Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird (3 page)

James B. Kelley

Online forums for talking about creative literature—which include the commercial Internet sites eNotes.com, SparkNotes.com, Amazon.com, and Oprah.com—are often ignored by contemporary literary critics, if not dismissed outright as unreliable or even undesirable resources for persons wishing to explore meaning in a given literary work. These popular and ever-growing online forums, however, are heavily trafficked by contemporary readers and thus present a unique opportunity to explore how a popular novel is being read and discussed today. By December 3, 2009, for example, the “Question & Answer” section at eNotes.com on Lee's novel
To Kill a Mockingbird
contained 2,124 postings, with each posting consisting of one question and one or more answers to that question. Nearly all of the posted questions come from middle school and high school students, and most of the posted answers come from teachers at the middle school, high school, and first-year college level.
To Kill a Mockingbird
is the most widely discussed work at eNotes.com. The Question & Answer section on Lee's novel not only attests to the novel's popularity in school curricula today but also presents an opportunity to explore how teachers tend to explain
To Kill a Mockingbird
to students.

Perhaps the main obstacle in analyzing these online forums, aside from a possible perceived triviality of the postings, is the literary critic's lack of familiarity with a method for making sense of such massive amounts of data. In the case of the novel
To Kill a Mockingbird
, there are thousands of postings at eNotes.com that contain answers written by hundreds of different teachers, and each answer often measures only one to three paragraphs in length. This essay employs a widely used method in qualitative studies in the social sciences, a method called grounded theory, to explore what teachers say and do not say about Lee's novel. This study uses a simplified grounded theory approach to review a sample of the postings at eNotes.com; uncover recurring themes in the teachers' answers to students' questions; and draw conclusions about how teachers working in middle school, high school, and first-year college classrooms tend to talk to students about Lee's novel.
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In the final sections, this essay explores the extent to which recent trends in critical literacy are present (or are not present) in the teachers' answers to student questions about
To Kill a Mockingbird
.

Defining Grounded Theory

Grounded theory is an approach that views generalizations as necessarily built from the ground up, from a wide range of specific incidents in concrete, real-world data. Researchers using grounded theory begin with an initial, open-ended question. In this study, the initial question is how middle school, high school, and first-year university teachers talk to students about Lee's novel. To explore the question of what teachers say and do not say about Lee's novel, the researcher using grounded theory needs to collect and evaluate a large number of statements from teachers to students about the novel and, through both close engagement with each statement and constant comparison among different statements, begin to identify the larger and broader categories of statements (or “concepts” and “emerging themes,” as they are called later in this essay) that slowly begin to manifest. Whether performed manually or with the aid of computer software, grounded theory is both rigorous and creative. Grounded theory is rigorous in that the researcher must read and code the entire sample of data (usually more than once, as recommended by Robert C. Bogdan and Sari K. Biklen) and must constantly reconsider the significance of individual pieces of data as the researcher moves back and forth through the sample; this process of ongoing reconsideration is part of what is called the constant comparative method. Grounded theory is creative in that the researcher needs to ask innovative questions and develop unique approaches to the material with the goal of “creat[ing] new order out of the old” (Strauss and Corbin 27). Grounded theory is also necessarily subjective. In order to avoid forcing the data to fit some preconceived notion, for example, the researcher should consider all data and ideas that are encountered in the study and reject nothing outright. The researcher should also reflect on her or his own biases and remain willing to reconsider the manner in which she or he has been organizing and interpreting the data.

Grounded theory is not as alien to the literary critic as it may first seem. In a sense, grounded theory is literary criticism (or, more precisely, a mix of New Criticism and structuralism) writ large. This approach has its roots in the humanities and, like New Criticism, concerns itself with close, repeated readings of the “data” (the term for the prose passages to be examined here) in order to uncover one or more core ideas, or concepts. Like structuralism, grounded theory then seeks to uncover larger, unifying patterns (or emerging themes) that show how the separate narratives under examination collectively make sense of the problem or situation being discussed.

Sampling, Coding, and Grouping the Data

To read, code, and group well over two thousand items—even if each item averages only one to three paragraphs in length—is a daunting task. Thus, a sample of the most recent postings to the Question & Answer section at eNotes.com on Lee's novel
To Kill a Mockingbird
has been retrieved and carefully examined in this study. The sampling process used here can be characterized as systematic and non-purposeful. The sampling is systematic in that two postings—the top posting and the bottom posting—have been retrieved from every “page” (with each page containing fifty postings) of the first thirty pages in the Question & Answer section, beginning with the most recent posting (dated December 2, 2009) and working backward to the earliest posting in the sample (dated August 30, 2008). The sampling is non-purposeful in that samples have not been selected or rejected on the basis of criteria such as the length of the answer, the relative success of the answer in replying to the initial question, or the rating of the answer by readers of the thread. This method of systematic, non-purposeful sampling has been used to preserve a high level of generalizability; in other words, any general statements growing out of this study of the sampled answers should hold true of all of the Question & Answer postings on Lee's novel at eNotes.com from the last year or so.

