Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird (36 page)

Reading as Performance: Reading Deeply

Learning Boo's language requires that, as readers, we understand the way reading overlaps with performance. Peter Kivy's work on this subject, which focuses on the act of silent reading as it intersects with aesthetics, draws attention to the way reading is performed both in our imaginative creation of the text as well as our interpretive work. Scholarship on
To Kill a Mockingbird
has only begun to touch on the role of disability, and with the recent work on the intersection of disability and performance studies, it is time to continue our imaginative and interpretive task.
To Kill a Mockingbird
lends itself to a reading that focuses on the self-representation of disabled figures and places it within the context of the community that has historically denied them access. As readers, we are part of this community, and while we cannot change the unsettling ending that leads Boo back to the institution of his home and Tom Robinson to his death, we are nonetheless part of the audience expected to read and perform. The silencing of Tom and Boo would seem to remove their voices from the polyphony of the novel, but as reading performers we can relocate their agency. The enabling task proposed by Scout in the introduction then becomes an act of reading performance that demands we approach the definition of performance with new flexibility. While novels are so often viewed as a display of linearity, reading a text through a performance lens allows readers to connect our own understanding of performance as a lived experience and to attach it to the characters of the novel. This allows us to see them not merely as the metaphors that Mitchell and Snyder discuss or as purposeful plot propellers, but as complex human beings, with narratives that are part of a much larger whole. What we are confronted with in
To Kill a Mockingbird
is the opportunity to become a translator of the languages that function and push against the dominant discourse. Bakhtin argues that an understanding of the heteroglot of language is present in the minds of those who write novels. I would argue that this is equally present in the minds of those who read. As readers, we become members of the Maycomb community as well as part of the generative process of language that requires recognizing its different forms. For Tom and Boo, these languages surround the performance of their bodies, not only as they speak, but as they move and as they lose control in order to regain control. In that generative process, we can see the political progressions quietly at work beneath and begin to search for the dustings of change.

As one of the townspeople said before the trial, “Atticus Finch's a deep reader, a mighty deep reader” (
TKAM
185).
To Kill a Mockingbird
not only
asks
that we read deeply but also
demands
that we read deeply. In addition to challenging the dominant social discourses, this reading invites a critique of the pedagogical discourses associated with the text. As a text that is first introduced on the grade school level, it is an ethical mistake to simplify the novel's message as just a statement about tolerance without addressing all the voices and bodies that perform within that space or without reassigning Tom and Boo their proper agency. Narratives and performances come with obligations to listen. The whispers, as equally as the shouts, enable us as readers and as cultural critics. Reading a little more deeply means we enable characters to then enable the communities of the text—communities not unlike our own.

Notes

1. It is important to note that this generative process is highlighted again in the closing of the novel when Scout falls asleep while Atticus reads a chapter from
The Gray Ghost.
In an effort to convince her father she is awake, Scout begins to repeat the events of the story he just read. In her exhausted state, however, her own story of meeting Boo becomes part of
The Gray Ghost
, as discussions of Three-Fingered Fred and Stoner's Boy transforms to “An they chased him 'n' never could catch him 'cause they didn't know what he looked like, an' Atticus, when they finally saw him, why he hadn't done any of those things. . . . Atticus, he was real nice”(
TKAM
323). This scene once again highlights the move from verbal interaction, to performance, and change of language form as Scout's words become part of the narrative.

2. When Uncle Jack comes to visit, Atticus confides, “You know, I'd hoped to get through life without a case of this kind, but John Taylor pointed at me and said, ‘You're It'” (
TKAM
100). In this moment, Atticus reveals himself to also be a willing participant in this epistemology.

3. I believe Judge Taylor's growl speaks to his discomfort not only with the aesthetic closeness of Tom's disability but also to his confrontation with his own participation in the “epistemology of ignorance.” It is far more comfortable for a man like Judge Taylor, whose life has revolved around the study of the law, to ignore its cracks. While this interpretation may seem too harsh to some readers, it is impossible to reassign agency to Tom if as readers we continue to construct more white characters, like Atticus, as heroes.

4. I would again argue that, in this moment, Judge Taylor's choice to strike Mr. Deas's comments from the record points to his fear of any confrontation with the truth of the system. Mr. Deas's comments not only breach the social contract of the space but also the Racial Contract. For more on the tension between race and citizenship in American courtrooms, see Ariela J. Gross's
What Blood Won't Tell: A History of Race on Trial in America
(Cambridge: Harvard U P, 2008).

5. I borrow the term and concept of the post-performance from Susan Bennett (174).

6. The medical model of disability locates an individual's inability to participate “normally” in everyday life within the individual as opposed to society and relies on the medical field for diagnosis and treatment. This model, then, sometimes rather arbitrarily, relies on the surveying of the body. For a discussion of disability models, see Tom Shakespeare's
Disability Rights and Wrongs
(New York: Routledge, 2006).

