Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird (39 page)

But it is Scout who challenges boundaries most vigorously. Reassured by Atticus that her aunt's admonition to be mindful of her gentle Finch “breeding” is advice best forgotten, she realigns herself as common folk. She rejects Alexandra's identification of the Cunninghams as “trash.” A “mutt” in Miss Dubose's eyes (
TKAM
115), Scout remains loyal to Dill, who's a mere “stray dog”
15
to Francis (
TKAM
94). She goes with Calpurnia to a black church and sits with the black spectators at Tom's trial. And she openly violates prescribed codes for female dress and behavior, contesting the closeted confinement of her “pink cotton penitentiary” (
TKAM
155) to forge an unconventionally gendered identity. If these various transgressions do not obliterate boundaries, they blur them sufficiently to permit Scout, in particular, to see beyond the array of divisive biological determinants of which they are built. Consequently, the certainties of human makeup and destiny offered up by quack science prove illusory, like the notions of Old Families and Fine Folks. “There's just one kind of folks,” Scout comes to believe, “[f]olks” (
TKAM
259), human beings with a shared heritage of constructed imperfection.

To Kill a Mockingbird
literally begins after it ends, after Jem “waked up in the morning” (
TKAM
323) with “his arm badly broken” (
TKAM
3). One of many instances of narrative time travel in Lee's story, this particular example serves strikingly to reconstruct the events of the novel by foregrounding disability and investing it with a central significance from the start, a newly “awakened” understanding, which gathers meaning as the story unfolds. For Maycomb's usual disease is more than the pathology of racism; it is the social fear of widespread infection by exposure to difference, “fear itself” that has caused a community to erect and strive to maintain boundaries among its members, all of whom live under the shadow of one sort of disability or another and labor under an inherited burden of disqualifying biologically constructed Otherness.

Folks become “just folks” not simply by daring to transgress boundaries, but by recognizing that disability itself freely violates barrier. Most prominently, the afflictions of the Finches persistently link them with the Others. Jem's permanently deformed left arm connects the family to Tom Robinson's. Atticus' “blindness” connects the Finches to the nearsighted Calpurnia, the Cunninghams' “blind spot,” Boo's nearly “blind” gray eyes,
16
and the more symbolic lack of visual acuity that pervades the community.
17
And, the tribal “curse” of incest is one the best family in Maycomb implicitly shares with its worst. For if, as Laura Fine argues, “the most unacceptable double upon whom Scout projects her fears or desires is . . . Mayella Ewell” (74), it is in no small part because incest—the taboo lurking in Maycomb's moral center as well as at its most discredited periphery—suggests the two girls share a kind of figurative siblinghood.

Eugenicists warned of the dual danger posed by people “of inferior blood” and by families “so interwoven in kinship with those still more defective that they are totally unfitted to become . . . useful citizens” (Black 58–59). And so from the eugenic perspective, the folks of Maycomb, from the Finches to the Ewells, more than faintly resemble one another because they are more disconstructively like than unlike. Maycomb's thoroughly mingled bloodlines cast all of its families to a dysgenic margin; paradoxically, then, deviance from the “normal”
is
the norm, and folks become folks (at least in part) because a shared kinship of disability becomes “the great leveler” and assumes normalizing power. “To kill a cripple” becomes a more generalized violence than Mr. Underwood may fully understand when penning his editorial—it is effectively an act of social self-destruction.

