Is To Kill a Mockingbird the New Gone With the Wind?
I spent the last month doing a deep dive into my thoughts and feelings on a beloved American classic and reading new articles that have come out about it thanks to the success of the new Broadway adaptation. What I have to say about it is going to upset some people.
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee is considered one of the great works of American literature. Long woefully wanting of celebrated female authors, the American canon kind of needs Harper Lee's inclusion just to have a female voice. Scout was a compelling female main character, and certainly she spoke to me as a child since we shared some characteristics - both young tomboys who were left pretty much to our own devices in backwards small Southern towns that time had forgot.
My children will be reading To Kill a Mockingbird in their eighth grade classes soon. It is still taught alongside other old classics. They will study Of Mice and Men and have studied The Outsiders. These pieces are read still because we want our children to share certain cultural touchstones and because they are time capsules of periods in our history. Some of them are really well-written books and easy reads as well.
Harper Lee never wanted a Broadway play, and she never wanted her original book - the one that was revised to make To Kill a Mockingbird - to be published. But, shortly before her death, the book was published - Go Set a Watchman - and the play was in the works. In the period of time that followed the publication of Go Set a Watchman and today, many have started to write and think about To Kill a Mockingbird in a more critical way.
In Go Set a Watchman - Harper Lee's original book - we witness what happens to adult Scout when she experiences her childlike, idealized views of her father fall apart in response to his newly revealed overtly racist words and actions. We witness some scenes from her childhood in flashback form. Harper Lee's editor/publisher did not like this version of the book, and asked Harper Lee to revise and edit this work down to include only the scenes from childhood and mostly the young Scout's voice.
When the book came out, Flannery O'Connor stated, "It's interesting that all the folks who are buying it don't know that it's a children's book" (Metcalf, 2006). O'Connor may have been jealous at the swift and steady sales the book was enjoying, but she hit upon an important point that bears remembering in discussions of the text. It is a children's book. It has a child for a narrator. Scout sees Atticus the way many of us see our parents or want to see our parents when we are young - strong, steady, capable, reassuring, responsible, good.
Atticus has been reassuring to generations of white people. We name our children and our pets after him. I read somewhere that there is a bar named after him. A quick search reveals that there are actually multiple bars and restaurants named after him across the world - one of them even in Australia. When I think of Atticus, two scenes come to mind, but these are from the movie version: Gregory Peck standing tall taking down the rabid dog with a single shot and Gregory Peck leaving the courthouse with all of the Black characters in the segregated balcony of the small courthouse standing to show him respect.
Gregory Peck helped to fund the movie. The book was adapted for the film to more greatly showcase the character of Atticus perhaps because of his involvement. The entire second half of the movie became the Atticus Is a Hero
show. What we are left with is arguably a White Savior film. The only man that can save the people - from a mad dog, from an angry racist mob - is Atticus. White Saviorism is a real problem and is one of the pillars that continues to support systemic racism in our culture (and if the global proliferation of Atticus Finch pubs is any indication, maybe global culture). White savior films and books "...perpetuate an idea that is essentially a historical banner of colonialism: People of color need white people to save them … Many white people in films based on the stories of POC are often subliminally depicted as godlike saviors, heroes who are rational and judicious to the core. They are usually deified men or women - glorified and righteous - like scripture out of a Holy Book … in this centering of whiteness and white characters, the POC characters end up becoming props, which only perpetuates the ideas of our otherness and unimportance, which then establishes a status quo of racism. Whiteness is again normalized, and POC are decentralized" (Roisin, 2017). We can check off most of those boxes when we look at the portrayal of Atticus, certainly in the film version and definitely in the book version if we allow ourselves to forget that we are reading through an adoring young daughter's eyes.
Hollywood's white savior problem does not appear to be going away. The recent award-winning film Green Book has a whitewashing and white savior problem as well. Green Book claims to tell the story of Dr. Donald Waldridge Shirley but his surviving family has called the film "a symphony of lies" (Obie, 2018). These films are considered "Oscar bait" and are designed to win awards and assuage white guilt. Sometimes money makers, but almost always award winners, the list includes Mockingbird, The Help, Green Book, The Blind Side, and many more. As Roxane Gay astutely points out, in Mockingbird, "The black characters - Robinson
and the family's housekeeper, Calpurnia
- are mostly there as figures onto which the white people around them can project various thoughts and feelings. They are narrative devices, not fully realized human beings."
Some people love Mockingbird because they look back to a time when things were simpler, when people in the neighborhood or town knew each other, helped each other, interacted more face to face. Nostalgia for the past was part of what Harper Lee was writing about, after all. The book was published in the 1960's from her apartment in New York about her childhood in the 1930's in a small Alabama town. The 1960's were a tumultuous time, a flashpoint for race relations - the height of the Civil Rights Era. One critic pointed out that it was easy to feel good about how far we had come as a society when reading this book, easy for readers - especially white ones - to feel good about how progressive they were as compared to racist white folks from the 1930s even as people across the country were organizing, protesting, and dying in pursuit of basic rights. As Gay points out, some readers are struck by "...a yearning for a simpler time - a uniquely white yearning because it is white people to whom history has been kindest. It is white people who seem to long for the safety of cloistered communities where everyone knows one another, where people knows their place and are assured of what their lives may hold."
