Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird (41 page)

The Other of a Different Order

Perhaps it takes an “other” to recognize an “other,” for in Atticus we truly meet an “other” of a different order. What makes Atticus different is complex. Some of this is reflected in aphorisms (or Atticisms
8
), which tell us something about him—his character, principles, and values.

Early on, when Scout is having difficulty with her teacher and classmates, Atticus says, “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” (
TKAM
33),
9
an approach that Atticus spells out to Jem in detail toward the end when Jem is worried because Bob Ewell tells Atticus he is going to get him (
TKAM
249). To Atticus we owe the phrase that “it's a sin to kill a mockingbird,” though it falls to Miss Maudie to explain to the children afterward what he means by the statement (
TKAM
103).

Equally important is Atticus' shrewd understanding of human nature, amply demonstrated when Scout's recognition of Mr. Cunningham saves Atticus from a mob, and he points out that it can take “an eight-year-old child to bring 'em to their senses” (
TKAM
174–176, 179), or later when he explains to Jem that in that Maycomb jury, you can see what happens when something comes between “twelve reasonable men in everyday life” and “reason” (
TKAM
251–252).
10

For Atticus, living with oneself is a precondition of living with God; they might almost be synonymous. Asked why he insists on defending Tom Robinson, he says he couldn't go to church and worship God if he didn't. Told by Scout that most people think he is wrong, Atticus says that they are entitled to their opinions but “before I can live with other folks I've got to live with myself. The one thing that doesn't abide by majority rule is a person's conscience” (
TKAM
86, 120).

No wonder the locals find him puzzling if not irritating. Even in his own family, he is something of a loner and an enigma (
TKAM
94). He is a problem not only for his sister but also for his children. “Atticus,” says Scout to Miss Maudie, “can't do anything” (
TKAM
104).

He is not like other dads . . . too old . . . unable to engage in rough and tumble . . . gives Jem a gun but won't teach him to shoot . . . never does anything interesting . . . doesn't hunt, play poker, fish, drink or smoke . . . just works in an office, sits, and reads . . . wears glasses and is half blind in one eye. (
TKAM
102–103)

But then again (on the principle that it takes one to recognize one), Miss Maudie provides a useful corrective by providing a picture of a dad to be proud of (
TKAM
104, 111),
11
though not perhaps without a Freudian slip when she lets it out that Atticus is not at all like other people.
12
With Atticus, “what you see is what you get” and (in a phrase which Scout later recalls) “he's the same in the court-room as he is in the public streets” (
TKAM
226).

In his toughest test, toward the end of the novel, when initial evidence (based on Scout's report) suggests that Jem was responsible for the death of Bob Ewell and therefore the case would have to come before the county court, Sheriff Heck Tate has other evidence to show that Bob Ewell fell on his knife and killed himself. Atticus suspects Tate of a cover-up and, despite Jem being his own son, insists that everything must come out in the open. He does not want Jem starting out with something like this over his head, adding, “If this thing's hushed up it will be a simple denial to Jem of the way I've tried to raise him” (
TKAM
312 ff).

Such a man inevitably amuses some, puzzles others, and probably angers as many as he pleases. He has a natural, if unintended, flair to keep the tongues wagging; is clearly not everybody's cup of tea; is possibly not the sort of man you would want to meet up with in a bar; and is unlikely ever to be the soul of a party. He doesn't easily build close relations with anyone and has few friends, associates, and supporters, almost as if people respect him but don't like him. Yet Atticus risks his reputation if not his life in order to be himself, with all that that entails for himself and for his family, and few will doubt that he is unique, his own man,
sui generis
.

What motivates him is a matter for speculation. Unlike Browning's Pippa,
13
Atticus would probably never say, “God's in his heaven, All's right with the world!” but he always seems to have a kind of hunch that all was well—the kind of hunch we all need in childhood if we are to mature as we grow. He never doubts who he is, where he belongs, and whom he belongs to, and these traits are more than enough to give him sufficient confidence to face life for himself and with plenty left over for others. In any community he would be a
distinctive other
.

The Distinctive Other

What enables Atticus to develop his hunch is never spelled out, but the seeds may be found in relationships within his own family, particularly with his sister, Alexandra.

Atticus is other to Alexandra. Alexandra is other to Atticus.
14
On family traditions, standards, values, and social graces they are poles apart, and it is only as they come to terms with their own personal backgrounds and problems, in a particular situation and in the interests of others (in their case, the rearing of children), that each (the distinctive and the exclusive) morphs to create a
balancing other
,
15
rather like the “sail and keel” in marriage or the “good guy/bad guy” in management.

Life and relationships for a balancing other are never entirely smooth, sometimes creating harmony, sometimes strife (as siblings who have struggled to find their own niche in a family know only too well), but it is in the balancing other that we see the potential for a new world. To Alexandra, her family is special—and different—so when Atticus has opened Scout's eyes to a different view of the Cunninghams and Scout tells Aunt Alexandra that she is proposing to invite Walter to tea and even to stay the night, not surprisingly, she is firmly rebuffed. “Why not, auntie?” she asks, “they're good folks.” Alexandra has no wish to challenge the fact that they are “good folks” but replies, “They're not our kind of folks.” But then we hear Atticus telling Scout that “most of this Old Family stuff's foolishness because everybody's family's just as old as everybody else's,” and that includes “colored folks and Englishmen,” thereby essentially demolishing the one thing that makes them different from the Cunninghams, the Ewells, and the rest and thus destroying one of the myths that props up not only Alexandra but so many others like her (
TKAM
255–259).

