Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird (21 page)

Simply because of Mayella's complicity in the death of Tom Robinson and the way her accusation echoes those of the women in involved in the Scottsboro and Till cases, I have always been hard-pressed to muster up the sympathy encouraged by Lee's use of Scout as the filter through which we see Mayella. There are multiple white feminine voices in the novel, but all of them are clearly marked as middle-class voices, the norm against which Scout has to define herself. Mayella occupies no such space, and it is in fact easy to skip over any focused analysis of her character given the overdetermined role she plays in the novel.

Through the lens of reading whiteness as a social construction, though, I began to ask, how is it that Mayella arrives on that stand and why is it that she tells this particular story to the judge and jurors? What made her want to touch Tom Robinson despite the racism that must have shaped her childhood? Are there any moments when we get to her authentic voice, given the degree to which so many people are invested in her telling this one particular story? How and why is it that she appears in the novel briefly and is sketched so slightly, but has such a staggering impact on the lives of the characters in the novel? What becomes apparent on re-reading is the degree to which Mayella's identity as a poor, white working-class woman actually makes her marginal to the story Lee has to tell.

3. “I'll tell you a story and maybe you'll believe me”: Recovering the Voice and Body of the White, Working-class, Southern Woman

In
Two or Three Things I Know for Sure
, South Carolina native Dorothy Allison limns in searing detail what it was to grow up poor, white, and a girl in the South during the 1950s and 1960s, the significance of storytelling and personal mythmaking to her survival of extraordinary physical and sexual abuse at the hands of her stepfather, and the long journey to healing she faced as she confronted the refusal of family members to accept her truth as a survivor of sexual abuse and as a woman finally ready to claim her identity as a lesbian. What makes Allison's writing germane in this context is her certainty that finding her voice and proclaiming her desire publicly are essential to her survival. In the opening pages of the memoir, Allison states,

I'm a storyteller. I'll work to make you believe me. Throw in some real stuff, change a few details, add the certainty of outrage. I know the use of fiction in a world of hard truth, the way fiction can be a harder truth. The story of what happened, or what did not happen but should have—that story can become a curtain drawn shut, a piece of insulation, a disguise, a razor, a tool that changes every time it is used and sometimes becomes something other than we intended. . . . The story becomes the thing needed. (3)

Allison names the ability to tell stories about one's own life, not just as artistic self-expression, but as functional, a technique of survival, particularly in the case of white, working-class Southern women, who often find that the truths and stories they would tell about themselves are effaced or disbelieved by multiple actors and spaces in their worlds—by other women in their families who are themselves mired in cycles of abuse or poverty, by men inside and outside their families who may perpetrate the abuse, by outsiders such as the middle class, the legal system, or social service systems—who would name them “the lower orders, the great unwashed, the working class, the poor, the proletariat, trash, lowlife and scum”(1). Allison is acutely aware of the degree to which who she would be is overwhelmed by how other people represent poor white women. Allison frames the ability to transmute the real details of one's life as an effort to escape the very narrow visions of white working-class women available in American popular and literary culture.

One area of particular danger and continued threat of effacement is the idea that white, Southern working-class woman are neither capable of being the subject of desire nor of being the object of rape. As young women, Allison and her female relatives were “never virgins, even when [they] were,” because they are always seen as sexually available to men, particularly by the boys who grow up to be middle-class men (36). Their sexual worthlessness in the eyes of these boys means that acts of rape are never claimed as such, given that there was putatively nothing sexually alluring about such girls, and that rape in these accounts is figured as the fault of the young woman who is sexually alluring or beautiful.

