English

I have studied the novel, ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’, by Harper Lee. This novel is set in Alabama in the 1930s, during the Great Depression. The story is told by Scout Finch, a young tomboy, who lives with her lawyer father, Atticus, and her brother, Jem. This novel dealt with many interesting themes but the one which interested me most was the theme of prejudice.

The novel explores prejudice in its many forms - snobbery, social exclusion, religious prejudice and racism. Scout’s hometown, Maycomb, is a typical southern town and is a hotbed of prejudice. Social snobbery is rampant. Scout’s Aunt Alexandra is an incurable snob. She looks down on the Cunninghams because they are poor farmers. She tells Scout that she may not play with Walter Cunningham because ‘he is trash’.

Everybody in Maycomb regards the Ewell family as ‘trash’. They live on a dump and their father spends his welfare money on whiskey. The children would starve if he wasn’t allowed to poach in the local woods. Every year, Maycomb gives them ‘Christmas baskets and the back of its hand’. This shows us the hypocrisy of white people; they will offer some charity at Christmas but they like to pretend that people like the Ewells don’t exist.

People are also prejudiced towards the innocent victim of a cruel father, Boo Radley. Boo has harmed nobody and most people haven’t seen him for years, yet people, like Miss Stephanie Crawford, spread vicious rumours about him and convince children that he is a ‘malevolent phantom’ who eats live squirrels and makes people’s flowers freeze during a cold snap.

The strongest form of prejudice in the novel is racism. While the Ewells are regarded as trash who live among pigs, respectable, hard-working, black people are still seen to be inferior to the Ewells.

When a well-respected African-American man, Tom Robinson, is accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, he is immediately presumed guilty. Atticus says ‘Tom was a dead man the minute Mayella Ewell opened her mouth and screamed’. People in Maycomb are shocked that Atticus agrees to defend Tom in court and they try to stop him from doing so. Atticus’s children are also bullied in school because their father is ‘defending niggers’.

When the all-white jury finds Tom guilty of rape, only the children in the novel are shocked. There wasn’t an iota of medical evidence that Mayella had been raped at all and the evidence suggested that her father had beaten her, yet Tom is still sentenced to death.

While many forms of prejudice are explored, the novel makes it clear that racial prejudice is like a deadly disease, which infects society and leads to the death of innocents.