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To Kill a Mockingbird: Chapters 1 - 6

#172: Nov. - Jan. 2021 (Fiction)
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Chris OConnor

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To Kill a Mockingbird: Chapters 1 - 6

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To Kill a Mockingbird
Please use this thread to discuss Chapters 1 through 6.
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Harry Marks
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Re: To Kill a Mockingbird: Chapters 1 - 6

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Just getting started.

I am reading with several notions in the back of my mind. First, I want to discern the outlines of "Go Set a Watchman" in this classic tale of heroism. Who has remained unaffected by Atticus Finch standing for simple truth and equality before the law, despite the narrow racism of his town? Yet many years later Harper Lee set the record straight by spelling out the fact that he had feet of clay. I want to give some thought to the way Atticus was part of his setting, as Lee would later have it, even if a special part of it.

And that is right there in the beginning. I am on about the 4th page of the edition I got hold of, and Finch is the name of the fellow who founded a nearby town, Finch's Landing, and Atticus is the descendant who went away to law school and who was elected to the state legislature. He is ordinary, but he also has standing, somewhat more than the average of the culture around him. When he eventually rises to heroism, there will be echoes of the macho narcissism featured in our time, because he shames the townsfolk, and as we know, shame is toxic.

The other thing I am looking for is the rumor that Truman Capote re-wrote it for Lee, to make it the monster success it became. Did he write in the heroism? I think he wrote in Boo Radley, the character hiding in the shadows, symbolizing the shame that is so fundamental to polite, respectable society. Shame that Capote evidently knew a thing or two about.

Rumor has it that Capote was "Dill", the neighbor boy who shows up and disrupts their narrow world, bounded on one end by the Radley place and on the other by Mrs. Dubose, a lady undescribed except as "just plain hell". These boundaries keep them within shouting distance of Calpurnia, the cook, but also keep them from encountering the scary things at the borders.
Last edited by Harry Marks on Thu Oct 29, 2020 3:06 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: To Kill a Mockingbird: Chapters 1 - 6

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It's known, of course, that Lee helped Capote in Kansas with In Cold Blood research, but Capote helping Lee seems to lack evidence. It doesn't seem likely that Capote would have kept it quiet! I had thought that Lee's reworking the book with her editor at Lippincott was accepted as how the book evolved over a two-year period. I saw the recent "American Masters" on Lee, in which the rumor was mentioned. The program didn't give the rumor creedence.

I haven't managed to read Go Set a Watchman yet. Partly, this is from dismay that Lee apparently first conceived Atticus as more or less in-step with the bigotry of his time.
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Re: To Kill a Mockingbird: Chapters 1 - 6

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To Kill a Mockingbird

I am going to read this book, as it is so famous, and I have never seen the movie or read it before. All I know about it is that Atticus Finch (played by the dashingly handsome Gregory Peck in the movie) is a lawyer who defends a black man who is wrongly accused, in a context of the extreme racism of the Southern USA.

Now I have just read the first chapter (found a free pdf online) and was intrigued by its depiction of how the rigid caste system in this rural county creates a strong sense of social capital, with the community appalled by people who do not conform to the expectations of regular local interaction. That is so completely different from my situation, where cars, television and the internet mean that I barely know my neighbours, and find them withdrawn and difficult to talk to, rather like the strange Radley House in To Kill a Mockingbird. If everyone had to walk everywhere, we would all know our neighbourhood so much better.

Some of the lines that struck me in the first chapter.

When the maid Calpurnia disparaged old Radley after his death, “we looked at her in surprise, for Calpurnia rarely commented on the ways of white people.”

“Being Southerners, it was a source of shame to some members of the family that we had no recorded ancestors on either side of the Battle of Hastings. All we had was Simon Finch, a fur-trapping apothecary from Cornwall whose piety was exceeded only by his stinginess.”

“I said if he wanted to take a broad view of the thing, it really began with Andrew Jackson. If General Jackson hadn’t run the Creeks up the creek, Simon Finch would never have paddled up the Alabama, and where would we be if he hadn’t?”

“Simon, having forgotten his teacher’s dictum on the possession of human chattels, bought three slaves and with their aid established a homestead on the banks of the Alabama River some forty miles above Saint Stephens.”

