race but still espouses his broader outlook on humanity. The writer Casey Cep, for instance, claims that “millions of Americans credit Harper Lee with teaching them how to understand difference. It is a mark of progress in our culture that many who read Lee’s fiction now heed the advice of Atticus and imagine walking around Maycomb in the skin of Calpurnia or Mayella, leaving Atticus himself looking considerably less heroic.” The lawyer, Cep contends, teaches his children “a kind of radical empathy that he himself cannot sustain but that they might grow up to embody.”
Sixty years on from Mockingbird’s publication, however, as racially-motivated killings continue to mar American society, the Atticus Finch brand of “radical empathy” can strike contemporary audiences as a fantastical and ineffective response to systemic racism. Yet many white readers actually credit Mockingbird with introducing them to systemic racism as a concept. “[It] was the first book I came across that showed me that guilt or innocence is immaterial if the system is stacked against you,” wrote the author Tanya Landman. “As a white teenager growing up in a white town it was my first encounter with the issue.” But a number of critics now question whether Lee’s novel is, for American children, the best introduction to such issues. The novelist Alice Randall, for instance, has asked whether a book “written by a privileged daughter of the Old South should still take up space in curriculum that could be well used to expose students to literary voices on race and injustice that have emerged in the past 50 years.” And some Black readers point out that Mockingbird, so often lauded as an “eye-opening” text, is in fact only “eye-opening” to its white audience. “I don’t need to read about a young white girl understanding the perniciousness of racism to actually understand the perniciousness of racism,” commented the cultural critic Roxane Gay. “I have ample firsthand experience.”
Some of this debate may rest on whether Lee herself possessed the bigoted, regressive ideas of her characters, or whether her decision to draw them with such traits was merely documentary. But the author, notoriously reticent and reclusive, provided little beyond Mockingbird and Watchman to clarify her personal views on the “American problem,” a dearth that has forced scholars to extrapolate her racial politics from the texts themselves. Conclusions vary. In 2015, for instance, Diane Johnson wrote in the New York Review of Books that “both Watchman and Mockingbird are not pleading a case for civil rights as we normally understand them, but instead for a return to the kinder, gentler times that privileged people like the Finches enjoyed before the civil rights movement and the interference of the Supreme Court.” On the other hand, Gopnik’s New Yorker essay offered an entirely different verdict that same year: the assessment of Atticus is the same, but Lee’s rhetorical thrust, he claims, is distinctly separate from the opinions of her character.
Either way, To Kill a Mockingbird’s status as the righteous, edifying handbook of America’s children has been substantially complicated. But the novel doesn’t appear to be going anywhere, at least not anytime soon. In fact, it has taken on new significance, not as a moral guide, but as a historical document—the book that, more than almost any other, informed the ideas of generations of Americans on right, wrong, and race.
-Tom Malmgren