Secret Life of Books

To Kill a Mockingbird: racism, gun violence and coming of age in the 1930s South

• Sophie Gee and Jonty Claypole • Season 1 • Episode 13

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Within a year of its publication in 1960, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird sold 2.5 million copies and has remained a much-loved classic by adults and children alike. What was it about this book that captured the public imagination at the time - and to this day? 

Harper Lee mined her own childhood in Alabama for this coming-of-age story of personal and social justice against a backdrop of Depression-era America. She worked and reworked several earlier drafts before achieving the crystal precision of what would prove her masterpiece. Harper imagined the book would be just the first in an illustrious career; that she would fulfil her dream of becoming, in her own words, ‘the Jane Austen of South Alabama’. But she never wrote another novel. 

Sophie and Jonty argue that the success of To Kill A Mockingbird rested on the way it optimistically presented a path of reconciliation through what was, at the time, a subject of deep national division - segregation and civil rights. Harper’s Mockingbird, like Martin Luther King’s famous dream, contained a message of hope. But was it a realistic one? 

At the very end of her life, and in controversial circumstances, an earlier draft of what became To Kill A Mockingbird was published. Titled Go Set A Watchman, this book presented a more pessimistic view of American society. It’s less convincing as a work of art, but - in many ways - a more truthful one. 

Content warning: discusses gun violence, racism, domestic and sexual violence.

Visit the Secret Life of Books and join a conversation about the episode and the show: https://www.secretlifeofbooks.org/forum

Further Reading:

Harper Lee, To Kill A Mockingbird, (Harper, 2010)

Harper Lee, Go Set a Watchman, (Harper, 2015)

Charles J Shields, I Am Scout (Square Fish, 2008) 

The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the American South, ed. Sharon Monteith, (Cambridge UP, 2022)

Neal Dolan, “The Class Dynamics of Antiracism in Go Set a Watchman.” (Twentieth Century Literature, [s. l.], v. 69, n. 2, p. 121–146, 2023)

W.D. Kim,  "Animal Imagery in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird," (ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes, and Reviews, [s. l.], v. 35, n. 2, p. 161–166, 2022)

 J. C. Ford, “Birds of a Feather: Gay Uncle Jack and Queer Cousin Francis in To Kill a Mockingbird,” (ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes, and Reviews, [s. l.], v. 36, n. 3, p. 418–433, 2023).


Speaker 5:

Every book has two stories.

Speaker 6:

The one it tells. And the

Speaker 5:

one it hides.

Speaker 6:

Welcome to The Secret Life of Books.

Speaker 5:

I'm Sophie Gee, academic and writer.

Speaker 6:

And I'm Jonty Claypole, broadcaster and producer.

Speaker 5:

In this podcast, we tell the story behind the story of the literary classics everyone wants to read, feels they should read, or has already read and loved.

Speaker 6:

Today, To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. Sophie, I'm not going to attempt a southern accent, you'll be glad to hear because

Speaker 5:

I'm a bit relieved to be honest with you. Yeah. You

Speaker 6:

were probably coming in thinking, oh God, is John C, is John C really going to try and sound like Atticus Finch? I'm going to make Atticus Finch sound like

Speaker 5:

He grew up in London.

Speaker 6:

Like a, yeah, rather sort of privileged white male who grew up in London speaking the Queen's English. Who just happens to live in Alabama in the 19 And

Speaker 5:

I think that's fair, actually. That's sort of, that is the vibe that Atticus is rocking. That's true. Okay.

Speaker 6:

Atticus pushed his glasses to his forehead. They slipped down and he dropped them in the street. In the silence, I heard them crack. In front of the Radley Gate, Tim Johnson had made up what was left of his mind. He made two steps forward, then stopped and raised his head. We saw his body go rigid. With movements so swift they seemed simultaneous, Atticus's hand yanked a ball tipped lever as he brought the gun to his shoulder. The rifle cracked. Tim Johnson leapt, flopped over and crumpled on the sidewalk in a brown and white heap. He didn't know what hit him. Mr. Tate jumped off the porch and ran to the Radley place. You were a little to the right, Mr. Finch, he called. Always was, answered Atticus. If I had my druthers, I'd take a shotgun.

Speaker 5:

That's so much better in the Queen's English..

Speaker 6:

And to be fair, we'll talk about this later, Harper Lee did say that her ambition was simply to be the Jane Austen of the American South.

Speaker 5:

Yeah, well you've really helped her along there.

Speaker 6:

Yeah. Yeah, nicely done.

Speaker 5:

So I, I picked that as the, as the initial reading. There's lots of moments where Atticus Finch is sort of, being long winded about his commitment to fighting injustice, but I chose that bit partly because you don't realize I think at first that it's a dog, not a person that's going to get shot. It's early on in the novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, when the young protagonist, Jem Finch, sees a mad dog, a rabid dog, in the streets of Maycomb, Alabama, which is the fictionalized version of Monroeville, Alabama, where Harper Lee grew up. We'll get to the plot and the substance of the book in a moment, but the reason that I wanted to start with that is that It's an iconic scene from a southern novel. We see the whole town gathered to watch the white hero, Atticus Finch, later played by Gregory Peck, in the film adaptation. He shoots the dog, who has a human name. That seems like a very southern touch to me.

Speaker 6:

Who played the dog in the film?

Speaker 5:

Great question. Dunno. Check it in post. It's a, it's a sign of Finch's fine character that he's also a great shot, and that also seems quite American. And his kids don't know it before the scene plays out, so they're completely terrified. So we've got a small southern town, we've got the gun, we've got the dog, we've got the omission of mentioning race explicitly in a book that is basically entirely about anti black racism in America. And we've chosen To Kill a Mockingbird as the first book in a series that we're recording leading up to the November election in the U. S. To Kill a Mockingbird, written by the white Southern writer Harper Lee won the Pulitzer Prize in 1961, and it's been a bestseller ever since. It's actually sold 40 million copies. It's probably the most frequently assigned American book on high school syllabi, even now, worldwide. So, Jonty, what's the story of To Kill a Mockingbird?