“Atticus’s office in the courthouse contained little more than a hat rack, a spittoon, a checkerboard and an unsullied Code of Alabama.”

“Somehow, it was hotter then: a black dog suffered on a summer’s day; 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.”

“When I was almost six and Jem was nearly ten, our summertime boundaries (within calling distance of Calpurnia) were Mrs. Henry Lafayette Dubose’s house two doors to the north of us, and the Radley Place three doors to the south. We were never tempted to break them.”
“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 down, and peeped in windows. When people’s azaleas froze in a cold snap, it was because he had breathed on them.”

“The Radleys, welcome anywhere in town, kept to themselves, a predilection unforgivable in Maycomb. They did not go to church, Maycomb’s principal recreation, but worshiped at home; Mrs. Radley seldom if ever crossed the street for a mid-morning coffee break with her neighbors, and certainly never joined a missionary circle.”

“The shutters and doors of the Radley house were closed on Sundays, another thing alien to Maycomb’s ways: closed doors meant illness and cold weather only. Of all days Sunday was the day for formal afternoon visiting: ladies wore corsets, men wore coats, children wore shoes. But to climb the Radley front steps and call, “He-y,” of a Sunday afternoon was something their neighbors never did.”
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Re: To Kill a Mockingbird: Chapters 1 - 6

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Here is a great discussion on the "Battle of Hastings" reference.

https://history.stackexchange.com/quest ... lees-novel
"Southerners got social status from being able to trace their genealogy back to the colonial period, and then to England, you were mostly socially OK if it ended there. Thus "back to the Battle of Hastings" is a wry exaggeration (or what the English might call "sarcasm")...

The Battle of Hastings [opening William the Conqueror's invasion from France in 1066] was arguably the most important event in (modern) English history. Most prominent English families had men engaged in it on one side or the other. Not being "represented" in what as arguably the "creation" of modern England was a source of concern to lineage conscious English families.

After he won, William the Conqueror compiled a list of major landholders in the so-called Domesday Book. Most of these landowners, by definition, had some family member fight at Hastings because of the feudal system. Not having anyone in the family represented there after so many generations of intermarriage signified a lack of feudal ancestors with status, at least to some.

A commenter reasonably observed that "not everyone considers 950 years ago to be 'modern.'" That's the way that most people on Stack Exchange would feel. But the question was why did the author depict a character from the middle of the 20th century Alabama as using the Battle of Hastings as a "frame of reference."

This character would have been a contemporary of Alabama's Governor George Wallace who (in) famously said, "segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever." This meant, "Your social status of today is your status of tomorrow, and forever." A person who shared that mindset would care deeply about whether their family had or didn't have ancestors going back "forever," (e.g. to the Battle of Hastings).

Southerners were more likely to feel this way than Northerners because a larger percentage of (white) Southerners were of English descent. Also, a larger percentage of English Southerners were "gentlemen" settlers, as opposed to e.g. Puritans, and therefore even more class conscious than other Englishmen.
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Re: To Kill a Mockingbird: Chapters 1 - 6

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I read the first three chapters and find them to be a wonderfully skillful evocation of childhood. Perhaps Lee's success with that should be the basis of the book's lasting fame, ahead of even the book's moral message. Scout may be right up there with Huck Finn among first-person narrators in American fiction.

I could see some similarity in Scout's small-town experience and mine, at least in regard to scary people becoming legendary exaggerations, fun for kids to tell stories about and maybe use to prove their mettle, as Jem did. There were always a few people who were different or eccentric, and always they were rarely seen, adding to their mystique. In view of the later theme of the book, I wonder if it's significant that the Radleys had at least the privilege of being left alone in their difference, being white. Boo's wounding of his mother didn't result in his being taken from the family for any great length of time. Kids are always aware of difference, which Lee also shows us with the characters of Dill, the Cunningham boy and the Ewell boy. Again, there was acceptance of such people even if they were kept at arm's length.