I often get pushback at this point when discussing Mockingbird as a problematic piece with family and friends. "Well," they say, "during the time period that Harper Lee was writing about, a white man would have been the only person that could save Tom Robinson. He needed a lawyer, and the only lawyer in that town was white. Do you want to change history? Or just pretend it didn't happen?"
I like Mockingbird. I like the character of Scout, and I love the character of
Boo Radley (even more now that I learned from Tom Santopietro's book that Boo was based on Harper Lee's real-life neighbor). I don't think that we necessarily need to stop teaching To Kill a Mockingbird in schools. But I do think that teachers who bring the book forward need to encourage critical thinking in students and need to be prepared to foster discussions of Atticus, white saviorism, and racism both historic and in the present if they are going to teach this book. I would love for us, as a society, to come up with a new reading list, one that is more inclusive of writers of color, women, and LGBTQ+ authors. I know that I would have been more encouraged in my dream of being a writer if I had been exposed to more voices that looked and sounded and felt like me when I was younger.
Barack Obama, in his farewell address, invoked Atticus Finch. "If our democracy is to work in this increasingly diverse nation, each one of us must try to heed the advice of one of the great characters in American fiction, Atticus Finch. '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'" (President Obama's Farewell Address: Full Video and Text, The New York Times). It was a call to our hearts, a call for connection, a call for understanding between groups, across aisles, from one anonymous face behind a computer screen to the next. Obama reassured us all in his speech: "For every two steps forward, it often feels we take one step back. But the long sweep of America has been defined by forward motion, a constant widening of our founding creed to embrace all, and not just some."
Keep teaching the book, but teach others alongside it, expand the American canon to reflect the diversity of people who call this place home, and engage in the difficult conversations about inequality, injustice, and racism that our children need and deserve. We cannot move forward unless we keep pushing. The more of us that wake up and push, the better.
Works Cited:
Gay, Roxane. Lots of People Love 'To Kill a Mockingbird.' Roxane Gay Isn't One of Them. The New York Times. June 18, 2018. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/18/books/reviews/tom-santopietro-why-to-kill-a-mockingbird-matters.html
Kornhaber, Spencer. Obama's Ingenious Mention of Atticus Finch. The Atlantic. Jan. 11, 2017.
Metcalf, Stephen. On First Looking Into To Kill a Mockingbird: How Sentimental and Nostalgic Is It? Slate. June 9, 2006. https://slate.com/culture/2006/06/harper-lee-s-to-kill-a-mockingbird.html
Obie, Brooke. How Green Book and the Hollywood Machine Swallowed Donald Shirley Whole. Shadow and Act. Dec. 14, 2018. https://shadowandact.com/the-real-donald-shirley-green-book-hollywood-swallowed-whole/
President Obama's Farewell Address: Full Video and Text. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/10/us/politics/obama-farewell-address-speech.html
Roisin, Fariha. Why Hollywood's White Savior Obsession is an Extension of Colonialism. Teen Vogue. Sep. 14, 2017. https://www.teenvogue.com/story/hollywoods-white-savior-obsession-colonialism
Santopietro, Tom. Why To Kill a Mockingbird Matters: What Harper Lee's Book and the Iconic American Film Mean to Us Today. St. Martin's Press. 2018.
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee is considered one of the great works of American literature. Long woefully wanting of celebrated female authors, the American canon kind of needs Harper Lee's inclusion just to have a female voice. Scout was a compelling female main character, and certainly she spoke to me as a child since we shared some characteristics - both young tomboys who were left pretty much to our own devices in backwards small Southern towns that time had forgot.
My children will be reading To Kill a Mockingbird in their eighth grade classes soon. It is still taught alongside other old classics. They will study Of Mice and Men and have studied The Outsiders. These pieces are read still because we want our children to share certain cultural touchstones and because they are time capsules of periods in our history. Some of them are really well-written books and easy reads as well.
Harper Lee never wanted a Broadway play, and she never wanted her original book - the one that was revised to make To Kill a Mockingbird - to be published. But, shortly before her death, the book was published - Go Set a Watchman - and the play was in the works. In the period of time that followed the publication of Go Set a Watchman and today, many have started to write and think about To Kill a Mockingbird in a more critical way.
In Go Set a Watchman - Harper Lee's original book - we witness what happens to adult Scout when she experiences her childlike, idealized views of her father fall apart in response to his newly revealed overtly racist words and actions. We witness some scenes from her childhood in flashback form. Harper Lee's editor/publisher did not like this version of the book, and asked Harper Lee to revise and edit this work down to include only the scenes from childhood and mostly the young Scout's voice.