Speaker 6:

Yeah, it's written from the point of view of the five year old Jean Louise Finch, who is known as Scout. And she sets out to tell the story of how her older brother, Jeremy, Jem, came to break his arm. And it's a three year flashback leading up to that point. There are two mostly independent threads in the plot, and the first revolves around Scout and Jem's efforts to lure a reclusive mysterious neighbor, who they call Boo Radley, out of a closed and shuttered house on the street in the town. Boo has been allegedly locked in the house since childhood and is said to be insane and dangerous. The second plot strand revolves around the children's father, Atticus, who defends a black man called Tom Robinson falsely accused of raping a poor white woman, Mayella Yule. Robinson is convicted and dies when trying to escape custody, and Mayella's father, Bob Ewell, is killed by Boo Radley when he attacks Scout and Jem because their father tried to ruin his reputation. Sophie, what's the secret of this book?

Speaker 5:

This book's got a good secret, I think. I think the secret is its sequel, Go Set a Watchman. So, after many, many years, Harper Lee finally published in 2015 a sequel to To Kill a Mockingbird called Go Set a Watchman. But she had actually written it before she wrote To Kill a Mockingbird. And its publication caused a huge stir because it really undid, the character that she gave to the hero Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird. Go Set a Watchman presents a much more nuanced and difficult, at least for white people, depiction of the racism and the social dysfunction of the post reconstruction South. In Go Set a Watchman, the white characters who are in some ways quite liberal and progressive are also deeply racist, segregationist. and in fact, have a kind of personal history of involvement with the Ku Klux Klan and other, racist organizations. For white readers, it's a much more troubling account of what the racist history of America looks like. and in, In Go Set a Watchman, Scout, the main character who by then is an adult, says, I wish I could forget. what she's come to know about her father Atticus. And I think the secret of To Kill a Mockingbird is that it is an act of forgetting. It allows Scout to forget what she knows about her father Atticus and to reconstruct this much more simple, stripped out story of white heroism

Speaker 6:

And as an act of forgetting, I think the secret for me is that The book is a very thinly veiled many elements. So it's, parts of it are taken from Harper Lee's life. The town of Maycomb is just Monroeville. You can literally map it out in exactly the same way. And most of the neighbors that she describes, really lived and she recounts their story. But the one thing she leaves out, which is this great act of trying to forget, is her mother. So in, in To Kill a Mockingbird, Scout and Jem do not have a mother. She died when Scout was two. And, in fact, in Harper Lee's real life, her mother lived on for,, a very long period, had very debilitating mental illness, and a violent relationship with Harper Lee herself. And so I think part of what she's doing in the book is just writing her mother out of existence.

Speaker 5:

That's a great point. I really like that. Yeah,

Speaker 6:

What's its significance, Sophie? Why is this book a classic?

Speaker 5:

I'm going to say that it's, it's one of a handful of books by white people that defined what a modern American classic looked like. So that's now being challenged by literary scholars and readers in general. But I think of To Kill a Mockingbird as kind of a little women of the South. It's an iconic depiction of what small town America was like, in this case, in the 1930s, this is a coming of age novel, par excellence. It's about racism. It's about sexual violence and the miscarriage of justice. It has guns, it has mental illness, and it has classic Southern food like collards and peach pickles. And most importantly, for the purposes of defining what an American classic is, it features an innocent, wronged black man, a victim of a system and a white heroic lawyer who tries to save him and whose efforts are doomed. So in that sense, this is kind of allegory of this story of American racial catastrophe. And as we're going to find out, Harper Lee worked on this book for a very long time. She reconceived it many times. And what I think she changed it into is this American bestseller that is telling the story that white Americans, especially in the civil rights era, wanted to hear about themselves. I think that's why it's a classic.

Speaker 6:

I don't think it's the first book for young adults, what we call young adult fiction. But I think she really, cements it as a form. It's a book you do in school. And so I think it's become a classic because it's been imitated so many times by writers trying to write grown up fiction for, for teenagers. Over the last week, I read it again for the first time since I was a teenager. And, and it's interesting when you come back to it because there is something just morally simplistic about it that I felt quite uncomfortable with. But the story presents a set of ethical challenges that are really useful ways for children to start thinking about the complex world that they live in. So

Speaker 5:

And it's the ultimate teachable novel. It teaches incredibly easily because it's like you have a map of the concerns and the themes and the motifs and the symbols and it's all there waiting for you and the book just plays out beautifully. Which is not to diminish the book, it's a beautiful book. It's a, it's a remarkable piece of literary construction. it's our first American book

Speaker 6:

that we've talked about. And Sophie, you have a bit more American experience in your life than me. So how does, how did rereading To Kill a Mockingbird match with your experience of having lived in America for two decades? More.

