Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird (23 page)

Wray, Matt and Annalee Newitz. “What Is White Trash?: Stereotypes and Economic Conditions of Poor Whites in the United States.” In
Whiteness: A Critical Reader
. Ed. Mike Hill. New York: New York U P, 1997. (168–184).

Michael J. Meyer

In the first paragraph of his March 1933 inaugural address to Congress, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the thirty-second president of the United States, was frank and bold in his assertion that the only thing Americans had to fear was fear itself.
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Assessing the common difficulties faced by citizens in the deep throes of the Great Depression, FDR sought to reassure his fellow countrymen and -women that failure was not imminent and that the key to a return to success—both financial and emotional—was to rely on interdependence: being a good neighbor who respects one's self and because she does so, respects the rights of others; a neighbor who respects his obligation and respects the sanctity of his agreement in and with a world of neighbors.

Some twenty-seven years later, Harper Lee published
To Kill a Mockingbird
, a book now celebrating its fifty-year anniversary. Whether ironically or intentionally, Lee set the story in 1933, the same year that Roosevelt delivered the speech—a time that despite Roosevelt's protestations to the contrary, was rife with various fears, not the least of which were the economic conditions that brought the failure of banks and businesses and that also foreshadowed the foreclosures of homes and loss of property. At this time, individuals also worried about having enough to eat, about finding a job, and about supporting a family. It was a distressing era throughout the United States but even more so for minorities, who found these concerns compounded by racial prejudice—by unfounded fears that black people were somehow individuals who, as their skin color suggested, were allied with the forces of evil. Overseas this dark force was already evident in the racialization of Germany under the rule of Adolf Hitler, whose rise to power prefigured the fall of the Weimar Republic and the rise of the Third Reich. These Nazi goals of genetic and racial purification, of course, fostered hatred and discrimination especially against Jews, blacks, Catholics, and homosexuals while promoting a “pure” Aryan race.
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Given these parallels to real-life events that existed within the novel's time frame, it should be no surprise that Lee decided to incorporate the very real racial tensions that had flourished in her native South since the arrival of African slaves in the 1600s, not to mention the conflict that existed even earlier with Native Americans. It was a tension that she realized was escalating in her present-day world and had culminated in the modern civil rights movement in the late 1950s and early '60s. Set in Maycomb, Alabama—a town that parallels Lee's own hometown of Monroeville, Alabama—Lee's novel clearly addresses many types of fear that flourished on the American scene both in the distant past and the more recent present. Unfortunately, the novel still reflects the concerns of current American citizens who continue to be terrified not only by such things as the supernatural but also by individuals who are labeled as “Others,” those whose backgrounds and personalities are different from their own and thus seem threatening and need to be avoided or condemned.

Although several critics have assessed Lee's use of a child narrator, her employment of childlike humor and naïveté, and the accuracy of her reproduction of preadolescent language, to my knowledge no study has been made of Lee's emphasis on fearful childhood experiences and her assertion that for the most part, such fears are unfounded. While not developing this idea fully, critic Gerard Early goes so far as to label the character Boo Radley as “the strange Doppelganger of the national conscience, a madman trapped within our haunted house, the ghost of the middle class southern liberal [as well as] the rabid lower-class racist, Bob Ewell” (94). Indeed, the haunted nature of Southern culture and the fear motif that typifies Southern Gothic fiction becomes more evident, an emphasis Lee expands on as she presents scary images as a dominant concern in the novel's plotline. Claudia Durst Johnson's assessments of the novel's close connection to the Gothic tradition are helpful in this regard as she cites the theories of such scholars as Eve Sedgwick, William Patrick Day, Irving Malin, and David Punter, among others, as a reminder to readers of what the most frequent emphases in Gothic fiction include: “murder, ghosts, witches, werewolves, vampire monsters, imprisonment, ruins, nostalgia for the past, unnatural parents, haunted or decayed quarters, specters, foreboding, deformity, madness, magic, dark and forbidding secrets, sexual violence, rape, incest, insanity, mental breakdown and cultural decay” (Johnson 40). Citing Punter specifically, Johnson's chapter on the Gothic also stresses the genre's portrayal of the “terrifying, its prominent use of the supernatural, its repetition of ‘horror' and ‘horrible'; the total darkness and masked faces of villains, its insistence on the potential finality of imprisonment and its note of half gasping, half gloating voyeurism as commonplace traits in such fictional output” (Punter qtd. in Johnson 40). Clearly, when readers examine
Mockingbird
for the above emphases, they will discover that most of these characteristics are manifest within its pages.