7. Although Boo is represented as the medical model of disability, his story also points to the limitations of this model over the social model that addresses culture's role and culpability in creating impairments.

8. In this moment, we are reminded of Bob Ewell's dramatic finger-pointing gesture to Tom in court.

9. It is significant to note that the manner in which Boo inspects the body of Jem is not unlike the methodical observation of Boo by Scout.

Works Cited

Bakhtin, M. Mikhail. “Discourse in the Novel.” In
The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin
.
Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: U Texas P, 1981. (259–422)

——
—.
Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics
. Trans. and ed. Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis: U Minnesota P, 1984.

Bennett, Susan.
Theatre Audience: A Theory of Production and Reception
. New York: Routledge, 1990.

Brooks, Peter.
Reading for Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative
. Cambridge, MA: Harvard U P, 1992.

Brueggemann, Brenda Jo. “Delivering Disability, Willing Speech.” In
Bodies in Commotion
. Ed. Carrie Sandahl and Philip Auslander. Ann Arbor: U Michigan P, 2005. (17–29)

Gross, Ariela J.
What Blood Won't Tell: A History of Race on Trial in America.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard U P, 2008.

Kivy, Peter.
The Performance of Reading
. Oxford: Blackwell, 2006.

Kuppers, Petra.
Community Performance
. New York: Routledge, 2007.

Lee, Harper.
To Kill a Mockingbird
. 1960. New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2006.

Mills, Charles W.
The Racial Contract
. Ithaca, NY: Cornell U P, 1997.

Mitchell, David T., and Sharon L. Snyder.
Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse
. Ann Arbor: U Michigan P, 2000.

Peterson, Eric E., and Kristin M. Langellier. “The Performance Turn in Narrative Studies.”
Narrative Inquiry
16.1 (2006): 173–180.

Shakespeare, Tom.
Disability Rights and Wrongs
. New York: Routledge, 2006.

Stubblefield, Anne. “Race, Disability, and the Social Contract.”
The Southern Journal of Philosophy
157 (2009): 104–111.

Thomson, Rosemarie Garland. “Dares to Stares, Disabled Women Performance Artists and the Dynamics of Staring.” In
Bodies in Commotion
. Ed. Carrie Sandahl and Philip Auslander. Ann Arbor: U Michigan P, 2005. (30–41)

Voloshinov, V. N.
Marxism and the Philosophy of Language
. 1929. Trans. Ladislav Matejka and I. R. Titunik. Cambridge, MA: Harvard U P, 1986.

Hugh McElaney

“We like to have all our comforts and familiars about us,” Harper Lee remarked in the course of her address to West Point cadets in March of 1965, “and tend to push away that which is different, and worrisome” (Shields 244). The perception of “difference” and the persistent, pervasive anxiety it causes in the community of Maycomb, Alabama, have informed a variety of critical readings of
To Kill a Mockingbird.
Such readings have focused principally on issues of race, class, gender, and even the suggestion of queered identity in the text. Less commonly, scholars have attended to the actual and constructed varieties of disability that attach themselves to each and all of these marginalized identities, even though, as David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder have noted, the book “is
directly about
making the terrain of disability and disabled people less alien” (
Negative Prosthesis
173).
1

Reading
To Kill a Mockingbird
“disconstructively”—that is, by holding the construction of disability within the novel to be centrally informative—is in no way intended to call into question the lasting merit of other interpretations. As a story about race and social justice, in particular, it has continued to inspire both admiration and controversy. Theodore and Grace-Ann Hovet have elegantly argued for an understanding of “the way the novel links racism to gender and class oppression” (68). And, more daringly perhaps, Gary Richards has suggested that the novel's “symbolic representation of closetedness [and] a destabilization of heterosexuality” (151) in the individualized and social character of Maycomb help explain why
To Kill a Mockingbird
has been ranked among the most influential gay-themed novels produced in America.

The disability reading of the story I intend to offer here is not a leeward tack away from these more familiar, mainstream critical excursions, but rather a deliberate effort to moor them with a different kind of anchor. For if, as Mitchell and Snyder have contended, “disability is the master trope of human disqualification” (
Cultural Locations
125), such a reading can provide us with a unified way of examining the myriad presentations of human difference within the story, fragmenting distinctions rooted in notions of biological fitness that Lee seeks to resolve in a fundamentally disconstructive fashion. And this, it seems to me, is arguably what
To Kill a Mockingbird
is about—an exploration of both the stigmatizing power of difference and its transformation into something privileged.