A few things to note: the Finches are poor, yet they can afford a black cook and housekeeper. The kids call their widower father by his first name, which must have been untraditional. The father-child relationship is cooly described by Scout: "Jem and I found our father satisfactory: he played with us, read to us, and treated us with courteous detachment."
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Re: To Kill a Mockingbird: Chapters 1 - 6

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Robert Tulip wrote:Here is a great discussion on the "Battle of Hastings" reference.

https://history.stackexchange.com/quest ... lees-novel
"Southerners got social status from being able to trace their genealogy back to the colonial period, and then to England, you were mostly socially OK if it ended there. Thus "back to the Battle of Hastings" is a wry exaggeration (or what the English might call "sarcasm")...

Southerners were more likely to feel this way than Northerners because a larger percentage of (white) Southerners were of English descent. Also, a larger percentage of English Southerners were "gentlemen" settlers, as opposed to e.g. Puritans, and therefore even more class conscious than other Englishmen.
Nice. It is a nearly forgotten part of American culture, this ancestor worship. My great aunt made a big deal of the ancestor who was on the Mayflower (and who was apparently at one point a major landowner in Massachusetts). The Daughters of the American Revolution would endlessly commemorate the bravery of military men, and, as with the Ladies' Auxiliary of the American Legion, strove mightily in most of America to exclude Black people. Deep Southern roots but also allegiance to the past and to social hierarchy per se.

Just a side note. The Civil War has sometimes been characterized as a war refighting the English Civil War, with the Cavaliers represented by the landholders of the South and the Roundheads being represented by the staunch levelers of New England. It's easy to oversell such claims, but I think it is also an interesting insight into American culture(s).

Australia surely has its own versions of these tensions, with Irish roots, Catholicism and the feeling of superiority to aboriginal folk all playing major roles in the social dramas.
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Re: To Kill a Mockingbird: Chapters 1 - 6

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DWill wrote:I read the first three chapters and find them to be a wonderfully skillful evocation of childhood. Perhaps Lee's success with that should be the basis of the book's lasting fame, ahead of even the book's moral message. Scout may be right up there with Huck Finn among first-person narrators in American fiction.
I had the same reaction. I was thinking, much of the time, "No wonder teachers assign this book." It is so relatable, with most of us having some memory of those feelings at the beginning of participation in larger social life, and also some distance from them. And Lee is so good at pulling them out and helping us feel in the middle of the process, for example feeling sympathy for the confusion and mortification of the poor teacher who did not understand the social rankings or the implications of poverty.

I am quite willing to let go of the notion of Truman Capote making the book work. Lee's voice is the same wry commentator that comes through in "Watchman", but ratcheted down in its worldliness to remember what it was like to have "You're getting more and more like a girl every day," be a clinching argument in the battle for control between brother and sister.

I am, on a little further reflection, struck by the genius of using the emerging child's perspective to gradually reveal the status hierarchies that the ending of the book revolves around. The kids have picked up a sense of how it works, and they know the shame of being on the lower end of one of these comparisons, but they can still see the world on its face without filtering their own feelings through the requirements of status. They glimpse the workings of the adult world, but they are also mystified by many aspects, and they treasure an adult who will play it straight with them and explain while giving them some tools for resisting being sucked into the nastier demonizations.

This business of hidden emotions is so pervasive in life, and the story so shot through with them, that it becomes obvious how Boo Radley can symbolize all that dark mystery.
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Re: To Kill a Mockingbird: Chapters 1 - 6

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Harry Marks wrote:It is a nearly forgotten part of American culture, this ancestor worship. My great aunt made a big deal of the ancestor who was on the Mayflower (and who was apparently at one point a major landowner in Massachusetts). The Daughters of the American Revolution would endlessly commemorate the bravery of military men, and, as with the Ladies' Auxiliary of the American Legion, strove mightily in most of America to exclude Black people. Deep Southern roots but also allegiance to the past and to social hierarchy per se.
Chatting about classic novels is a great pleasure, helping us to think about history and identity. The term “ancestor worship” is something usually associated with non-Western cultures such as China, but it is a perfectly apt description of the attitude of racial veneration associated with the genteel superiority of the American south.

The point of the Battle of Hastings is that the Normans established themselves as a racial nobility, a military ruling class who built formidable castles across the whole English countryside to dominate and oppress the Anglo-Saxon and Celtic inhabitants, creating a model which the English imperialists were to apply around the world, including in the American South.