While Johnson's study notes the general parallels to the genre of Gothic fiction that exist in
To Kill a
Mockingbird
, it does not delve into sufficient detail to help readers see the various connections that Lee makes between how children approach fear and how adults deal with it. Although the motif seems most evident at the beginning of the novel and in its reappearance at the Halloween celebration and pageant at Jem and Scout's school that occurs as the novel draws to a close, it is my contention that the text intentionally foregrounds a number of scary things throughout the novel and that Lee frequently makes reference to such frightful elements as ghosts, masks, spirits, and darkness as indicators of things that trouble both children and adult characters in the novel. I further believe that most of the fears that occupy a central position in
To Kill a Mockingbird
are those shown as having their origins in youthful fantasies,
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which then unfortunately extend into maturity where they are revealed as irrational and unsubstantiated. Most ironic, however, is that many of the “things that go bump in the night” in the novel are connected to the unknown, the different, or unusual—items that may prove especially unnerving and upsetting to the naïve and largely susceptible characters in the novel, but that then develop, due to ignorance, into some sort of excuse that allows mature individuals to justify their tendency to be afraid of what may be entirely normal and safe. Indeed, a close reading of the novel will substantiate the claim that the events in
To Kill a Mockingbird
reveal that for most humans there initially seems to be far more to fear than fear itself, but will also support the assertion that Roosevelt's contention was ultimately correct.

As the title of this essay indicates, my study of Lee's novel draws attention to how Lee's foregrounding of the imagery of childhood fears helps to determine and even control the novel's organizational pattern. Perhaps the first indication of Lee's interest in fear begins with the introduction of Charles Baker “Dill” Harris early in the novel (
TKAM
8), when he is almost immediately associated with the cinematic version of
Dracula
(a 1931 film featuring Béla Lugosi), a chilling movie to have been viewed by a young child but one that endears him to ten-year-old Jem Finch, who is the brother of Lee's narrator, the precocious six-year-old Jean Louise “Scout” Finch. Dill's choice of fiction (he also enjoys the pulp novel,
The Grey Ghost
by Seckatary Hawkins [
TKAM
15, 322]) and cinema indicates his assumed courage in the face of dangerous people and dangerous locations. Therefore, when the “malevolent phantom” of Maycomb, Boo Radley, is introduced shortly after Dill's entrance (
TKAM
9), Jem and Scout seem motivated to discover his real personality primarily because Dill is around to support their investigation. The Radley story, which has been created and exaggerated by local legend and gossip, suggests Boo is a ghostlike individual who has been forcefully isolated from society after he committed an act of violence many years previously. After being sequestered or perhaps even incarcerated for almost fifteen years in his own home, this outsider is considered mentally deficient and dangerous after he stabs his father in the leg with scissors. As a result of this unprovoked attack, Boo has become a local “spook” (ironically, a slang term for blacks).
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He is depicted as a strange and unusual character whose very mysterious personality creates an uncomfortable sense of anxiety and discomfort among the townsfolk of Maycomb many of whom interpret his presence as threatening. Their “othering” of Boo also accounts for Lee's development of his negative reputation by associating him with exaggerated terrifying events:

People said he went out at night when the moon was down, and peeped in windows. When people's azaleas froze in a cold snap, it was because he breathed on them. Any stealthy small crimes committed in Maycomb were his work. Once the town was terrorized by a series of morbid nocturnal events: people's chickens and household pets were found mutilated, and people still looked at the Radley Place, unwilling to discard their initial suspicions. . . . A negro would not pass the Radley Place at night: he would cut across to the sidewalk opposite and whistle as he walked. (
TKAM
9)

As Johnson notes, this description may just as well have been given to the actions of a coven of witches (42).