In the midst of grinding poverty and childrearing, these same girls grow up to be “measured, manlike, bearers of babies, burdens, and contempt.” In popular and visual culture, these white working-class women are figured as laboring (as in childbearing and physical labor) bodies, in “photos taken at mining disasters, floods, fires, . . . all wide-hipped and predestined. Wide face meant stupid. Wide hands marked workhorses with dull hair and tired eyes” (32–33). The inability to be named as the object of rape and the inability to be seen as a body capable of sexual desire is part of the freight that Allison has to unload as she explores her identity and family history. She is ultimately able to name herself as object of rape and as capable of sexual desire only through her making community with other women and through her ability to tell her own story. In telling such a story in her many first-person writings and in
Bastard Out of Carolina
(1992), made into a film in 1996, Allison gave voice to women who by and large had been silenced by willful ignorance and virulent stereotypes in popular culture.

Allison's history of what it was like to be a white, working-class Southern girl or a woman is contiguous with the moment of composition of Lee's novel. Lee's drawing of Mayella would have been shaped, in other words, by a milieu in which the notion of Mayella as capable of producing or inspiring desire, beyond the putative desire of a black men to enact racialized violence expressed in the act of rape, would have been almost inconceivable both to the people in the courtroom and then contemporary readers.

Examining Mayella less from the perspective of those men of the court, who read Mayella's defensiveness on the stand as a mark of her ignorance, and more as the reaction of women like those of Dorothy Allison's family, opens up the possibility that there is a knowingness to Mayella's defensiveness on the stand; her hostility toward the court is not so much evidence of her identity as “white trash” as it is an indication of her clear understanding that white men, regardless of their class, do not have her interests at heart, and her recognition that the professional, middle-class identity of men like Atticus Finch will always find it necessary to figure her as less than, incapable of self-restraint. Her feeling that Atticus Finch is ridiculing her when he calls her “Ma'am” and “Miss” is not as far from the truth as the men on the jury or in that courtroom or even the reader may think. Structurally, the legal system of which Atticus is a part is devoted to disenfranchising and indeed holding up to ridicule the class of which Mayella is a part, as the putatively humorous story about the day the Cunnighams and Coninghams had their day in court (the case was thrown out) illustrates.

As a modern reader, I have always found myself extraordinarily conflicted as I read through the scene of Mayella's testimony. On the one hand, most contemporary readers will hopefully be familiar with the involvement of white women in the trials of the Scottsboro boys and the death of Emmett Till, and the long history of assaults on and imagined affronts to white women as the premise for lynching. The novel's publication in 1960, so close in time to the lynching of Till and echoing the facts of the Scottsboro case, would have made it difficult to escape reading in the context of the history of lynching. Mayella's accusation, given what she had to have known about lynch law and the codes of race and sex in the Deep South, is virtually unpardonable, and (unfortunately) typical.

On the other hand, I read the novel on the other side of a decades
-
long struggle to help women claim a voice in their families, communities, and legal systems serving those communities as they confront sexual violence; all too often women have been re-victimized by the presumption that accusations of rape and incest are almost always false. Then, too, I am also reading on the other side of the culture wars waged over so-called false memory syndrome and other attacks on the character of women, theorists, and legal scholars involved in changing the culture of disbelief surrounding women's discussions of sexual abuse and rape. Ellen Bass and Laura Davis, authors of
The Courage to Heal
, a popular self-help book for survivors of sexual abuse, call this resurgence of a culture of disbelief a backlash, and some feminist critics situate this attack as a larger backlash against feminism itself.
1
So when a modern reader considers Mayella's testimony and that which is reported about her, that reader becomes acutely conscious that it is men—her father, Atticus, the judge, and the all-male jurors—who are engaged in battle over the meaning of her story, and by extension over her representation. The effect of the gendering of the law as male is that Mayella is never able to give voice to her own truth. She instead engages in constructing what Allison calls “fiction harder than truth,” creating a story that becomes “the thing needed” (needed for whom?) (Allison 3). The danger of such a strategy for white, working-class Southern women, as Allison outlines it, is that the story “sometimes becomes something other than we intended.”

