Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird (14 page)

Mike Papantonio, in his book
In Search of Atticus Finch: A Motivational Book for Lawyers
, well expresses the longing for a balanced life, a good public and private life, that Atticus Finch represents. His aforementioned survey found 76.2 percent of all respondents said, “I need to take more time from my day-to-day practice to improve my quality of life” (27). Papantonio looks nostalgically at the slow-moving, small community–based world of Maycomb where, Papantonio asserts in an obvious oversimplification, “things mean what they mean, people are what they are and seldom change” (32). For him, the book represents an effective counter to the frenzied world of the 1990s with “contentious, combative” trial lawyers, lawyers focused on monetary rewards, and lawyers consumed by stress and burnout (35–36).

Papantonio sees Atticus as the solution to these problems. In his opinion, Atticus is a “tremendously complex yet simply drawn character who possesses almost every attribute a human being and a trial lawyer might wish to have” (11). Papantonio, like the
Harvard Law Review
, speaks of Atticus' ability to link public and private worlds through the “quality” he epitomizes in his functions (11). Atticus represents a person who knows himself, who is defined by his beliefs, values, and lifestyle. In short, he lives a full and meaningful life. One of the biggest issues to Papantonio is the respect in which Atticus is held. “I saw great contrast between the way Atticus is regarded in his community and the way lawyers are regarded today” (25). Today's lawyers, he bemoans, are seen as self-serving rather than serving their communities. Though Papantonio describes Atticus as almost god-like in ennobling “all who come in contact with him” (25), his study of
Mockingbird
is correct in saying that, although many of Atticus' neighbors believe he is wrong and while his friends believe he is naïve and blind and his detractors viciously convey their disapproval of his defending a black man, none excoriates him for being dishonorable (26). On the whole, Atticus has the respect of his community, yet he does not depend upon it. He “does not define his successor value as a person by his level of acceptance or by his material worth” (43). What Atticus stands for is clear and definable. Papantonio, like Ted D. Lee, even goes so far as to encourage lawyers to “develop a habit of asking themselves, ‘What would Atticus Finch do and how would he do it?'” (45), in order to live a balanced and fulfilling life.

The difficulty, again, is that Atticus and his life are much more complex than Papantonio presents. Although Lee herself characterized her tale as “a love story pure and simple” (quoted in Lubet, “Reconstructing Atticus Finch” 1341), Atticus' private life has its weaknesses. Scout herself admits, “Atticus ain't got time to teach me anything. . . . Why he's so tired at night he just sits in the livingroom and reads” (
TKAM
19). Atticus is so deeply involved in his book that he does not even hear his children as they peek in the shutters of Boo Radley's house. In fact, the person who does fulfill the parental role teaching the children, especially about morality, is Calpurnia, the housekeeper. Although Atticus does exemplify and confirm what she teaches (Shaffer, “Learning” 142), Calpurnia remains the teacher, the one who is watching over Scout and Jem during most of their waking hours. In truth, Atticus and his children are fortunate to be surrounded by a number of women who enable him to be a respected attorney with a happy family. Besides Calpurnia (as previously stated), Miss Maudie and Aunt Alexandra also fulfill these maternal roles for Jem and Scout since Atticus has no wife with whom to maintain a relationship and seems not to be seeking one. Also, although the novel occurs in the depths of the Depression and Atticus does assist those who can pay little, he seems to have no material worries: he lives in a comfortable, two-story house and has the money to pay a servant.

So, for all Atticus means to attorneys as both an honorable public servant and a loving father, should he be a hero to lawyers? Examination of his actions fits into the law and literature movement in which narrative literature is used as a mean of improving the moral character of the law and the lives of lawyers. Yet to what extent is it valid and even healthy to use a fictional character to represent a complicated, evolving, and sometimes morally ambiguous profession such as law? Fictional characters face fictional difficulties and challenges and are shaped by their authors to perform actions that might have happened, that, as Aristotle said, are probable and not actual, more universal and singular (353). Ann Althouse takes this tack as she notes that
To Kill a Mockingbird
says much about rape in its own fictional world but little about rape cases in the real world (1367). When honoring Frank Armani, a New York attorney who did not reveal that his client had confessed to him four murders and the place he dumped the bodies, law professor Lisa G. Lerman likened Armani to Atticus but underlined that “the difference is that, unlike Atticus Finch, Frank Armani is a real person” (Hansen 30). A comment by Dershowitz mentioned earlier in this essay is applicable here: one should choose heroic characteristics rather than a heroic person. And, it might be added, choose a real person rather than a fictional character, no matter how multilayered a creation he might be. William H. Simon, too, has questioned whether icons of virtue are what attorneys should look for in novels (1377) or whether they should seek real-life role models.

Nonetheless,
To Kill a Mockingbird
has attracted two generations of lawyers to the profession and, in its depiction of a dedicated, empathetic, and skilled attorney, has inspired hero-worship and impassioned debates, especially over legal ethics and the limitations of the legal system. Lawyers' reactions to the novel reveal their deep need to be seen as respected public servants, individuals with strong moral cores who can effectively navigate their professional and family lives while simultaneously coping with their discomfort with the ethically ambiguous waters that swirl around them.

As fifty years have passed since the novel's publication and nearly fifty years since the film's release—years filled with racial, gender, and technological revolutions—the question remains: Will the novel and film still hold their appeal and power? How dated are they? The film, as a classic of American cinema, will certainly continue to be watched by lovers of movies, even black-and-white, non-digitized ones. But, if the small poll of my freshman university pre-law class is any indication, it is the book itself that will endure and continue to draw young people to the law. On the first day of this fall's semester, I asked the thirty students in the class, “Who has read
To Kill a Mockingbird
?” An amazing seventeen out of thirty had. I then asked how many had seen the movie. Hands went down until only two remained. Finally, I asked the seventeen how many had decided to explore becoming a lawyer because of the book: three answered affirmatively. Thus, either the book inspired them to want to become lawyers or they were motivated to read the book because of their interest in law. Either way, the legal profession will continue to benefit from a novel written about three children and the summer when they first had the idea of making Boo Radley come out.

Note

1. Thomas Shaffer earlier commented on Atticus' lie to protect Boo Radley as an example of a gentleman-lawyer story where the lawyer strives to protect the weak who are not weak. The gentleman-lawyer cannot prevent pain so he “hides from what he cannot do in the delusions of his optimism. These delusions corrupt his ethic by turning it from an ethic of the virtues to an ethic of honor and shame” (
American Lawyer
93).

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