To this end, I will look first at two “different and worrisome” characters—Boo Radley and Tom Robinson—whose disability-coded presences compel the attention of both the general reader and Scout as cultural reader. Then I will look, more extensively, at the disabling way in which the biological determinism of eugenics influences comfortable community assumptions about family and folks in Maycomb. Finally, I will examine how these influences are interrogated in the text in order to invest disability with normalizing power.

“On all sides, madness fascinates man,” Michel Foucault once said (23). In Maycomb, a town assiduously observant of the boundaries, visible and invisible, that separate and define its mixed populations, Boo Radley surely fascinates us—in no small part because he occupies, in counterintuitive fashion, centered space. The decaying Radley house with its “malevolent phantom” does not lie on the dusky fringe of Maycomb, but in its heart, three doors south from the Finch house and adjoining the schoolyard (
TKAM
7). Boo's private confinement has endured for years in the midst of normal daily life all around it; but while inaccessible and
shut
away, he has never truly
gone
away, and it is this paradox that seizes upon the imagination of Scout, Jem, and Dill, who devote so much of their time together in trying to make Boo “come out.” Yet another paradox serves to oppose their interests; for the rest of the town, Boo Radley's constant presence is bound up in a tacit social understanding that he cannot be acknowledged. In some sense, then, the invisible Boo exercises a dual kind of secret authority. Boo's mythic self, true to his nickname, terrifies the children, even as it compels their wakeful attention—yet Boo induces a forgetfulness on the rest of the town for whom he has largely disappeared as a living entity, “stigmatized as non-being” (Foucault 116).

To terrify, to fascinate, to be rendered invisible . . . all these masquerades are well-known among the disabled everywhere, for whom closeted confinement—whether self-imposed or imposed by others—has a complex signifying power akin to, but not derived from, that felt by queer folk. As Tobin Siebers points out,

The closet often holds secrets that either cannot be told or are being kept by those who do not want to know the truth about the closeted person. Some people keep secrets; other people are secrets. Some people hide in the closet, but others are locked in the closet. There is a long history, of course, of locking away people with disabilities in attics, basements, and backrooms. (98)

In fact, the closeted Boo seems to so comfortably fit this profile of disability that we may be tempted not to question the reality of his mental illness; after all, most critical readings of the character don't. But as a good lawyer like Atticus Finch would surely remind his jury, such a conclusion would call on us to assume facts not in evidence.

Disability is, after all—as Lennard Davis reminds us—a phenomenon that is located in the observer (50), and Boo's disability is not so much a verifiable impairment as it is a construction of community narratives about him. The circumstances leading to Boo's home confinement are the product of “neighborhood legend” (
TKAM
10), and Jem “received most of his information [about Boo] from Stephanie Crawford” (
TKAM
11), a notorious gossip, who unreliably claims to have seen his “skull” peering through her window one night. Sudden cold snaps that kill azaleas are believed to be Boo's doing,
2
as is a rash of nocturnal animal killings, later discovered to be the work of another—a fact that does not disturb the town's crafted discourse of his monstrosity, the man-beast Jem translates into “reasonable” profile:

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).

The felt need to codify difference through “the invocation of monstrosity should alert us to the inclination for creating fantastical landscapes where we encounter only our own ignorance and grotesquerie” (Mitchell and Snyder,
Narrative Prosthesis
70–71), but this is a lesson lost on Maycomb's adults and not yet meaningful to the children. So they build on and perpetuate these stories by creating one of their own, “One Man's Family,” a drama in which Jem, Scout, and Dill publicly reenact the lurid details of Stephanie Crawford's foundational tales.

The cumulative effect of these narratives is to create what Erving Goffman has termed a “spoiled identity” for Boo, his phantom status an essential part of the stigma by which he is “reduced . . . from a whole and usual person to a tainted, discounted one” (3). Or to put it in a disconstructive fashion, Boo's persistent invisibility creates a vacuum of anxiety that is readily filled by com
munal texts that collectively shape him into disabled form. But despite their own contribution to these texts, the children are unwilling to settle for the uncritical reading of Boo that more or less satisfies the adults in Maycomb, as they probe the alien space inscribed around Boo through a series of childish pranks.

While their behavior at some level can be seen as thoughtless, even taunting—a furious Atticus demands they stop “tormenting” Boo—Jem, Scout, and Dill also act to tease out Boo's humanity, to reconcile what Goffman calls the “discrepancy between an individual's actual social identity and his virtual one” (41). And it is to this impulse that Boo responds. He does not look to negotiate a socially acceptable status by “coming out” generally to Maycomb's adults; rather, he seeks a connection—selectively and furtively—to its children. Goffman notes the phenomenon of “discreditable” (for which read “disabled”) people exercising information control of their identities, deciding “to display or not display; to tell or not to tell; to let on or not to let on . . . and in each case to whom, how, when, or where” (42). And so Boo, from time to time, leaves tokens for Jem and Scout in the knothole of the tree, suggesting a desire to establish familiarity, if not an almost familial bond.
3
He also ventures out to retrieve Jem's pants and fold them over the fence after the young boy's misadventure in the Radley garden. Unbeknownst to Scout, he later slips a blanket over her shoulders as Maudie's house burns down shortly after a rare winter storm (
TKAM
77). And he emerges one last time to save the children's lives when they are attacked by Bob Ewell.