It is more than curious that the events of
To Kill a Mockingbird
and its literary creation both unfold against the historical backdrop of one of America's most disabling viruses—poliomyelitis. As young Scout learns a new and better way of reading her world as a child in the 1930s, a polio survivor, Franklin Roosevelt, assumes central responsibility for wrenching the paralyzing grip of “fear itself” from the economic landscape. And as Lee put the finishing touches to her work a half century ago, the fear of polio itself was beginning to abate in the American psyche, thanks to the breakthrough findings of Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin. It is Sabin's discovery of an attenuated vaccine, in particular, that I have been mindful of with this reconsideration of the book on the occasion of its fiftieth anniversary. Attenuation takes a living agent and alters it so that it becomes harmless or less virulent, but still recognizable to the immune system that is roused to combat it. The Sabin vaccine consisted of live polio virus that, when introduced into the bloodstream of children, empowered their immune systems to recognize and render polio powerless.
To Kill a Mockingbird
offers a vision of a world in which exposure to attenuated versions of disability can render the disabling viruses of race, class, and gender oppression (and their historically constructed narratives) powerless. Or, to put it otherwise, our vision of humanity is most encompassing and humane when we look at those disabled by history, science, and small-town mythology—cast to the margin, like people with disabilities everywhere—and see ourselves.

Notes

1. In her 1997 dissertation, Kathleen Anne Patterson offers a Goffmanesque interpretation that
Mockingbird
is a novel “depicting disability as one of many potentially stigmatizing conditions” (64), but she does not see disability itself as the historically constructed, foundational master key of difference in the text, as I will argue here. Patterson's insights, nonetheless, are consistently interesting; her reading of Boo Radley in the context of stigma theory is especially good and an interpretation which I largely share.

2. Later, Mr. Avery attributes the strange snowstorm to disobedient children.

3. As Levi-Strauss points out, “[T]he term ‘gift' . . . has the dual meaning of ‘present' and ‘betrothal'” (63). In this sense, Boo's persistent gifting prefigures the symbolic “engagement” with Scout at the novel's end, when the two walk arm in arm. That engagement, in turn, suggests the natural kinship between their disconstructed identities.

4. In folding Jem's pants and putting the blanket over Scout's shoulders, Boo fills the role of the absent mother. In the more critical act of saving the children from Bob Ewell, he replaces Atticus, whose soothing mantra—“not time to worry yet”—betrays his naïveté about the danger Ewell poses. The mother-father dyad (like Scout's transgendered pose) adds hermaphroditic “monstrosity” to Boo's constructed disability.

5. This is the understanding in Maycomb, too, as Jem knows, because “around here, once you have a drop of Negro blood, that makes you all black” (
TKAM
184).

6. When the children build the “Morphodite” during the snowstorm, they enact in the ritual of play a foreshadowed understanding of human origins and their implications.
Shaped to resemble Mr. Avery, the figure they construct is essentially earth, covered with just enough snow until “gradually Mr. Avery turned white” (
TKAM
76). The uncontrasted
whiteness
of the snow Scout awakens to is terrifying (“I nearly died of fright” [
TKAM
73]), recalling Morrison's observation that “whiteness, alone, is mute, meaningless, unfathomable, pointless, frozen, veiled, curtained, dreaded, senseless, implacable” (59).

7. Boo's whiteness is problematized in a way that suggests an even more layered affinity with Tom. The Radley Place “was once white” but is now “slate-gray” (
TKAM
9), a merging of black and white. Physically revealed at the end of the story, Boo is “sickly white” (
TKAM
310).

8. The events of
To Kill a Mockingbird
reach a climax in 1935. That same year, Shields reports, A. C. Lee joined many of his fellow state legislators in voting to enact involuntary sterilization into Alabama law.

9. From Old English “aewell” See A. D. Mills. “Ewell.”
A Dictionary of English Place Names.
New York: Oxford U P, 2003. Encyclopedia.com. http://www.encyclopedia
.com?doc/1O40-Ewell.html

10. Information on the phenomenon of “Fitter Family” contests is drawn from the Dolan DNA Learning Center website. See http://www.eugenicsarchive.org/eugenics/topics_fs.pl?theme=8&search=&matches=

11. Earlier, far-ranging examinations of boundary themes in
To Kill a Mockingbird
—though they do not focus on disability as a master trope—are among the most valuable criticisms extant. See, in particular, Claudia Durst Johnson's book
Threatening Boundaries
(especially its chapter on “The Danger and Delight of Difference”) and Laura Fine's essay “Structuring the Narrator's Rebellion,” which appears in Alice Petry's more recent collection of
Mockingbird
criticism.