Speaker 5:

Yeah, I moved to America when I was 22. So I lived there for 25 years, my whole adult life. I had a coming of age story, which was moving to America. So To Kill a Mockingbird really resonated with me. And what I would say most resonated is that we're still living very much in the Jim Crow South. Jim Crow being a racist caricature of a black man produced in the reconstruction period of American history after the Civil War in the 19th century, before the civil rights movement of the 1950s. That's the period that we're inhabiting in To Kill a Mockingbird. And it was a sort of space of naivety and ignorance that I inhabited I'd grown up in a country, Australia, which at the time was one where race was rarely, if ever, explicitly discussed. I think it's, that's really changed. I went to America very naive about race and I discovered that it pervaded everything about American life. The guilt, anxiety, an attempt to think in more sophisticated and more equitable, more radical ways about race. These are the great preoccupations of modern America. And it took me a long time to realize that because when you're a white person living in America, you actually can ignore race for a long time. So for me, that's one of the things that's really interesting about To Kill a Mockingbird is that you can read it through naive eyes, or you can read it through

Speaker 6:

I said to you just before we started recording that I had nothing to contribute in terms of talking about experiences in America. And while talking, I suddenly remembered that one of my first jobs, when I was starting out in documentary making, was I went a documentary that was being made about a woman in South Carolina who had, murdered her children, she drowned them, by driving the car into a lake with the children in it, and then claimed to the police that a black man had abducted the car, which led to a search for several days before she confessed. And I, as a researcher, went alone and spent several weeks in this small town in the American south, talking to the protagonists, of this story who were still around.

Speaker 5:

But it's very telling that you forgot this in the context of reading To Kill a Mockingbird.

Speaker 6:

I blocked it out. I remember being very struck. I was 27. But just how segregated society was in this town, even though there was no official segregation, and the racism as well, which I hadn't really encountered in my life up until that point. So, although in some ways To Kill a Mockingbird is a historical novel, it still feels like there are parts of the American South where those dynamics have yet to resolve themselves.

Speaker 5:

Of course, it has been superseded by many novels about race in the American South, but, one of the things that's really interesting about it is that, it's a reminder that the civil rights movement, which we think of as a movement that sort of took off in the 1950s and became radicalized with black power in the 1960s, the civil rights movement is an ongoing struggle, which we saw resurface with Black Lives Matter during COVID. We're seeing it resurface, in the lead up to this election with Kamala Harris running as president. And in fact, when you read it's fiction and historical material from long before even the period in which To Kill a Mockingbird is set, when you read it from the 19th and the 18th century, these struggles are already in place. So people have really changed their approach to teaching To Kill a Mockingbird now, at least in So for example, one could teach it alongside Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, which was published published in 1937, or Toni Morrison's first novel, The Bluest Eye, from 1970, but it's set back in the 1940s in the pre civil rights era south. John, do you know that you're really interested in the ways in which Harper Lee is engaging her own autobiography in this novel?

Speaker 6:

Yes, Of course, most people who write novels are putting elements of their own lives into it. But I was struck when reading Charles Shields biography of Harper Lee, how much Harper Lee puts in and gives us clues the whole time to, to seeing the world. real elements from her life reflected in the book. And I'm kind of intrigued why she did some of this stuff. So, as we said earlier, Monroeville, her hometown, is just renamed Maycomb, the story is set between 1932 and 35 and Harper Lee was roughly the same age that Scout was at that time. In the book, Scout's father is called Atticus Finch. Finch was in fact her mother's maiden name. So she's keeping the names in play. her father, who was called A. C. Lee, who was a local politician and lawyer and newspaper editor, he becomes Atticus Finch. Harper Lee, Amazingly, and this is a fact most people know about Harper Lee, but her neighbor was Truman Capote and they grew up together. Um. It's a great

Speaker 5:

fact.

Speaker 6:

And Truman Capote becomes the character of Dil In the book, Capote later said that all the stuff in the book about,, Scouts Neighbors and Boo Radley is, quote, quite literal and true, unquote. It's hard to know how much to believe him because Truman Capote was a massive liar and just a pain in the backside generally. Yeah. Uh, but he certainly claimed it was all true. There's a couple of things about, uh, Harper Lee's parents, therefore, which are worth reflecting on the first thing is, is that A. C. Lee, Amasa Coleman Lee, who becomes Atticus Finch, he was not in real life as morally righteous A. C. Lee, he was in fact a segregationist. The other part, as I mentioned, is the absence of Scout's mother in the book. Scout's mother died when Scout was two, and that, interestingly, is the same age that Harper Lee was when, according to Truman Capote and others, her mother, in a sort of bipolar fit, tried to drown Harper Lee herself. So there's an interesting trauma processing in which Harper Lee writes her mother out of existence at the moment when her mother had anecdotally,, tried to kill her.

Speaker 5:

A lot of people with absent and violent mothers in the books that we've looked at so far. I feel like it's not a coincidence.

Speaker 6:

There are, and one thing to say about Harper Lee and Truman Capote and why they became such close friends is that they were complete outsiders in a very conservative society, even from a very young age. So Harper Lee, like her character Scout, is very tomboyish. Which didn't fit in too well with the expectations of how a little girl should behave in Monroeville. And Truman Capote was a mini version of Truman Capote. He, he wore Hawaiian shirts and blue socks and sandals and Eaton caps. And unsurprisingly, in a small town in the 1930s American South, he was deeply bullied. So these two became very close friends and began writing stories together, and a lot of their early stories are about one another as well.

Speaker 5:

Yeah, it's a great relationship. We won't spend much more time on it except to say that when Truman Capote went and did the research that led to In Cold Blood, he took Harper Lee with him, didn't he? She was there. Yeah. Yeah. And the townspeople, where he was writing the novel, much more were willing to confide in her, Nelly, as she was called, than they were in him.

Speaker 6:

Yes, and it was a joint project, and they spent months together researching that book. And when it finally came out, Truman Capote didn't even dedicate it to her. He just sort of says, oh yes, and my research assistant was Harper Lee. That's

Speaker 5:

pretty shabby. Although you can't argue with 40 million copies of Harper Lee's novel selling. I think she's probably outsold him.

Speaker 6:

Yes. So Sophie, I think the second thing to mention about Harper Lee's life is from a very young age, she has an obsessive relationship with the emerging civil rights movement. I think her instincts are on the right side of history, even if people find the book itself problematic today. So, I just wanted to ask you about where was the civil rights movement in the 1930s when the book is set? Where was it in the 1950s when, she was writing it?

