Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird (34 page)

Just as Scout's narrative voice is a negotiation of the many languages that characterize Maycomb, Jem, Scout, and Dill together find themselves drawing from each of the stories around them in a desire to be part of their own adventure narrative, very much like the characters in
The Gray Ghost
. Their understanding of the materiality of narrative urges them in their creative process to produce their own material text through physical performance. The playacting draws upon the stories as they have been relayed by the members of Maycomb, or “woven from bits and scraps of gossip and neighborhood legend” (
TKAM
44), and quickly grows from just a simple game into a more complete immersion in the imaginative process when “every scratch of feet on gravel was Boo Radley seeking revenge, every passing Negro laughing in the night was Boo Radley” (
TKAM
62). Each utterance from someone in Maycomb is an embodied language, and Jem, Scout, and Dill take that embodied language and act it out not only in their initial dare to touch the Radley home but also in a more elaborate staging. In the culmination of the children's fascination with Boo Radley, Dill announces emphatically one day, “I know what we are going to play . . . Boo Radley” (
TKAM
43). Quite literally their playing becomes a performance piece. Scout explains that

Jem parceled out the roles: I was Mrs. Radley, and all I had to do was come out and sweep the porch. Dill was old Mr. Radley; he walked up and down the sidewalk and coughed when Jem spoke to him. Jem, naturally was Boo: he went under the front steps and shrieked and howled from time to time. As the summer progressed, so did our game. We polished and perfected it, added dialogue and plot until we had manufactured a small play upon which we rang changes every day. (
TKAM
43)

In this moment, the staging by Scout as narrator becomes a true physical staging as Jem, Scout, and Dill elevate Boo Radley from a character to the title of a dramatic game, thus drawing attention to the complex interplay of his identity as they understand it. Their performance of their characters is firstly mimetic in the way they reproduce the actions these individuals perform in their daily routines. This performance undergoes further transformation as they add their own violent episodes to those relayed by Miss Crawford's graphic tales, imagining Boo biting the forefinger of Mr. Radley, for example. At one point, Scout refers to their game as “playing Chapter XXV, Book II of One Man's Family” (
TKAM
44). What Jem, Scout, and Dill manage to create is a kind of hybrid form that mixes “two speech manners, two styles, two ‘languages,'” as Bakhtin explains (“Discourse in the Novel” 304). Informed by stories from multiple individuals, the children create a narrative, which they even title by using the correct genre conventions of their day. Simultaneously, the dialogues they imagine in their narrative,
One Man's Family
, become reconceived and reproduced as the lines of a script that is then performed.

Reading
To Kill a Mockingbird
as a performance text allows a fuller interpretation of the novel, one that considers narrative in all of its rich complexities. In its construction of language as something that behaves,
To Kill a Mockingbird
forces readers to consider the way the verbal performance of discourse informs a physical performance. More importantly, as Bakhtin suggests, it provides a means for characters to shock the author as they seem to develop outside of the author's control—in the way they become characterized by an “inner unfinalizability, their capacity to outgrow, as it were, from within and render
untrue
any externalizing and finalizing definition of them” (
Dostoevsky's Poetics
59). In other words, as long as a character is living, he or she will continue to participate and negotiate the language discourse, continue to add his or her voice to the many.

This unfinalizability, however, poses an important question regarding the characters of Boo Radley and Tom Robinson. If, according to Bakhtin, being alive means to always participate in the tension between discourses and evolve as a character, what becomes of Boo, who after his brave act of saving Jem and Scout, is walked back to his house, returned to the institution of his home, and essentially silenced? At the end of the narrative, Boo's status is returned to that of a disabled individual, a figure incapable of fully participating in the everyday life of Maycomb. Similarly, what becomes of Tom's voice when he is killed in an attempt to escape prison? Tom's escape is dismissed by many members of Maycomb as “typical of a nigger's mentality to have no plan, no thought, for the future” (
TKAM
247). Like Boo, Tom's racial identity, which functions in a town like Maycomb as a disability, also means his voice will be silenced, while another voice is privileged. As previously discussed, the voice of Atticus is the one that emerges most prominently out of the text as the spokesperson for Maycomb's enabling, as it is privileged over that of two disabled figures. If enabling a community means carving out a space for all members to contribute their voices to the whole, it is our responsibility to listen to the text a bit more closely—to see the way these figures grow, speak, and perform despite their silencing.

Tom Robinson: Breaching the Contract

“Self expression and political change” are at the root of community performance, and unlike tightly scripted performances, the end result is flexible, with room for individuals to alter the energy of the space and insert themselves into the performance. Community performances then emerge as acts of experimentation that unfold layer by layer, revealing the weight of the words and actions of the performance that leave impressions in the walls of the dominant discourse (Kuppers 4, 5). One of the largest performance scenes in
To Kill a Mockingbird
is the trial of Tom Robinson, where Tom's testimony invites members of the community to surrender their bodies to a non-scripted performance.

As Jem, Dill, and Scout prepare to go to the courthouse to watch the trial, Miss Maudie describes the masses of people moving to the courthouse as “a Roman carnival” (
TKAM
181), immediately establishing the event as a spectacle and highlighting the politics of seeing. Very much like a stage, where audiences are searching for meaning in the props and gestures of the actors, the courtroom draws spectators into a similar meaning-making process of searching for the truth by reading each detail of a witness's testimony. Miss Maudie's observation of the masses asks readers to consider when a spectator becomes a spectator; and it would be false to believe that this role is only assumed as the curtain is raised or, in this case, as Judge Taylor invites the opening comments from Atticus and Mr. Gilmer, the prosecuting attorney. Rather, the performance begins immediately in the ritualistic movement to the courthouse, where the bodies physically moving to that space grow together in order to form a community collective. This collective, however, is marked by division.