Indeed, Dill's active imagination invents an even more fantastic Boo for the trio's play/fantasy reenactment of Boo's life, speculating with Jem on Boo's monster-like appearance (
TKAM
14) and warning his new-made friends that the Radley house smells of death (
TKAM
40).
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The first supernatural element, besides Dill's literary and film interests, is clearly evident in Arthur Radley's previously discussed nickname of Boo. As Johnson states in
Threatening Boundaries
, “Chief among [the predictable character types] is Scout and Jem's neighbor, Arthur Radley, whom they seem to type from their readings of horror literature, stereotyping him by renaming him Boo” (50). For the town of Maycomb, Radley has become a type of ghost, his reputation connected to a spectral scene that has been enhanced by hearsay and exaggerated beyond reality. The actions quoted here suggest a fantastical individual who exists primarily in the imagination of Maycomb residents. In short, Boo becomes someone whose unstable personality must be feared; he looms in the background as an individual who can never quite be trusted, primarily because his motives and mental stability are in question. As Laura Fine states, “Townspeople, especially the children, think Boo is weird, ghoulish, dangerous, insane, and perhaps even dead. Whatever he is, in truth or rumored to be, the one certainty is that he is an outsider” (73). He is indeed a character who Jem and Scout and Dill are in awe of and who they quizzically try to understand. But since they fear his differences, specifically his deranged mental state and his penchant for violence, they are wary of him as someone who may indeed threaten their very safety and security.

Perhaps because the children are intrigued by adventure stories such as
Tom Swift
,
Tarzan
, and
The Rover Boys
(
TKAM
8–9), they are quick to add to the Radley mystique: they even believe that the pecans from the Radley Place would kill you (
TKAM
10) and that Boo was so dangerous “he was chained to the bed most of the time” (
TKAM
12). In fact, the description Jem gives of Radley is right out of a horror novel: “Boo was about six-and-a-half feet tall judging from his tracks; he dined on raw squirrels and any cats he could catch. . . . There was a long jagged scar that ran across his face, what teeth he had were yellow and rotten; his eyes popped, and he drooled most of the time” (
TKAM
14). Even though the feeling of fear is addictive and even though Boo may gouge their eyes out or even kill them, the children are fascinated by the danger he represents. For them, such fear is exhilarating. Dill even risks losing treasured possessions like
The Grey Ghost
, offering his copy to Jem and daring him to just touch the Radley house, thus possibly helping the trio of friends to find out more about Boo's true nature (
TKAM
150). Even the description of the Radley property fits the architecture of fear, “harboring what appears to be forbidden secrets and embodying the degeneracy of the past. . . . The house and grounds are, in the minds of the children, a haunted place of palpable evil and danger” (Johnson 43).

As the mood progresses, still other characters are associated with the fear motif. For example, Burris Ewell's “cooties” scare Miss Caroline, and Mrs. Henry Lafayette Dubose is avoided as the “meanest old women who ever lived” (
TKAM
39). Like Boo, each is misunderstood because outward masks or previous judgmental attitudes about their reputation seem to take precedence over what may be on the inside of these individuals. Another illustration of a character wearing a mask of deception would be Calpurnia's use of different language patterns since she adopts “white” language patterns when working for the Finches and uses “black” ones when interacting with her own race at church and elsewhere. But, as Atticus says in an oft-quoted section of the novel, “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view . . . until you climb into his skin and walk around in it” (
TKAM
33). Lee thus advocates all attempts by humanity to see behind the mask. Unfortunately, this method of discovering truth is ignored for most of the novel as characters prefer to foreground superstitions and exaggerated rumors rather than look beyond them.