Each act bears directly upon Boo's socially constructed disability and simultaneously confounds it. He comes out only at night when he is least likely to disrupt the field of community observation—and most likely to elude its stigmatizing gaze. His gifts, on the other hand, extend an offer of symbolic kinship. Instead of requiring the solicitude of others, he assumes the role of surrogate parent, caring for and protecting Jem and Scout when both care and protection are wanting from others.
4
He also displays an unexpected reserve of physical strength in his encounter with Bob Ewell. And he shows a more figurative, but equally important, kind of strength by acting autonomously and independently. Boo
chooses
. He does not depend upon the kindness of strangers or the approval of familiars. Not only does he defy the stereotypes of weakness and victimization associated with disability, but for the Finches—some of whom are embarrassed by their lack of recorded ancestors at the Battle of Hastings—he is, as Laura Fine observes, “a knight in shining armor” (74). Without speaking a word, shorn of alien status at the story's most critical juncture, he attains a moral stature in the novel that is just as articulate in its way as that demonstrated by Atticus himself.

Most critically, Boo Radley compels us to reconsider what is normal and what is aberrant in Maycomb. Disappearing into his home for the last time, Boo may not be behaving in the fashion deemed appropriate historically for disabled people—a social contaminant best hidden from view. His decision may come, rather, from an understanding that the society itself is contaminated and disabling, an insight not lost on the children. Boo doesn't have to stay inside, Jem comes to realize—he
wants
to stay inside (
TKAM
259). And Scout, who walks arm in arm with Boo at the story's end, seems to walk just as comfortably in isolation: “I came to the conclusion that people were just peculiar. I withdrew from them, and never thought about them until I was forced to” (
TKAM
279).

Peculiar people in Maycomb, we come to see, are the products of peculiar institutions and thus particularly susceptible to infection from the town's “usual disease.”

Nathan Radley “bought cotton” for a living, just as the male descendants of Simon Finch tended to do. As sure as the coursing of the Alabama River from Finch's Landing to the sea, the ebb and flow of Maycomb County's fortunes are morally encumbered by their historical tethering to the institution of slavery. Three score and more years after the Emancipation Proclamation, that dark entailment serves as the backdrop against which the tragic drama of Tom Robinson unfolds. But while virulent small-town racism is brought most prominently to trial in
To Kill a Mockingbird
and the book's examination of its tributary injustices have dominated critical discourse over the last fifty years, a consideration of the way race and disability conflate in the novel—or more specifically, the way notions of disability inform racialized thinking—may offer us better access to Lee's broader literary purpose.

Mitchell and Snyder have speculated that “an idea about biologically inferior bodies preceded the belief in a racially degraded body,” explaining “the degree to which racial marginalization depends on concepts of in-built biological inferiority” (
Cultural Locations
106). A generation before General Jackson ran the Creeks up the creek opening the way for Dr. Simon Finch, Dr. Benjamin Rush had argued that black skin was a form of leprosy (Baynton 40). And a hundred years later, Tom Robinson is culturally marked as a figure of disability more by virtue of his racial identity than by virtue of his damaged left arm.

The ideological justification for racism began to assume “scientific” dimension in eighteenth-century Europe, as Stephen Jay Gould cogently recounts in
The Mismeasure of Man
. Gould notes that the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus proposed a racial taxonomy (as early as 1758, in
Systema naturae
) that “mixed character with anatomy” (35) in such a way as to suggest a pervasive degeneracy inherent in blackness; similarly, in 1812, the French paleontologist George Cuvier “read” in the bones of Africans a text that revealed “the most degraded of human races whose form approaches that of the beast” (Gould 36); while the Swiss biologist Louis Agassiz, after emigrating to America, extended scientific racism in 1850 by arguing the merits of polygeny, a theory that categorized blacks and other non-white people as members of distinct (and inferior) species (Gould 42–46). Agassiz spawned a host of American disciples, notably in the medical community, among them Joseph Nott, author of
Types of Mankind
(1854), renowned for touring the South to offer self-proclaimed “lectures on niggerology” (Gould 69). The works of Nott and others—indeed the growing acceptance of scientific racism as indisputable fact—translated directly and easily into the nineteenth century's culture of mass entertainment, when freak shows burgeoned in popularity. Along with the presentation of nonnormative bodies of all kinds, a prominent feature of the freak show was the exhibition of black bodies staged to suggest atavistic or subhuman characteristics.