Speaker 5:

Yeah.

Speaker 6:

And what was her relationship with that movement?

Speaker 5:

It's a, It's a really, really interesting question because I think that from the point of view of Harper Lee, you know, Go Set a Watchman Now to us is a much more convincing, and, you know, Suggestive and interesting depiction of what white racism looked like in the South. The sort of polarized version that's presented in To Kill a Mockingbird is, you know, it's overtly more appealing. It has more heroes and villains in it. but it is, very much a kind of story about white heroism in a way that doesn't really reflect Lee's own thinking about anti Black racism and the aftermath of enslavement,, as someone who was growing up in the, in the South, in the 1930s and 40s. So, you know, as a child, she would have been aware that her father had defended Black people in court. She would have known about the Scottsboro Boys, um, who were actually in, in Tennessee in the, in the early 1930s. nine male African American teenagers who were wrongly accused of raping two white women. This became a kind of national emergency, this case. Her specific inspiration for To Kill a Mockingbird is probably a story that was reported in the Monroe Journal, which her father edited. In 1934 there was a trial in Monroeville for a black laborer whose name was Walter Lett, who had been accused by a white woman of raping her. near a brick factory where they worked. And although there was a lack of evidence, he was sentenced to death. So it's a, it's a very similar story to the one that she retells in To Kill a Mockingbird. and actually Lee's father petitioned on let the accused's behalf, but it was too late. He had a breakdown, he was sent to an asylum and he died a couple of years later. That was happening in the 1930s when Mockingbirds said, but Lee is really informed by what was going on in the 1950s, the, the mockingbirds published in 1960. So she wrote a series of short stories, in the late 1940s at university, and they, they present a much more nuanced account of civil rights. There's a very important case that happened in 1954 around the figure of Emmett Till, who was, a teenager from the North. He was from Chicago, actually, and he went to visit relatives in Mississippi. He was slightly cheeky to a female store clerk in, in a shop in the town, and he was pursued and brutally murdered by the store clerk and her family. Till's maimed body was taken back to Chicago and his mother, in an extraordinary act of, courage and radicalism, chose to display the body in the church in an open casket. And there was a national outcry about it. It's a real, uh, moment of national awakening about anti black racism and violence.

Speaker 6:

She did it in the open casket so people could come and see what had happened to him. That was right. And there were queues around the block, people coming.

Speaker 5:

And

Speaker 6:

it mobilized the North,

Speaker 5:

because there's still this divide, and to some extent this is still true. There's this imaginative divide between the North and the South in America where the North thinks of itself as liberal and progressive, having rejected slavery and thinks of the South as being kind of backward. And, and, and Lee is really trying to intervene in that story. so the major events that we normally pay attention to with the civil rights movement, Rosa Parks and the Montgomery brothers. Bus boycotts in 1955, the emergence of Martin Luther King Jr. in that decade leading up to his murder in 1968. and the landmark court decision, Brown versus Board of Education in 1954, which ruled that segregation in schools was unconstitutional. So these, these things were all gathering momentum when Harper Lee was being educated. The thing I want to say before we move on from this is that while, historically, you know, stories about the civil rights movement in America have tended to map it as this kind of rising action from the horrors of the 1930s and 1940s, the lynchings, the violence, the,, Ku Klux Klan and all these, racial atrocities tends to map it as escalating into the full blown. Vision of the civil rights movement with Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. and so on. Revisions of that story now are to say that there is always this ebb and flow and that whenever there is a radicalization of black rights, there is always a reaction. And as someone who's now lived in America for a very long time, I would say that that's very much the version of racial politics that, I see in America.

Speaker 6:

One of the things I find fascinating about Lee is that she's a single noted author, and I mean that in a good way. When you mentioned earlier that those short stories she wrote at university in the late 1940s were really concerned with racial justice. Those are pretty much the only short stories she writes. She spends a long time writing and rewriting To Kill a Mockingbird, and then famously, despite the extraordinary success of this book, she never wrote another book afterwards. And so when,, Ghost Letter Watchman was published, it was actually just an earlier draft of To Kill a Mockingbird. It's almost like She had one thing to say and she said it in To Kill a Mockingbird and then just had nothing else that motivated her other than this issue. The other thing I think that's interesting is that her father, A. C. Lee, who had been a staunch segregationist in the 1930s, he did actually have at the end of his life an Atticus Finch style shift where he shifted to that view of racial justice that Atticus Finch has, and it happened after Emmett Till and some of those events.

Speaker 3:

So let me set the scene as, Harper Lee does in her description of Macomb very early in the book. Macomb 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, grass grew on the sidewalks, the courthouse sagged in the square. Somehow, it was hotter then. A black dog suffered on a summer's day. Bony mules hitched to hoover's 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 tea cakes with frostings of sweat and sweet talcum. Wonderful writing. It's wonderful writing. No,

Speaker 4:

no.. Snapsopally. I notice we're not having, we're not having the kind of merry banter that we usually have in these episodes for, for totally good reason, but that moment with the soft tea cakes and the frostings of sweat and sweet dough, that's very good, isn't it?

Speaker 3:

It is. Yeah.

