English Note cards for Research Paper

You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view . . . until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.

"Remember it's a sin to kill a mockingbird." That was the only time I ever heard Atticus say it was a sin to do something, and I asked Miss Maudie about it. "Your father's right," she said. "Mockingbirds don't do one thing but make music for us to enjoy . . . but sing their hearts out for us. That's why it's a sin to kill a mockingbird."

When we first meet Mr Cunningham, Scout learns that the Cunninghams are poor and poverty makes a proud man ashamed.

When we next see Cunningham, he heads a lynch mob of farmers who, like him, were hit hardest by the Depression. Harper Lee's book was set during a period in American history when millions of men were out of work.

The careful attention to detail here suggests that this is a self-conscious piece of narrative foreshadowing, looking forward as it does to the vicious attack upon the Finch children by Bob Ewell, an attack which does not take place until the novel's penultimate chapter.

Such things cast a shadow forward, as well as registering that this is, in fact, a discourse of memory, a personal history the outcome of which is known to the narrator, though not to the reader. But it is rather more than that, too.

Then, the child drawing the bird tears the paper, 'killing' the mockingbird and leaving a jagged image of white on black; the camera continues to pan across the different toys and objects left by Boo Radley for the children to collect from the tree-knot outside the Radley house.

On page 11 of the novel we read words which are remarkably close to the opening sentences of the film's screenplay: 'A day was twenty-four hours long but seemed longer. There was no hurry, for there was nowhere to go; nothing to buy and no money to buy it with'.

The end of the novel's sentence—'nothing to see outside the boundaries of Maycomb County'—is omitted, perhaps because Hollywood sought a wider American audience for the film's narrowing of focus onto the theme of racial prejudice.

For many years the Black Educators' Association and parents, amongst others, have lobbied the Nova Scotia Department of Education and school boards to remove various books from the school curriculum and school use.

Similar initiatives have taken place in New Brunswick and other provinces across Canada. Pressure from the community forced the Department of Education to face up to its social responsibility to provide enlightened education and teaching materials and address the issue of restricting racist materials in the province's classrooms, in the same way that pressure had forced the government to abandon its legislated policy of segregated schooling for the African Nova Scotian population, a policy only formally ended in the 1950s.

Six years later, in March 2002, the African-Nova Scotian ad hoc advisory committee (a committee of parents and educators) of the Tri-County district, which runs schools in southwestern Nova Scotia, recommended that the three works should be removed from school use altogether.

Editorialists were especially incensed that To Kill a Mockingbird had come under criticism. The book was lauded as a classic, a paragon of anti-racist literature and, therefore, untouchable and sacrosanct.

he Black community was chided for being overly sensitive to the use of racial slurs and for its failure to appreciate the context and message of the novel.

What was ignored was that the use of racist epithets or negative and debased imagery is not the only basis upon which to determine the racist or anti-racist character of a book. Jane Kansas, a columnist for the Halifax Daily News, typified the prevailing mindset.

Indeed, the lines define the book: 'Mockingbirds don't do one thing but make music for us to enjoy. They don't eat up people's gardens, don't nest in corncribs, they don't do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That's why it's a sin to kill a mockingbird.'

Is not the mockingbird a metaphor for the entire African American population? Do these lines, as the partisans of the book assert, embody the loftiest ideals and sentiments?

arguing that just as one should not treat one's horse, ox or dog cruelly, one should not treat one's Black cruelly.

Perhaps the most egregious characteristic of the novel is the denial of the historical agency of Black people. They are robbed of their role as subjects of history, reduced to mere objects who are passive hapless victims; mere spectators and bystanders in the struggle against their own oppression and exploitation.

It is as if the Scottsboro case—in which nine young Black men travelling on a freight train in search of work were wrongfully convicted of raping two white women who were riding the same freight train—never happened. The trial was a 'legal lynching carried through with the cooperation of the courts and the law enforcement agencies'.

To Kill a Mockingbird gives no inkling of this mass protest and instead creates the indelible impression that the entire Black community existed in a complete state of paralysis.

"My own recollection of the book, which I first read as a child, was that it was full of hard and ugly truths," explained the Washington Post's Kathleen Parker.

Now, I must confess to never having read Mockingbird. But my loved ones have expressed sentiments similar to Parker's when describing why the book moved them so deeply. That the book has been powerful enough to touch so many people for so long inclines me not to write it off as heavy on morals but soft on race, as some have described it. Still, I can't completely ignore Mockingbird's critics.

"The black characters in the book are the least developed, the most stereotypical, especially the defendant Tom Robinson," USA Today stated. The paper pointed to McBride, author of The Color of Water: A Black Man's Tribute to His White Mother, as one who posits that Lee failed to make her Robinson character as complex and three-dimensional as the white characters. McBride isn't completely critical of Lee, though.

"At one point, Scout asks him if it is O.K. to hate Hitler," Gladwell writes. "Finch answers, firmly, that it is not O.K. to hate anyone. Really? Not even Hitler?"

"Finch will stand up to racists," writes Gladwell. "He'll use his moral authority to shame them into silence. ... What he will not do is look at the problem of racism outside the immediate context of Mr. Cunningham, Mr. Levy, and the island community of Maycomb, Alabama."