A few years ago I was able to visit Rochester Castle in Kent, and was amazed to see this straightforward Norman military technology of building a keep as a system of physical power. Therefore for a Southern aristocrat to have a lineage that goes back to the Norman Conquest illustrates their easy ability to apply social cruelty in a way that assumes divine right – as the British Royal mottos say, “God and My Gun”, and “If you don’t like it then tough luck”.

It makes me wonder about Lee’s mention of ‘both sides of the Battle of Hastings’, since having ancestors on the losing side might be seen as a mark of shame.
Harry Marks wrote:
Just a side note. The Civil War has sometimes been characterized as a war refighting the English Civil War, with the Cavaliers represented by the landholders of the South and the Roundheads being represented by the staunch levelers of New England. It's easy to oversell such claims, but I think it is also an interesting insight into American culture(s).
That makes good sense. Associating the antebellum attitude with the cavaliers creates the connection with knighthood, horse riding, armour wearing, and a general insouciant assumption of right to rule. There is a cultural evolution there going back to the Norman conquest.

And similarly, the English roundheads under Cromwell were Puritans, closely associated with the Mayflower, with strongly democratic attitudes of the equality of all believers and the importance of Biblical ethics. The emergence of anti-slavery among English Christian leaders such as Wilberforce and Wesley reflected this problem of conscience that owning slaves was incompatible with Christian morality. Just found this relevant thesis - The relationship between the Methodist church, slavery and politics, 1784-1844 https://rdw.rowan.edu/cgi/viewcontent.c ... ontext=etd
Harry Marks wrote:Australia surely has its own versions of these tensions, with Irish roots, Catholicism and the feeling of superiority to aboriginal folk all playing major roles in the social dramas.
Indeed, and I have just had an essay accepted for publication titled Waltzing Matilda and the Myth of Peaceful Settlement, looking at the elisions of genocide in Australian history.

Both black and convict ancestry have shifted in perceptions, from colonial views that ‘a touch of the tar’ required total social exclusion to a much more egalitarian modern culture that celebrates outsider heritage, at least ostensibly. The sectarian tension between Protestant and Catholic dominated Australian culture until the 1960s, with Aboriginal people only recognised as human in a national referendum in 1967.

Australia and the USA are twin societies as settler imperialist cultures established by the English, who owed their great success to the fact they were the cruellest people on the planet.
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Re: To Kill a Mockingbird: Chapters 1 - 6

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How did Arthur "Boo" Radley get that way?

Talking to her adult friend Miss Maudie Atkinson, Scout is told "You are too young to understand it," and "There are just some kind of men who -- who're so busy worrying about the next world they've never learned to live in this one, and you can look down the street and see the results."

Arthur Radley's father, and then his brother Nathan, kept him inside because of his rebellious behavior as part of the town's only youth gang. And so he became "Boo", never daring to go out and talk to people, never daring to interact and be social. The others in the gang were sent away and taught a trade and became productive members of society, but Arthur withered and became a recluse.

The Radleys were Hardshell "foot-washing" Baptists. I read a little about them on Wikipedia, and they don't sound so terribly repressive by doctrine. But they believed pleasure was a sin and women were sin by definition, according to Miss Maudie. They scolded her and threatened her with Hell for gardening. This Calvinist striving to be in the Elect made them resist socializing with others and the family was already isolated before Arthur's great crime.

When Boo leaves gum and trinkets for the children and they eventually leave a note back to him, Nathan cements the knothole in the tree.

I had not absorbed any of this the previous time I read the book, and certainly not from the movie. Now it seems to me that Lee was making a specific statement by having Boo Radley emerge from this Hell created by Heaven.

It reminds me of two statements. One, passed around a lot since 911, is "to get good men to do horrible things, it takes religion." (Feel free to correct the quote). The other is Atticus saying (and Miss Maudie unpacking, I gather from Wikipedia) "it's a sin to kill a mockingbird." I believe that Harper Lee meant to combine those ideas with the backstory of a loveless, merciless zealotry that had twisted a man's own son into a ghost, bereft of any engagement with life or community.
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