Speaker 4:

So the first part of the book is basically setting the scene in Maycomb and introducing us to the drama of Boo Radley. So Boo Radley's this Shartian character who has been sort of entrapped by his past. punishing parents when he's a teenager for a misdemeanor. Um, and the rumor around the town is that when he was 33 years old, Boo Radley was sitting in a childlike way, cutting out clippings from the local newspaper to put in his scrapbook. And as his father walked past, he stabbed him in the leg with a pair of scissors. And that's the kind of legend of Boo Radley. And the Finch children and the Dill character, the Truman Capote character decide they want to lure Boo out of the house. They want to find out what he's like, and this becomes their sort of obsession through the first part of the book, where, seeing this unfold, when Scout and Jem also go back to school at the end of the summer, Scout learns that she cannot be a precocious intellect, she can't be super smart and able to read, she has to kind of trim her sails and look As though she's as sort of backward as all the other kids in the class and she's complaining about the fact that one of the other kids in the class,, just doesn't seem to be up to the task of doing his schoolwork. And we get the first of Atticus's wise pronouncements, which sort of gives us a big heads up about what the themes of this.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, it's an amazing detail, this section that Scout has taught herself to read. She, at her first day of school, the teacher, who is following a system, is appalled that Scout has already learned to read and says, you know, You need, you can't, you're not meant to be reading this way yet. And I think it's also a metaphor for what's going to emerge as one of the big themes in the book as well, which is that idea of resistance to systems and being an outlier to systems. So it's Scout and her reading is rather similar to Atticus Finch and his racial tolerance. So, at school, Scout has very quickly a run in with, a boy called Walter Cunningham, the phrase white trash quote unquote would be used, to describe this boy as well, and Atticus, sits Scout down and says, you can't behave like that to people. First of all, he said, if you can learn a simple trick, Scout, you'll get along a lot better with all kinds of folks. You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view. Sir, until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.

Speaker 4:

I want to put money on the table right now, John T, that never since this book was published has a high school essay been written without including that quote.

Speaker 3:

Yes, because it is a theme and it is a theme that Atticus drives home again and again, which is if we could just learn to see the world through the eyes of other people, there would be no trouble in the world.

Speaker 4:

We do, and it's an appealing sentiment, but I actually think that the sort of, the contextualizing presence of, of Gosset, a watchman, complicates that with this theme. Much more suggestive racial narrative. So that's all happening. Atticus is weighed in as a as a wise man and The plot kind of ticks along and Boo Radley starts appearing in the story

Speaker 3:

What is going on with Boo Radley, Sophie? Why is this? Why is this such an important story? Yeah,

Speaker 4:

he's a, so Boo Radley's this sort of fixation. When I was a, when I was a teenager, there was a band called the Boo Radleys. There

Speaker 3:

was, I saw the Boo Radleys play once.

Speaker 4:

Were they any good? They were

Speaker 3:

quite good. Yeah,

Speaker 4:

not bad. They sort of had a moment, didn't they? Yeah.

Speaker 3:

I hadn't realised that's where the name came from and it's been confusing me a lot when re reading this book. Anyway, what is Harper Lee doing with Boo Radley?

Speaker 4:

I think that Boo Radley is a sort of figure for the white unconscious. He's, he's white guilt, he's white shame. The Boo Radley character has actually been re read substantially by scholars since. The publication, Harper Lee ends up sort of presenting him as a bit of a Christ figure, a bit of a sort of sacrificial lamb in the novel. Scholars now see him as this lurking, figure of, disability and unacknowledged mental illness in the novel. he's this kind of unspeakable shadow story of white injustice, I think, that's hovering around in the text.

Speaker 3:

And it's about fear of the unknown, I suppose. Yeah. Because he's a shut in, he never comes out. So Scout, Jem and their friend Dill, build these wild fantasies about the terrible things that Boo Radley has done simply because they can't see him. Killing and

Speaker 4:

eating cats, attacking people in the night, etc, etc. So one of the things that happens is that Boo Radley starts leaving little presents for the children. He leaves some chewing gum, a couple of scrubbed and polished pennies in a knot hole in a tree. And this becomes this motif of Boo's unacknowledged kindness that fuels the children's obsession with him. They start playing a game called the Boo Radley game.

Speaker 3:

I'll give you a bit of the Boo Radley game., this is Dil, is particularly good at the game. Dil is Truman Capote, so if you want, you can imagine this character wearing Hawaiian shirts and blue socks and an Eton cap. And probably a bruise on his face because he's been beaten up again for walking around town looking like that. Dill was a villain's villain. He could get into any character part assigned him, and appear tall if height was part of the devilry required. He was as good as his worst performance. His worst performance was gothic. It was a melancholy little drama, woven from bits and scraps of gossip and neighbourhood legend. Mrs. Radley had been beautiful, until she married Mr. Radley, and lost all her money. She also lost most of her teeth, her hair, and her right forefinger. Dill's contribution. Boo bit it off one night when he couldn't find any cats and squirrels to eat. She sat in the living room and cried most of the time while Boo slowly whittled away all the furniture in the house.

Speaker 4:

It's a great passage, another one that really shows what a good writer Harper Lee is. She can sketch those characters really quickly and effectively. The kids are kind of hard boiled kids. You don't really, you don't have kids like that in children's books anymore, where they just kind of get the job done. They're not afraid of getting roughed up, and they have this gothic imagination. And actually what I want to say about that, mentioning of the word Gothic, his worst performance was Gothic, is that Hubley is deliberately constructing this Boo Radley part of the story as an archetypal instance of Southern Gothic writing. So Southern Gothic is this mode of literary writing that has, come into place with people like William Faulkner, whose,, Jochnap of Torfa sequence of novels are about the decay and,, dissipation of a great southern family in the aftermath of enslavement., Kate Chopin's book, The Awakening, and actually Truman Capote's early writing. These Are all examples of southern Gothic, which is this mode that defines the South as this place where dark things happen, where there are superstitions. Southern Gothic's actually been reclaimed to a large extent by writers of color, who've turned the Gothic mode into magical realism, of, wild and quite radical imagining. So Southern Gothic has become in many ways a much more interesting form than it was when Lee was writing To Kill a Mockingbird, but that's what she's getting at with these gothic scenes. So that's,

Speaker 3:

that's the moment where she's letting us know that she's not writing that sort of book. She's breaking from tradition. That's right. And she's writing a book that while being very cognizant of all the social ills of the time is also going to be a book of optimism and light. And so she's very playfully telling us here, you know, Dil, or Truman, might have written a gothic book, and might be the master of that form, but that's not me. I'm doing something different. So, no wonder truman Capote wrote her out of,, In Cold Blood. Maybe it was Comeback. Yeah. Yeah. He was like, take that for your gothic.