"When they finally saw him, why he hadn't doneany of those things . . . Atticus, he was real nice. . . ." His hands were under my chin, pulling up the cover, tucking it around me. "Most people are, Scout, when you finally see them." He turned out the light and went into Jem's room. He would be there all night, and he would be there when Jem waked up in the morning.

A boy trudged down the sidewalk dragging a fishing pole behind him. A man stood waiting with his hands on his hips. Summertime, and his children played in the front yard with their friend, enacting a strange little drama of their own invention. It was fall, and his children fought on the sidewalk in front of Mrs. Dubose's. . . . Fall, and his children trotted to and fro around the corner, the day's woes and triumphs on their faces. They stopped at an oak tree, delighted, puzzled, apprehensive. Winter, and his children shivered at the front gate, silhouetted against a blazing house. Winter, and a man walked into the street, dropped his glasses, and shot a dog. Summer, and he watched his children's heart break. Autumn again, and Boo's children needed him. Atticus was right. One time he said you never really know a man until you stand in his shoes and walk around in them. Just standing on the Radley porch was enough.

Maycomb was an old town, but it was a tired old town when I first knew it. In rainy weather the streets turned to red slop . . . [s]omehow it was hotter then . . . bony mules hitched to Hoover carts flicked flies in the sweltering shade of the live oaks on the square. Men's stiff collars wilted by nine in the morning. Ladies bathed before noon, after their three-o'clock naps, and by nightfall were like soft teacakes with frostings of sweat and sweet talcum. . . . There was no hurry, for there was nowhere to go, nothing to buy and no money to buy it with, nothing to see outside the boundaries of Maycomb County. But it was a time of vague optimism for some of the people: Maycomb County had recently been told that it had nothing to fear but fear itself.

Neighbours bring food with death, and flowers with sickness, and little things in between. Boo was our neighbour. He gave us two soap dolls, a broken watch and chain, a knife, and our lives.

The one thing that doesn't abide by majority rule is a person's conscience.

f there's just one kind of folks, why can't they get along with each other? If they're all alike, why do they go out of their way to despise each other?

Persecution comes from people who are prejudiced.

Let the dead bury the dead.

Social standing is central to the problems the film works through. It is significant that traditional gender characteristics are deeply involved with one another in Scout, since the film is most poignantly about defining masculinity.

America had come a long way in thirty years. For millions of Americans in the rich white suburbs of the 1960s this was how things should be and their values were the right values.

To Kill a Mockingbird compares Scout's environment, full of books and knowledge, with that of the Ewells and the Cunninghams in which more pressing needs have taken precedence.

Both novel and film suffer from being sentimentalised narratives. One reviewer of the film commented: Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird is one of the best recent examples of the sentimental novel: the book designed principally to create warmth, which doesn't exclude ugliness but views it through generally optimistic eyes ... is not vigorous enough to celebrate life, but does enjoy it.

The unreality of the scene is further conveyed: when I slowly awoke to the fact that I was addressing the entire aggregation. The men were all looking at me, some had their mouths half-open. Atticus had stopped poking Jem: they were standing together beside Dill. Their attention amounted to fascination.

In the silence which follows Scout's speech, the novel records that she: looked around and up at Mr Cunningham, whose face was equally impassive. Then he did a peculiar thing. He squatted down and took me by both shoulders. 'I'll tell him you said hey, little lady,' he said (p. 158) before leading the mob away.

Again, for the children, the Radley household figures as the equivalent of a gothic mansion: Inside the house lived a malevolent phantom. People said he existed, but Jem and I had never seen him. People said he went out at night when the moon was high, and peeped in windows ... A Negro would not pass the Radley place at night, he would cut across to the sidewalk opposite and whistle as he walked. (pp. 14-15)

In a seemingly leisurely way, the novel drifted through 121 pages of youthful adventure, and, only then, with the children solidly established did it turn into a rape case. The two discrete parts of the novel are telescoped in the film, however, and the result is to bring the trial out of the blurry background and into sharp focus. The trial weighed upon the novel, and in the film, where it is heavier, it is unsupportable. The narrator's voice returns at the end, full of warmth and love ... but we do not pay her the same kind of attention any more. We have seen that outrageous trial, and we can no longer share the warmth of her love

In the last few minutes of the picture, whatever intellectual and moral content it may be said to have contained is crudely tossed away in order to provide a 'happy' ending. Peck ... and the sheriff agree to pretend that a wicked white man who has been killed will be reported to have fallen on his own knife, thus sparing the man who killed him—admittedly a mental case, but the saviour of the lawyer's children—the humiliation of a public arraignment. The moral of this can only be that while ignorant rednecks mustn't take the law into their own hands, it's all right for nice people to do so.

extension for Alabama more generally, 'Law' and its 'Order' are to be manipulated by those who, it is presumed, know best.

t was African North Americans who took up the task of confronting and organising against racism

who through weal and woe, trial and tribulation, carried on—and still carry on—the battle for equal rights and dignity.

hose whites who did, and do, make significant contributions gave, and give, their solidarity in response.

And children bred in the Bible Belt would best understand how to respond to racists by learning to "hate the sin, love the sinner," she says.

Is Parker right, or should the Finch character be taken to task for not opposing racism and racists with outrage and working to reform the system?

Moreover, if Finch isn't as heroic as popular culture presents him as, should we reconsider holding up Mockingbird as a literary race relations pioneer?