12. In European folk tales, children manifesting congenital disorders (mental and physical) were often assumed to be changelings, elfin beings emerging from the fairy world to inhabit a human space where “the psychologically alienated and the physically handicapped [were] conflated” (Silver 81). In “Fairies and the Folklore of Disability,” Susan Schoon Eberly notes that children who failed to thrive or grow naturally were suspected to be changelings, and that “the different child who survives, perhaps with more mental than physical difference, offers a rational explanation for many of the solitary fairies . . . living quietly on the edges of society” (246). There is something of the changeling in both Dill (“I'm little, but I'm old” [
TKAM
7]) and Boo, as well as Scout.

13. The encoded disability of the female body in Western literature extends most famously back to Aristotle's
Second Generation of Animals
and its characterization of women as, anatomically, “mutilated males.”

14. When reminded by Atticus that the Finches have a long history of incestuous breeding habits, Alexandra dismisses this dysgenic “streak” as a genteel beauty mark (“that's where we got our small hands and feet” [
TKAM
147]). Her eugenic doppelganger, Charles Davenport, made a similar distinction. In
Heredity in Relation to Eugenics
, Davenport generally “condemned the marriage of cousins as prohibited consanguinity,” but “extolled the marriage of cousins among the elite as eugenically desired” (Black 74).

15. Harper Lee's mother, it is worth recalling, was Frances
Cunningham Finch
before marrying. The family surname also echoes in “Robert E.
Lee
Ewell.” One is reminded of Steinbeck's observation in
Of Mice and Men
that “the whole country is fulla mutts” (85). The image of the “mutt” serves as a useful metaphor, in fact as in fiction, for the concept of shared imperfection as normalizing counter-argument to pure breeding.

16. For a different and enlightening take on the way impaired “vision” serves as extended metaphor in the novel, see Laurie Champion's excellent essay, “‘When You Finally See Them': The Unconquered Eye in
To Kill a Mockingbird
.”

17. The Cunningham who holds out for Tom Robinson's acquittal does so because he's “a little disturbed in his mind” (
TKAM
254). Linking the Cunninghams with the heroism of Boo, mental “disturbance” is recast as the equivalent of an advanced and elevated form of social consciousness and is consistent with Lee's broader strategy of investing shared disability with normalizing power.

Works Cited

Baynton, Douglas C. “Disability and the Justification of Inequality in American History.” In
The New Disability History
. Ed. Paul K. Longmore and Laurie Umanski. New York: U New York P, 2001. (33–57)

Black, Edwin.
War Against the Weak
. New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 2003.

Champion, Laurie. “‘When You Finally See Them:' The Unconquered Eye in
To Kill a Mockingbird
.”
Southern Quarterly
37.2 (Winter 1999): 127–136.

Davis, Lennard.
Bending Over Backwards: Disability, Dismodernism, and Other Difficult Positions
. New York: U New York P, 2002.

Davenport, Charles B.
Heredity in Relation to Eugenics
. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1911.

Early, Gerald. “The Madness in the American Haunted House.” In
On Harper Lee: Essays and Reflections
. Ed. Alice Hall Petry. Knoxville: U Tennessee P, 2007. (93–103)

Eberly, Susan Schoon. “Fairies and the Folklore of Disability: Changelings, Hybrids, and the Solitary Fairy.” In
The Good People: New Fairylore Essays
. Ed. Peter Narvaiez. Lexington: U Kentucky P, 1991. (227–250)

Fine, Laura. “Structuring the Narrator's Rebellion in
To Kill A Mockingbird
.” In
On Harper Lee: Essays and Reflections
. Ed. Alice Hall Petry. Knoxville: U Tennessee P, 2007. (61–77)

Foucault, Michel.
Madness and Civilization
. 1961. New York: Random House, 1965.

Goffman, Erving.
Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity
. 1963. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986.