Mayella's truth is that she has indeed been the object of rape and that despite the impediments to doing so, she has managed to become a subject who desires. The story that she tells on the stand—rape at the hand of Tom Robinson—is true only insomuch as it captures the outrage that her father's rape of her should have occasioned in the spectators. In real terms, however, the uncovering of such a story in any other context than the trial of Tom Robinson would merely have confirmed for the town of Maycomb and the reader the stigmatype of the Ewell family as “white trash.” The public spectacle of telling
this
story of rape by a black man, though, is that Mayella's story is transformed into one that ultimately silences her. She is announced as a subject who desires, but does not get to make that announcement for herself.

Bracketing Mayella's big lie for a moment, one of the most notable things about Mayella is the degree to which her voice is co-opted and then silenced in the novel. We never quite get that authentic voice. The truth, presumably Tom's account of what she said to him, is this: “She says she never kissed a grown man before and she might as well kiss a nigger. She says what her papa do to her don't count. She says, ‘Kiss me back nigger'” (
TKAM
221). She touches Tom, grabbing him about the waist and kissing him on the cheek despite his protestations.

When acting of her own volition, Mayella violates racial taboos by touching the body of a black man in an intimate way. Her advances toward Tom are also violations of gendered norms for working-class women, in that she is figured as an aggressor as opposed to being the passive recipient of sexual aggression. The other content of that statement is that she names herself as having been sexually abused by her father, and that she is unwilling to count the depredations of her father as a part of what counts as sexual intimacy.

What makes this moment virtually unreadable is the status of what it is she is attempting to do with Tom, for starters. This scene can be read as a sexual assault on Tom, one that is ultimately fatal to him given the cultural context. Another way to read the scene is as a clumsy attempt at seduction, one that she ultimately denies simply because her father witnesses it. If we were to read the scene as clumsy seduction with unforeseen, lethal repercussions, Mayella's actions can be seen as her attempt to gain some sense of sexual agency, to name herself as capable of desire, in contrast to the coercion that she has apparently experienced on a regular basis in her home. Bob Ewell's insistence that Mayella was raped is not, then, just his attempt to exercise the prerogatives of white, middle-class male privilege; in propagating the story of his daughter's rape, Bob Ewell also co-opts her attempt at claiming sexual agency and expressing desire, albeit a transgressive and coercive expression of such.

He silences that voice, and it only enters the courtroom through the mouth of Tom, the person most injured by her voicing of that desire, and in Atticus' summation, in which he notes that “she is a victim of cruel poverty and ignorance, but I cannot pity her: she is white” (
TKAM
231); he takes her to task for allowing her desires to overrun her knowledge of racial codes governing cross-racial intimacy: “She knew full well the enormity of her offense, but because her desires were stronger than the code she was breaking, she persisted in breaking it” (
TKAM
231). Atticus seems to be arguing that she was overruled by her desire, and that in doing so, she broke one of the cardinal rules of his notion of white identity, that one must never overtly exercise power to one's advantage when dealing with people of color; it is this that is unforgivable. The inability to govern one's desires is a key element of the stigmatype of poor whites, and so it is on this basis, in addition to her complicity in the false accusation of rape that her father makes, that Atticus and probably then contemporary readers hold Mayella accountable in the first place.

Then, too, there is the issue of what happened before and after the encounter with Tom Robinson, namely, the relationship with her father. Although Atticus, the spectators in the courtroom, and probably the readers as well read the series of “no answer” statements (there are five of them on a single page) as Mayella's inability to continue lying or fabricating details of the Tom Robinson's so-called rape of her, these moments of silence can also be read as those parts of her story—desire for Tom, rape by her father—that are not remotely audible in Maycomb in 1935, because they violate the boundaries of white identity so thoroughly. Her sexual desire and Mayella as a subject of rape are both unspeakable, and she maintains her silence on these issues, perhaps in the interest of self-preservation, given that when the trial is over, she will return to the bounded space of the cabin where she lives with her father and siblings.