Speaker 4:

I like that.

Speaker 3:

Yeah.

Speaker 4:

I bet it's true. So there's a sort of climax scene in the first half of the novel where the kids sneak into the Radley backyard in the middle of the night. They're sneaking through,, the garden. They have to avoid the collard greens, a classic Southern touch. And they get up onto the balcony and then, I saw the shadow. It was the shadow of a man with a hat on. At first I thought it was a tree, but there was no wind blowing, and tree trunks never walked. The back porch was bathed in moonlight, and the shadow, crisp as toast, moved across the porch toward Jem. So it's a brilliant piece of Gothic writing, and it's also a parody of the Gothic, I think. reminding us that Harper Lee wanted to be the Jane Austen of the South. So this is both her Emma, or her Mansfield Park, more accurately, Jane Austen's novel of enslavement, and it's her Northanger Abbey, her parody of the Gothic. so in the middle of the book, we get a bit more background on the Finch family, who are from a plantation home somewhere else in Alabama. They go there for Christmas time to Finch's Landing is the name of the plantation., and, It's here that we learn why the book is called To Kill a Mockingbird. Jonty, can you read us that section?

Speaker 3:

Yes,, it's at Christmas time and Scout and Jem have been given air rifles. You know, as you do give to a, what is she, six or seven here?

Speaker 4:

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, there's no cliche that Harper Lee is, is unafraid to approach in the travel.

Speaker 3:

Scout says, When he gave us our air rifles, Atticus wouldn't teach us to shoot. Uncle Jack instructed us in the rudiments thereof. He said Atticus wasn't interested in guns. Atticus said to Jem one day, I'd rather you shot at tin cans in the backyard but I know you'll go after birds. Shoot all the blue jays you want if you can hit them But remember It's a sin to kill a mockingbird.

Speaker 4:

Title drop!

Speaker 3:

That was the only time I ever heard Atticus say it was a sin to do something, and I asked Miss Mordy about it. Your father's right, she said. 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 corn cribs, they don't do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That's why it's a sin to Kill a Mockingbird. That's two title drops in one paragraph.

Speaker 4:

Yeah, way to go, Harper Lee. So she brings, she brings up Mockingbirds, the Mockingbird motif four times in the novel, thus ensuring its place on American and global syllabi in perpetuity. We never really get to the bottom of what the Mockingbird is, do we? I mean, it's innocence. It's, it's joy. It's song. I spent

Speaker 3:

far too much time thinking about this the last week. Did you? And actually I came to conclusion that it, it really is as obvious as it seems, which if, if the Mockingbird is a symbol of joy and freedom and light, you don't shoot it. You don't kill it. Well, that seems unfair. And'cause she wanted to write an optimistic novel. And so it's a symbol of optimism.

Speaker 4:

The other detail to remember from the middle section of the novel is that some major female characters, emerge as these driving presences in the text. One is the figure of Mrs. Dubose, who is a morphine addict dying in her house. She's a kind of Miss Havisham character. And at a certain moment, Jem is punished for having attacked her camellia bushes, and he has to go and read to her interminably, every evening., and it's

Speaker 3:

sorry to interrupt, we did a school production of To Kill a Mockingbird after reading it and I played Missed DuBose.

Speaker 4:

Did you?

Speaker 3:

And I played it for laughs. I, I went full train spotting and just mind shooting myself up and Sort of going wild repeatedly. Did you

Speaker 4:

drop your drugs in the toilet?

Speaker 3:

I slightly ruined the play I think because I don't think it was meant to be a comic moment

Speaker 4:

It's not meant to be a comic moment But I do think it's part of Happily having a little bit of a sense of humor about the way white people want to see themselves figured. I noticed that, she dies having kicked her morphine habit by listening to Jem read Ivanhoe by Walter Scott, instead. And she informs the readers just before she dies that the camellia, whose name is Snow on the Mountain, is finally growing back. So I think Larbalee's having a bit of a laugh with that.

Speaker 3:

And talk to us about Calponia because she's probably quite a contentious character.

Speaker 4:

She is. Calpurnia is the children's black housekeeper. She's a local, Macomb woman, and she is basically a mother figure for them. She teaches them the ways of the world. She instills them with moral, wisdom and courage. She's actually a kind of foil to Atticus. She's, she's basically the sort of black mouthpiece to Atticus's white wisdom. And there's a crucial scene in the novel where she takes the kids to her church in the, in the town, after Atticus has stepped in and, and represented this, this black man, Tom Robinson, who is accused of raping a white woman. And the children are rejected by the black community in the church. And it's Calpurnia who steps in and has, has the, the preacher, the, Reverend in the church, come to the children's defense and welcome them into the community. And it's this kind of allegory of racial harmony that, yeah, has become highly problematic. Calpurnia very much speaks the words of white sensibility rather than having a kind of self, self determination. So the other character who we're introduced to in the middle section of the book is Mayella Ewell. She is the daughter of, Bob Ewell, who it becomes really important during the trial. Mayella Ewell is the woman who allegedly has been raped by the accused, Tom Robinson. And We learn that their kind of white trash house, which they're too poor even to have windows. There's, there's garbage all around the yard. It's a scene of total degradation and chaos of sort of white disintegration. Mayella Yule grows beautiful red geraniums in their yard. and so we know that Mayella is this figure of a certain kind of hope and optimism in the ruins of Mayella. impoverished white family. White poverty is a key motif in this book. And, you know, like all other motifs, it's presented in a very simplistic way, but it's really important to note that Harper Lee is calling attention to the problem of white poverty as being one of the contributing factors to racism in the South.