Each of the retrieved postings consists of one question, usually asked by a student, and one or more answers, usually posted by a teacher or a number of teachers. The purpose of this study is not to explore how well the teachers have answered the students' questions but rather to explore what the teachers have had to say to students when asked about the novel. Thus, the questions have been removed from the working sample. (It bears noting, however, that the questions themselves, taken as a whole, read very much like homework assignments given out by teachers to their students. A number of questions end in tell-tale phrases such as “Justify your answer” or in statements that sound even more specific to a particular classroom setting, such as “Make reference to the use [or avoidance] of the poetic elements covered in the unit.” If many of the questions
themselves have indeed been written by teachers for students, the Question & Answer section at eNotes.com may be seen as a particularly trustworthy source of data for this line of inquiry, as an echo chamber of sorts for teachers' thoughts and statements about Lee's novel.) Also deleted from the working sample are all individual answers that have not been written by self-identified teachers at the level of the middle school, high school, and first-year college classroom. The initial retrieved sample of ninety-three answers (in sixty postings) has thus been reduced to a working sample of seventy answers. The seventy answers making up the working sample have then been coded, compared, and grouped by emerging themes.

Even when using a simplified method of coding rather than a highly complex one, researchers find coding to be a time-consuming process.
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Each item of data (in this case, each answer from a teacher) is read line by line in order to identify what are often called “incidents”; in this study, incidents may be seen as any number of notable key words, phrases, and small ideas. In even the shortest of the posted answers examined in this study, multiple incidents can often be identified. One short answer reads,

Scout's observations at the end of the novel about protecting Boo Radley from suffering shows how much she has grown up. Scout makes the connection between Boo and the mockingbirds Atticus had forbidden Jem to kill because she has come to understand the value of innocence and goodness and the evil of cruelty. This passage shows that Scout has adopted her father's values. It also serves to emphasize the major themes of the novel.

In the passage, multiple key words and phrases stand out, including “Scout's observation,” “at the end of the novel,” “protecting,” “suffering,” “grown up,” “makes the connection,” “forbidden . . . to kill,” “come to understand,” “innocence,” “goodness,” “evil,” “cruelty,” “adopted . . . father's values,” and “major themes.” From the incidents in this answer and in any number of the other answers in the working sample, more general and abstract terms—sometimes called concepts—can be identified; these concepts need to be specific yet broad enough to contain a grouping of incidents. Thus, the phrase “at the end of the novel” can be grouped, along with a set of related incidents appearing in other answers, under the concept
story structure
, and “protecting” can be grouped—again, along with a set of related incidents appearing in other answers—under the concept
sense of duty
. As in this case in this answer, multiple key words and phrases within one answer can sometimes be grouped under the same, single concept. Three of the incidents identified here—“grown up,” “makes the connection,” and “come to understand”—can be grouped under the concept
education
or
development
or
life lessons
, for example, and four of the incidents in this same answer—“innocence,” “goodness,” “evil,” and “cruelty”—can be grouped under the concept
morality
or
values
. Of course, coding is not limited to the words actually used. A second short answer reads,

Like the intellectual southern gentleman that he is, Atticus treats the ladies of his neighborhood with a degree of kindness and respect that is typical of this era: Men and boys were expected to treat all women and girls with near-reverence, standing when women entered a room, offering seats to them when none were available, opening and holding doors as they entered buildings, addressing them with the formal title “ma'am,” and basically showing courtesy and politeness that was above and beyond today's standards. Atticus exemplifies the expected male treatment of women in the south of the 1930s.

This answer contains a string of incidents—from the concrete word “kindness” to the unnamed notion of chivalry—that can be grouped under the previously established concept
morality
or
values
. Even a negative or implied incident can be noted. For example, the slip in terminology from “gentleman” and “ladies” in the opening sentence to “male” and “women” in the final sentence suggests that the idea of
social class
is operating in the answer, even if it remains unstated. Alongside the unstated idea of social class are incidents of a particular place (“southern” and “south”) and a particular time (“this era,” “today,” and “the 1930s”); these three incidents can all be grouped meaningfully under the concept of
setting
or
context
.

The exact phrasing of each concept is unimportant. What is important is that these concepts are grounded in the data itself; they are not imposed from above by the person who interprets the data. A concept that contains multiple incidents across multiple answers is a good candidate for promotion to the status of “emerging theme”; emerging themes are statements of the central topics, concerns, and approaches of the answers as a whole. Through this grounded theory approach to the Question & Answer postings, three emerging themes have been identified:
Moral Character
,
Life Lessons
, and
Text and Context
.

An understanding of these three emerging themes has been refined through a process called “theoretical sampling.” Key words, phrases, and ideas related to each emerging theme (e.g., “good,” “right,” “innocent,” “evil,” “bad,” “wrong,” “guilty,” and names of specific characters in the novel for the emerging theme Moral Character) have been entered into text searches of the entire collection of postings (not the much smaller working sample) as an informal test of the generalizability of the conclusions about the sampled answers to the collection of answers as a whole. This theoretical sampling of the entire collection has also served as a means to explore the possibility of a wider range of ways in which teachers talk about Lee's novel.

Discussing Three Emerging Themes

A simplified grounded theory approach to the Question & Answer postings on
To Kill a Mockingbird
reveals three emerging themes in the ways that teachers talk to students about the novel: Moral Character, Life Lessons, and Text and Context.

Moral Character

When talking to students about fictional characters in Lee's novel, particularly when talking about Atticus Finch and Bob Ewell, the teachers frequently move from character analysis to explicit and implicit statements of morality. Describing the fictional characters in the novel becomes a way of talking about moral character in the world.

One teacher calls Atticus Finch the “conscience” of Maycomb County and of the novel as a whole. In a second answer by the same teacher, also included in the working sample, Atticus is elevated above the other characters in the novel: