Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird (33 page)

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, 5 February 2008. Web. 15 October 2009.

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40.8 (2008): 548–50.

Lisa Detweiler Miller

We live immersed in narrative, recounting and reassessing the meaning of our past actions, anticipating the outcome of our future projects, situating ourselves at the intersection of several stories not yet completed.

—Peter Brooks,
Reading for the Plot
, 1992

To Kill a Mockingbird
is most often remembered for Atticus Finch's humbling observation that “you never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view . . . until you climb in his skin and walk around in it” (
TKAM
33). To walk around in the skin of the members of Maycomb, Alabama, would mean participating in the community as a disabled individual. As David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder have noted in
Narrative Prosthesis
, “Disability issues proliferate in the novel: Jem's ‘deformed' arm provides pretext for the story; Atticus is blind in one eye; Tom Robinson's ‘useless' right arm proves his innocence during the rape trial and is the reason for his death; Mrs. DuBose taunts neighbors from a wheelchair perch on her front porch” (173). Boo Radley, in his construction as a “feebleminded” individual, to replicate the eugenic language of the day, can certainly be added to the list of the disabled members of Maycomb, as can the Ewells and the lower planter class whose illiteracy marks their limited cognitive ability.

As Mitchell and Snyder have argued, disability has emerged in literature as a mode of characterization as well as a “metaphorical device” to stand in for a larger critique of a social condition (47). Their “narrative prosthesis,” then, points to the role of disability as “a crutch upon which literary narratives lean for their representational power, disruptive potentiality, and analytical insight” (49). There is no doubt that Harper Lee places disability on center stage of the novel. In the opening sentence, Scout mentions Jem's deformed arm, pairing it with an acknowledgement of her act of remembering: “When enough years had gone by to enable us to look back on them, we sometimes discussed the events leading to his accident” (
TKAM
3). Scout continues to explain that it really all began with Andrew Jackson and proceeds to stumble through the family lineage. At first glance, Scout's narrative voice can be read simply as a display of Southern identity and as an introduction to a narrator, who although older, still embodies much of her younger excitable self. However, considering the centrality of disability in the novel, it is striking and deliberate that a line would be drawn between one site of disability, Jem's arm, and a much larger “enabling” task.

In traditional readings, Atticus Finch as the moral beacon of the novel becomes the enabler of Maycomb. His defense of Tom Robinson, a black man accused of raping Mayella Ewell, a member of a poor and uneducated family, forces the town to reflect on the depths of its prejudice. As this plotline develops, a parallel story affects Scout and Jem, who are forced to confront their own prejudice, specifically their misconceptions of Arthur Radley, the town recluse who they construct as a monster in their imaginations and nickname “Boo.” These two plotlines intersect after Atticus confronts Maycomb's racist assumptions and makes a case for Tom's innocence by drawing attention to Tom's disability. Angered by Atticus's cleverness, and unwilling to break from a racist tradition, Mayella's father, Bob Ewell, attacks Jem and Scout in retaliation. Surprisingly, it is Boo Radley who steps outside the comfort zone of his home to save Jem and Scout, revealing himself to be quite the opposite of the monster the children had imagined.

Despite Boo's brave act, it is Atticus's actions that in most interpretations of the text are seen as more significant for ushering Maycomb into a new phase of self-awareness. In this regard, Atticus becomes the crutch of the novel, the representative of this enabling process, though “it is just a baby-step” (
TKAM
246). My purpose in this essay is to suggest that enabling a community like Maycomb means moving beyond a simple recognition of how cultural values are formed to embrace a lived and performed collective effort that addresses these formations of difference, particularly in terms of disability and race. This means relying less on Atticus as the ethical figure to do Maycomb's “unpleasant jobs” (
TKAM
245) and instead expanding the scope of readers' attention to include precisely those figures who are pushed to the peripheries of the community and designated as misfits. For this reason, I have chosen to focus on Boo Radley and Tom Robinson (representatives of medical and minority disabilities) as figures that we can “lean on,” not for their metaphorical significance as disabled bodies, but as figures who move the narrative of social progress forward in their subtle subversion of cultural norms and by the way they communicate by
performing
outside the prescribed stereotypes of Maycomb.

This reading, with its focus on the performances in the narrative, centers on the text as an embodied network of communication and requires that the narrative as a genre be destabilized. It demands that the novel be read not as a series of multiple events collapsed into one single linear cause and effect with a clear beginning and end, but as a form that “emerges from the lived realities of bodily conduct” (Peterson and Langellier 174). This reading also requires that the narrative be positioned as a location “for engaging the pleasures and power of discourse for challenging and confirming possible experiences and identities” (Peterson and Langellier 174). This shift toward performance takes note of the way Scout's narration situates the readers within a web of competing socio-ideological discourses, both able-bodied and disabled.

From Story to Narrative: Scout's
Verbal Performance

As narrator, Scout is not simply retelling a story, but rather molding and sculpting her own artistic and creative use of language. Her opening line reads, “When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow” (
TKAM
3). While Jem's injury is a part of the story, or the list of events as they occurred, the narrative involves Scout's choices, her conscious decision to forefront this disability in the text, to remind readers of how young she and Jem were and to inform them that she is moving back and forth from past to present in her sharing of this experience. Her admission that it was years before they were “enabled to look back” on these events further highlights this shift from story to narrative, as she simultaneously and implicitly directs readers to a time when they were first enabled to look forward. Each time Scout moves between the past and present in her language she carries with her the values of that time. Mikhail Bakhtin takes note of this dual nature of language, referring to it as a “heteroglot” in the way that it represents “the co-existence of socio-ideological contradictions between the present and past” (“Discourse in the Novel” 291). He explains that both are always present “first and foremost, in the creative consciousness of people who write novels” (292) and asserts that it is not that one replaces the other but that they both exist simultaneously as one is privileged and one is silenced. In Scout's introduction to the text, when she draws our attention to looking back, it is that implicit nod to looking forward that is silenced.

Scout's silencing and privileging of language discourses is a means of inhabiting her language or imbuing it with meaning. Bakhtin refers to this as “taste,” or the way words have the mark of a “profession, a genre, a tendency . . . a generation, an age group” (“Discourse in the Novel” 293). In the opening of the novel, Scout reveals her particular Southern “taste” of history in her recounting of her family genealogy. Additionally, she also identifies herself as part of the Depression generation when she mentions that it was a “time of vague optimism for some of the people: Maycomb County had recently been told that it has nothing to fear but fear itself” (
TKAM
6). As Scout discusses her family history and the Depression, it is evident that there is a shift in tone. She moves from her refreshing matter-of-fact manner, explaining that “all we had was Simon Finch,” and spirals into a long mechanical explanation of who Simon Finch was, while making use of language that significantly breaks from her previous casual approach. Scout explains, “In England, Simon was irritated by the persecution of those who called themselves Methodists at the hands of their more liberal brethren, and as Simon called himself a Methodist, he worked his way across the Atlantic to Philadelphia, thence to Jamaica, thence to Mobile, and up the Saint Stephens” (
TKAM
4). Her use of politically charged language such as “persecution,” the apparent distrust at the core of the phrase “those who called themselves Methodist,” as well as the repetition of words like “hence,” clearly identify this genealogy as an inherited story. The sentiments being expressed and the nearly epic quality of its delivery are not an accurate reflection of Scout's present. Similarly, rather than explaining the economic hardships of the Depression that affected the Deep South more so than other parts of the country, Scout relies on the words of President Roosevelt's 1932 Inaugural Address to acknowledge the anxiety that plagued towns like Maycomb.

Both instances reveal the way Scout has embodied the language of others and reproduced that language in her narrative. Her narrative is double-voiced in its repeating of other's words, further pointing to the heteroglot of languages that operate and perform in this text. In these moments, Scout's use of language very much reflects a view of the generative process of language shared by Bakhtin and V. N. Voloshinov, whose
Marxism and the Philosophy of Language
explains that “social intercourse is generated (stemming from the basis); in it verbal communication and interaction are generated; and in the latter, forms of speech performances are generated; finally, this generative process is reflected in the change of language forms” (96). As this process of language highlights, Scout draws our attention to the inherently social nature of language rooted in verbal communication and interaction, as well as the reproduction of these performances that surface immediately in the opening of the text.

Therefore, when Scout invites readers into the polyphony of voices that construct the ideologies of Maycomb, we are drawn not into a linear story, but into a narrative in which the languages behave, or perform; a narrative in which the embodied languages and communicative practices are reproduced and constantly informed by the othered, silenced voices. In this regard, Scout as narrator can be thought of as a director who sets the stage and provides readers access to a much larger community performance that might allow them to remember the past and to recognize the present in a more accurate manner.

Behavioral Language: The Physical Performance of Narrative

Bakhtin emphasizes, in a rather able-ist assumption, that “the human being in the novel is first, foremost and always a speaking human being” (“Discourse in the Novel” 332), that all language transmission and evaluation on a primary level depends on the body. Similar to the way Scout absorbs different language discourses and reproduces them in her narrative voice, so too are these languages absorbed by the body and performed quite literally by Jem, Scout, and Charles Baker Harris (aka Dill), a young visitor who resides with his aunt in Maycomb for the summers. The children's performances circulate around their construction of Boo Radley and are informed by what other members of Maycomb have to say not only about Boo, but the entire Radley family. While Atticus remains particularly quiet about the Radleys, Calpurnia, the Finchs's cook, refers to Boo's father as the “meanest man ever God blew breath into” (
TKAM
13), and Jem, Scout, and Dill's curiosity about Boo's nature culminates in Ms. Stephanie Crawford's explanation that Boo once drove a pair of scissors into his father's leg. These independent stories as they are verbally communicated to Jem, Scout, and Dill act as different languages informed by different ideologies. Atticus's silence about Boo conveys his strong belief as a lawyer in respecting another's privacy. In their assessment of Calpurnia, who Jem and Scout perceive as a kind of link between the black and white communities of Maycomb, the children find harsh unsolicited comment about Mr. Radley to be out of character, further validating their curiosity. The comments of Miss Stephanie, an older woman of the town known for her gossipy nature, clearly stem from her desire to shock her audience as she proceeds to exaggerate and frighten Jem, Scout, and Dill with the more violent disturbing imagery of Boo's identity. What Jem, Scout, and Dill are left with are three very opposing languages to negotiate—one rooted in a sense of fairness, another rooted in personal perception, and a third rooted in personal interest.

Jem, Scout, and Dill decide to work through the tensions of Boo Radley's identity by searching for their own story to add to the collection of information
borrowed from other sources in Maycomb. In a moment of mutual curiosity about Boo, Jem and Dill strike a bet. If Jem touches the Radley house, Dill will reward him with his copy of
The Gray Ghost
, a popular children's adventure story series of the day. Jem confidently replies, “Touch the house, that's all?” (
TKAM
15). In this discussion, Jem and Dill agree to exchange a narrative for what Jem believes to be a rather simple task. The presence of
The Gray Ghost
narrative within the larger narrative is particularly significant in three ways. On the most practical level, it draws attention to the way in which Jem, Scout, and Dill understand the materiality of narrative, in the way it is embodied through the act of reading. On another level, it makes a connection between narrative and the performance of touching the Radley home. Lastly, in the way it inserts another language layer to those already at work in Maycomb, it reproduces the fundamental tension between languages that is at the root of Bakhtin's generative process.
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