Speaker 3:

But she's critical because it's her who the rape case, pivots around, right?

Speaker 4:

Bayeliyul, yes. Yes.

Speaker 3:

So, so what happens is that their cabin is on a road, and at the end of that road is the area where a lot of the black people in the town, it's a sort of shanty town.

Speaker 4:

Yep.

Speaker 3:

And a young black man called Tom Robinson passes by every day. He has a family, but he often stops to help her out with little favors. She'll say, could you help me lift this chair and so on. And something happens. One evening, he goes into the house. He later claims that he went in and she made a pass at him, and then he tried to get away and was spotted by her father, and of course what Mayella and her father say is,, he came into the house and assaulted me. That's right. And so that's what the trial hinges around.

Speaker 4:

And what actually happened, and this becomes very apparent, is that, Mayella did make a pass at Tom Robinson, they were possibly attracted to one another, and Bob Ewell, the father, who's a very unsympathetic figure, beat up his daughter, and the suggestion, I think, is that she has been the victim of domestic and possibly sexual violence throughout her life. The red geraniums, again, are this kind of symbolic, gesture toward the red of blood, of violence, and also the flower of hope and possibility. One of the things that scholars and critics have said about Mayella as a character is that the reality of her suffering at the hands of this white male, abuser, is never really acknowledged. She's a bit of a shadow figure in the book, who is the foil to this story about, injustice towards the black man and his attempted salvation by a white hero. So May Ella Ewell is an interestingly underdeveloped figure in the novel.

Speaker 3:

And her emergence leads us through to the final third of the book, in which all the different plot strands will finally come together. Boo Radley, and Tom Robinson, and Atticus Finch, and we finally get the courtroom drama. The courtroom drama, yeah. As I was rereading, I thought most of the book was going to be a courtroom drama, and I was looking forward to rereading, because I love a courtroom drama.

Speaker 4:

Who doesn't?

Speaker 3:

And I'd forgotten that it doesn't take place till very late, and it's quite short, because it all happens in one afternoon.

Speaker 4:

They really get it over and done with, which is sort of the point, that the case isn't over. Barely heard I think part of the reason that we remember that it is a courtroom drama and the back of the book says as much is because of the film of To Kill a Mockingbird where Gregory Peck as the trial lawyer with his, heavy black glasses and his speech, that we'll read in a moment is such an iconic. moment in cinema.

Speaker 3:

And it's quite, like, I think courtroom drama has evolved a lot since then, because doesn't the whole thing end up resting on Robinson having a sort of withered hand so that so that the argument is that he couldn't possibly have raped her because because he hasn't got the strength in his hand. Well,

Speaker 4:

It's that the The hand that is withered is his left hand, and Mayella Ewell, according to all witnesses, was beaten up on her right side, so she must have been beaten up by someone using their left hand, and Tom Robinson could not have used his left hand. Okay,

Speaker 3:

but it's a bit Agatha Christie does courtroom drama, I guess, isn't it?

Speaker 4:

It's one of the moments where we're reminded that Harper Lee did not complete her law degree.

Speaker 3:

Yes, right. But the great bits of the scene are of course Atticus Fincher's speech. Yes. And there's so much one could quote here, because it's rousing wonderful stuff. But we'll do a short extract just to give you a flavor of it. So Atticus says. To begin with, this case should never have come to trial. This case is as simple as black and white. She was white, and she tempted a negro. She did something that in our society is unspeakable. She kissed a black man. Not an old uncle, but a strong young negro man. No code mattered to her before she broke it, but it came crashing down on her afterwards.

Speaker 4:

That's, that's, it's a good speech. It's a rousing speech. You have to look quite carefully to see that it's actually quite a problematic speech. It's really centering whiteness as this fragile condition that Mayella is grappling with., and in her fragility, she turns to a strong young Negro man.

Speaker 3:

And unfortunately Atticus's big speeches don't work., the all white jury convicts Robinson anyway. Robinson, goes off to jail. Atticus feels quite strongly that They will liberate him on appeal, but then never get the chance.'cause Robinson decides to make a run for it and is shot in the back by.

Speaker 4:

That's right. And so he dies a tragic hero. And it's the coming of age moment for the children where they realize that justice has miscarried, that their father, the great hero has, has failed to save the day.

Speaker 3:

And somebody has shot a Mockingbird, which is Robinson.

Speaker 4:

That's right. And that, that's a sin. So the book comes to its climax, which takes the form of. The children being pursued and violently attacked by the enraged Bob Ewell, the mailer's father. And he does this because, despite the fact that Tom Robinson was convicted,, he feels, Bob Ewell feels, that he has been attacked. humiliated by Atticus Finch So he attacks the children and the children are saved by Boo Radley, who finally bursts out of his house. He's actually popped out a couple of other times in the story. There's a moment where there's a big town fire and the kids are standing watching the fire and they realize that Boo Radley has come and put a blanket around them. So we've glimpsed him, but he comes out of the house and he saves the children by stabbing Bob Ewell and Bob Ewell is killed. And just to wrap that part of the plot up for people, the town sheriff, has it be decided that Bob Ewell died falling on his own knife.

Speaker 3:

And there's a moment where Atticus Finch is saying, well, he can't have fallen on his own knife. And the town sheriff is saying,

Speaker 4:

Yes, he did Atticus.

Speaker 3:

Atticus. Yes. I think this is in your interest just to agree with that. That's right.