When the book came out, Flannery O'Connor stated, "It's interesting that all the folks who are buying it don't know that it's a children's book" (Metcalf, 2006). O'Connor may have been jealous at the swift and steady sales the book was enjoying, but she hit upon an important point that bears remembering in discussions of the text. It is a children's book. It has a child for a narrator. Scout sees Atticus the way many of us see our parents or want to see our parents when we are young - strong, steady, capable, reassuring, responsible, good.
Atticus has been reassuring to generations of white people. We name our children and our pets after him. I read somewhere that there is a bar named after him. A quick search reveals that there are actually multiple bars and restaurants named after him across the world - one of them even in Australia. When I think of Atticus, two scenes come to mind, but these are from the movie version: Gregory Peck standing tall taking down the rabid dog with a single shot and Gregory Peck leaving the courthouse with all of the Black characters in the segregated balcony of the small courthouse standing to show him respect.
Gregory Peck helped to fund the movie. The book was adapted for the film to more greatly showcase the character of Atticus perhaps because of his involvement. The entire second half of the movie became the Atticus Is a Hero
Hollywood's white savior problem does not appear to be going away. The recent award-winning film Green Book has a whitewashing and white savior problem as well. Green Book claims to tell the story of Dr. Donald Waldridge Shirley but his surviving family has called the film "a symphony of lies" (Obie, 2018). These films are considered "Oscar bait" and are designed to win awards and assuage white guilt. Sometimes money makers, but almost always award winners, the list includes Mockingbird, The Help, Green Book, The Blind Side, and many more. As Roxane Gay astutely points out, in Mockingbird, "The black characters - Robinson
Some people love Mockingbird because they look back to a time when things were simpler, when people in the neighborhood or town knew each other, helped each other, interacted more face to face. Nostalgia for the past was part of what Harper Lee was writing about, after all. The book was published in the 1960's from her apartment in New York about her childhood in the 1930's in a small Alabama town. The 1960's were a tumultuous time, a flashpoint for race relations - the height of the Civil Rights Era. One critic pointed out that it was easy to feel good about how far we had come as a society when reading this book, easy for readers - especially white ones - to feel good about how progressive they were as compared to racist white folks from the 1930s even as people across the country were organizing, protesting, and dying in pursuit of basic rights. As Gay points out, some readers are struck by "...a yearning for a simpler time - a uniquely white yearning because it is white people to whom history has been kindest. It is white people who seem to long for the safety of cloistered communities where everyone knows one another, where people knows their place and are assured of what their lives may hold."
I often get pushback at this point when discussing Mockingbird as a problematic piece with family and friends. "Well," they say, "during the time period that Harper Lee was writing about, a white man would have been the only person that could save Tom Robinson. He needed a lawyer, and the only lawyer in that town was white. Do you want to change history? Or just pretend it didn't happen?"
I like Mockingbird. I like the character of Scout, and I love the character of
Barack Obama, in his farewell address, invoked Atticus Finch. "If our democracy is to work in this increasingly diverse nation, each one of us must try to heed the advice of one of the great characters in American fiction, Atticus Finch. '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'" (President Obama's Farewell Address: Full Video and Text, The New York Times). It was a call to our hearts, a call for connection, a call for understanding between groups, across aisles, from one anonymous face behind a computer screen to the next. Obama reassured us all in his speech: "For every two steps forward, it often feels we take one step back. But the long sweep of America has been defined by forward motion, a constant widening of our founding creed to embrace all, and not just some."
Keep teaching the book, but teach others alongside it, expand the American canon to reflect the diversity of people who call this place home, and engage in the difficult conversations about inequality, injustice, and racism that our children need and deserve. We cannot move forward unless we keep pushing. The more of us that wake up and push, the better.
Works Cited:
Gay, Roxane. Lots of People Love 'To Kill a Mockingbird.' Roxane Gay Isn't One of Them. The New York Times. June 18, 2018. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/18/books/reviews/tom-santopietro-why-to-kill-a-mockingbird-matters.html
Kornhaber, Spencer. Obama's Ingenious Mention of Atticus Finch. The Atlantic. Jan. 11, 2017.
Metcalf, Stephen. On First Looking Into To Kill a Mockingbird: How Sentimental and Nostalgic Is It? Slate. June 9, 2006. https://slate.com/culture/2006/06/harper-lee-s-to-kill-a-mockingbird.html
Obie, Brooke. How Green Book and the Hollywood Machine Swallowed Donald Shirley Whole. Shadow and Act. Dec. 14, 2018. https://shadowandact.com/the-real-donald-shirley-green-book-hollywood-swallowed-whole/
President Obama's Farewell Address: Full Video and Text. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/10/us/politics/obama-farewell-address-speech.html
Roisin, Fariha. Why Hollywood's White Savior Obsession is an Extension of Colonialism. Teen Vogue. Sep. 14, 2017. https://www.teenvogue.com/story/hollywoods-white-savior-obsession-colonialism
Santopietro, Tom. Why To Kill a Mockingbird Matters: What Harper Lee's Book and the Iconic American Film Mean to Us Today. St. Martin's Press. 2018.
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