Jem, Dill, and Scout observe the procession from Miss Maudie's porch, each group keeping to their own—the prominent figures ride by in their wagons, the Mennonites who lived in the woods drive by in their bonnets and long dresses, and the African Americans of the community congregate in the corner of the town square. As each group moves into the courthouse, crammed together with little standing room, the space comes to life. As the stage of this performance, the courthouse represents democracy symbolized by the Greek revival style complete with characteristic columns that “clashed with a big nineteenth-century clock tower housing a rusty unreliable instrument, a view indicating people determined to preserve every physical scrap of the past” (
TKAM
185). Just as the rusty clock interrupts the architectural cohesiveness of the democratic space, the community that Scout observes to be one of exclusion interrupts the definition of a community. As the members of Maycomb enter into that space, the disjointedness of the structure serves to represent their own disconnect.

The courthouse also informs the audience's expectation of what will take place in the courtroom, and as the trial reveals, the terms “justice” and “equality” are highly subjective. To the majority of the white audience members, equality would mean maintaining white supremacy, holding tightly onto their secured position within society that essentially denies African Americans their humanity. To African American audience members, these terms would mean finally being recognized as citizens. Similar to the way that someone may attend a performance with a certain expectation about its ending, each member of the audience comes with the anticipation, or at the very least the hope, of seeing their understanding of equality fulfilled. Trusting in their expectations, they watch and listen passively as one unit. Susan Bennett, who traces audience reception in theater history, argues that this kind of passive participation is part of a social contract audience members make, agreeing to give themselves up to the performance. This contract is usually marked with the purchase of a ticket, and although there is no such exchange before entering the courthouse, the members of Maycomb nonetheless enter into the same agreement.

Scout observes this passivity in the beginning of the trial, noting that “all the spectators were as relaxed as Judge Taylor” (
TKAM
193). Despite their passive nature, as Bennett argues, audience members have the right to breach the contract by leaving the performance (165). As the expectations of the trial seem to resist this outcome, some members of the community begin to break this contract, not by leaving, but rather by throwing themselves into the performance, by openly responding to the proceedings of the court with displays of their disapproval that blur the line between stage and audience. Clearly, it is the performance of Bob Ewell that first invites this breach. As he falsely explains that he saw Tom forcing himself upon Mayella, he stands up, and while pointing his finger at Tom Robinson, exclaims, “I seen that black nigger yonder ruttin' on my Mayella” (
TKAM
196). After this dramatic performance, Judge Taylor is forced to violently hammer his gavel as “happy picknickers” were turned “into a sulky, tense, murmuring crowd” (
TKAM
197). Outraged at both the display and the response, Judge Taylor explains, “People generally see what they look for, and hear what they listen for” and firmly reminds the spectators, “I can assure you of one thing; you will receive what you see and hear in silence or you will leave this courtroom” (
TKAM
198). To some in the crowd, their murmuring is an affirmation that their assumptions about race were correct; to others it is an expression of disgust and suspicion at Bob Ewell's testimony. Of most importance, though, is Judge Taylor's statement that reinforces this space as contractual, where the audience comes equipped with assumptions and expectations.

Following the testimonies of Bob and Mayella Ewell, Tom is called to the stand, and Scout observes that “he stood oddly off balance, but it was not from the way he was standing. His left arm was twelve inches shorter than his right, and hung dead at his side. It ended in a small shriveled hand, and from as far away as the balcony I could see that it was no use to him” (
TKAM
211). Scout's observation reveals that while Bob or Mayella's testimony elicits a politics of seeing, Tom's physical disability invites a politics of staring. As Rosemarie Garland Thomson explains, staring is “a kind of potent social choreography that marks bodies by enacting a dynamic visual exchange between a spectator and a spectacle” (30). Tom's performance under this gaze begins even prior to sitting down at the witness stand, as he struggles to place his left hand on the Bible to swear the oath.

Tom Robinson reached around, ran his fingers under his left arm and lifted it. He guided his arm to the Bible and his rubber-like left hand sought contact with the black binding. As he raised his right hand, the useless one slipped off the Bible and hit the clerk's table. He was trying again when Judge Taylor growled, “That'll do Tom.” (
TKAM
216)

Rhetoricians often forget that control of an audience means control not only over one's voice but also over one's body (Brueggemann 19). It may seem that Tom has very little control over his body, as seen by the slipping of his arm, and while it is true that his control is very different from that of Bob Ewell, who stands up and points, Tom is just as successful at sparking an audience reaction. This audience reaction seems to stem partly from Judge Taylor's own discomfort with watching Tom struggle with his injured arm, indicated by his growl. Staring at a disabled figure is often a way for an audience to confirm their own able-bodiedness, but in this moment, as Tom struggles with his arm, the aesthetic space that is usually maintained between able-bodied and disabled is closed. By closing this gap, Tom's performance invites audiences to watch and opens a space for critique that disturbs the “cultural prescription against staring at once exposing the impairments and oppressive narratives” (Thomson 32). Tom's refocusing of the stare on his physical disability reveals that his oppressive narrative is tied not only to disability but also to his race, what is truly responsible for the indictment against him. Anne Stubblefield, who has done extensive work on disability politics, explains the intersection of race and disability:

Turning to the past, chattel slavery was a conspicuous producer of disability. Loss of limbs, vision, and hearing were common results of corporal punishment and physical hardship. Poor maternal health and healthcare led to physical and cognitive impairments in children, as did accidents and disease. Beginning in the nineteenth century, the project of supposedly measuring intelligences, upon which the classification of cognitive disability continues to rest, developed as a means to justify the exclusion of nonwhite and not-quite-white people from the social contract. (108)