Speaker 4:

So we finally get this description of Boo Radley and this is Scout's voice as she observes him. His face was as white as his hands, but for a shadow in his jutting chin, his cheeks were thin to hollowness, his mouth was wide, there were shallow, almost delicate indentations at his temples, and his grey eyes were so colourless, I thought he was blind. His hair was dead and thin, almost feathery, when I pointed to him, a strange spasm shook him as if he heard fingernails scrape slate but as I gazed at him in wonder the tension slowly drained from his face. His lips parted into a timid smile and our neighbor's image blurred with my sudden tears. Hey boo, I said. So he's a sort of Christ figure when he finally appears and there's this moment of kind of recognition and camaraderie or friendship between the young scout.

Speaker 3:

I was thinking of Dracula as you were reading which we did a couple of weeks ago. Yeah, it's very nice. Very nice. yeah, it was definitely rocking. But

Speaker 4:

the description. But he doesn't have long white moustaches like Dracula. He

Speaker 3:

doesn't have a long white moustache. Yeah.

Speaker 4:

So that's Boo Radley and we finally see him as this sort of salvation figure and then we get the wrapping up of the Mockingbird motif, don't we?

Speaker 3:

Few novels wrap themselves up as neatly as To Kill a Mockingbird does. And just in case it hasn't wrapped up neatly enough, Harperley at the very end brings back the Mockingbird itself. So, after the Sheriff has gone, Atticus tell Scout that they're gonna go along with the lie of Mr. Yule falling on his knife. Atticus looked like he needed cheering up. I ran to him and hugged him and kissed him with all my might. Yes, sir, I understand, I reassured him. Mr. Tate was right. Atticus disengaged himself and looked at me. What do you mean? Well, it'd be sort of like shooting a mockingbird, wouldn't it?

Speaker 4:

Mmm. So that's, that's how she brings it all in for a landing.

Speaker 3:

Yeah.

Speaker 4:

So What happened afterwards? It was published in July 1960.

Speaker 3:

It's an immediate success. uh, It sold a staggering two and a half million copies in its first year and the critics loved it. So the New York Times really picked up on the fact that Harper Lee was distancing herself from Southern Gothic and writing a book about the South with an optimism to it. And they said, Macomb has its share of eccentrics and evildoers, but Miss Lee has not tried to satisfy the current lust for morbid, grotesque tales of Southern depravity.

Speaker 4:

The New York World Telegram said that, there was a bright future beckoning for the author,, and the Washington Post said that the novel had this incredible power in carrying a moral theme, a hundred pounds of sermons on tolerance or an equal measure of invective deploring the lack of it will weigh far less in the scale of enlightenment than a mere 18 ounces of new fiction bearing the title to kill a mockingbird. Those were the great days of the newspapers, weren't they? when they could really speak with authority.

Speaker 3:

They could. I think that last one is so important because it picks up on why the book was such a success, at the height of the civil rights movement, of this really polarized climate within America, Harper Lee's book presents a believable vision of reconciliation and it was optimistic, and very few books being written about racial injustice had that optimism to it. And so I think for a white readership, it gave them an image of racial justice being morally true, and it gave them an image of it being possible. And so it managed to speak to that huge white demographic in America who wanted to find their way into Yeah.

Speaker 2:

And I think, I mean, it's hard to prove this in data, but I think it's a book that really did have a social impact. and was probAbly a significant step in that road to reconciliation.

Speaker:

It's also become an iconic American novel, like Catch 22, like One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, On the Road, The Feminine Mystique,, these novels that really kind of gave America to the world. II generation, and position themselves as novel that really challenged the system.

Speaker 2:

The other thing that embedded it into our consciousness was, of course, it was very quickly made into an Oscar winning film. Yes. When we think of Atticus Finch, we see Gregory Peck. With his glasses. Interestingly, Harper Lee was very involved in the film, and when the production was getting up and running, she wrote to the Hollywood actor Spencer Tracy and said, Dear Mr. Tracy, there is only one person I can possibly see playing Atticus Finch, and that is you. And shortly afterwards, Gregory Peck was cast instead. That's

Speaker:

Hollywood. Okay,

Speaker 2:

Sophie,, let's wrap up. What's best bit and the worst bit of the book for you?

Speaker:

Well, the worst bit are the sort of clanging cliches. I think probably the, actually the mockingbird motif is probably the worst bit. And I think the best bit are those beautifully turned descriptions of life in the South. The small town mentality and sensibility.

Speaker 2:

I agree. I think when she's writing about, you know, what she knows and her childhood. It's really wonderful. And I find the moral simplicity of the book difficult and problematic. You know, Atticus Finch is just too good to be true. He has this absolute moral clarity. And the fact that she had to radically rewrite her image of her dad to fit that suggests its unbelievability.

Speaker:

And that she had to write her mom out. Yes.. Yeah. And

Speaker 2:

an overrated or underrated.

Speaker:

That's a tough one. You know, when I initially reread it for this, I thought, oh, this is a hugely overrated book. You know, it's kind of a bit nothing and how can it possibly have had the impact that it's had. But as I dived into it when we were writing the episode, it really dawned on me what a canny and skillful piece of literary construction it is and how she uses all these tropes of Southern literature in quite a clever way to produce this book that was going to have mass appeal. I'm going to say that it's appropriately rated.

Speaker 2:

Okay. I think it's overrated, coming back to it. I think it's too neat. There's something airless about it. It's hermetically sealed. It doesn't really let the messiness of life inside itself. Everything is too neat and wrapped up. So is a piece of craftsmanship it's perfect, but there's something a little bit lifeless I found as a result. But I think now I'd much rather be reading James Baldwin, for instance. Well, isn't that great? Because be talking about James Baldwin next week.

Speaker:

You've been listening to The Secret Life of Books.

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Jonty Claypole

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Sophie Gee

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