With that sharp division, rearing children is bound to be a bone of contention, as Atticus accepts Scout as something of a tomboy while Aunt Alexandra is committed to making her a lady (
TKAM
257).
16
So when Atticus feels obliged to give Scout and Jem a lecture to make them aware that they are “not from run-of-the mill people [but] the product of several generations' gentle breeding,” Scout immediately hears Alexandra rather than Atticus in the lecture, and by the time he has finished neither Scout nor Jem has any doubt that their father was simply repeating what his sister had asked him to say, a view confirmed when he ends the conversation telling them not to worry about anything. “When I heard that,” says Scout, “I knew he had come back to us” (
TKAM
151–152).

Further tensions come to light over Calpurnia. When Alexandra is not getting what she wants with Scout, for example, she tells Atticus Calpurnia must go. He has a daughter to think of, and Alexandra feels that while she is around, Calpurnia is no longer needed. But Atticus will not hear of it. Alexandra gets in only two words to object and then she is silenced immediately and the matter is considered closed (
TKAM
155–156). The balanced others may not have reached agreement and probably never will, but they have come to terms with each other, learned to respect each other and to live together. Each knows and recognizes what the other will and will not do. They also know they both have to live in Maycomb.

There still remains however one crucial difference between them. Whereas one balanced other (Alexandra) is still most at home among the exclusives,
17
the other (Atticus) has one other facet to his character that distinguishes him from most. He cannot countenance the killing of a mockingbird, and with it goes a distinctive yen for that other whom so far we have not mentioned and who needs help most of all—the
victimized other
, of which there are three classic examples: the rejected, the ignored, and the not needed.

The Victimized Other

Tom Robinson
—to all intents and purposes a quiet, unassuming fellow but a fall guy and a scapegoat—is rejected, caught in the crossfire of more powerful forces and prejudice, and the fact that we know so little about him tells its own story.
18
For Atticus, Tom is one of many. Atticus has to do what he does in order to help.

Mayella Ewell
is ignored. When Atticus asks her in court if she has any friends, Mayella seems not to know what he means, almost as if he were making fun of her. Scout then reflects what she knows Atticus is feeling when she says Mayella “must have been the loneliest person in the world”; not so much rejected as ignored, and as sad as “what Jem called a mixed child” (
TKAM
218).
19

Dill
is just not needed, and he knows it and feels it (
TKAM
158). He scarcely counts in the role of life, the victim of an indifference that is the antithesis of love. He arrives and departs very much like a summer holiday, has ideas and drive but is barely taken seriously. He knows his face will be forgotten once he closes the door behind him. Nobody except Jem and Scout seem to notice him at all, though (like father, like daughter) Scout understands—she
knows
she is needed and that Dill isn't.
20
Dill's contact with Atticus is minimal, though Dill clearly regards him with respect if not fear. Thus, when Dill turns up unexpectedly in Maycomb after running away from home, the way Atticus calmly accepts the situation, deals with the essentials, and leaves the judgments to others, is a fair reflection of how he relates to anybody and everybody (
TKAM
158–160).

Tom, Mayella, and Dill are not natural others. Unlike Atticus and the rest, they have done nothing to merit otherness. Victims of the attitudes of others, they have each had otherness thrust upon them.
21
Yet as we see Atticus in action with the victims we begin to see Atticus, the distinctive other, as “the other for all others.”

Though very much one of the society to which he belongs, Atticus almost seems to have come from another world and has found no personal difficulty maintaining the values of that other world come what may. Atticus launches no drive or campaign to promote his philosophy, but those closest to him (a few) find him an inspiration. More general reactions vary from admiration to puzzlement, from appreciation to anger, and by the end of the story, it is questionable whether anything really has changed as a result of his presence. Perhaps that was because change depended not on him but on the Maycomb community. It was up to them to write the sequel and for us, the readers, to imagine what it might be, either in their situation or in a similar one of our own world. Before we can do that, however, there is yet one more other.

The Corporate Other

The
corporate other
is not dissimilar from all the other forms except that it finds expression in groups and communities rather than individuals and therefore can be more insidious. At its heart is the fundamental nature of the otherness we started with: a suspicion, fear, anxiety relating to the unknown (
mysterium
) coupled with a desire to preserve one's identity and linked with an inability to achieve detachment and closure (
fascinans
). In Maycomb the focus is race and color. In other places and other times it may be religion, politics, or gender, possibly even language or dress.

At one level, it is what leads children in the playground to gang up against one who presents no threat but who is slightly out of the norm. At another level, it may lead to more serious attacks (or defense), ranging from minor skirmishes to wars and rumors of war between races, tribes, and nation states; it can and does surface anywhere.
22

In Maycomb, both sides subscribe to a corporate otherness and both seem to accept it. History may explain how it came about, but it takes more than history to tell us how and why it persists. In one sense, nobody in Maycomb is responsible for it. It is bigger and more far-reaching than any of them. In another sense everybody in Maycomb is responsible. So how
does
corporate otherness persist and
why
?

The idea that some group (such as the Ku Klux Klan) is actively promoting it in Maycomb seems unlikely, and there is no evidence for it in Lee's novel. What seems more likely is that Maycomb residents are all victims in different ways of something that has been there for as long as they can remember. They have grown up with it and learned to live with it. Perhaps, as with our growth from childhood to maturity, what began as a perfectly reasonable suspicion or anxiety has taken over. Eventually, this emotion hardens with age to the point that it becomes little more than a deceptive creation or crude invention that nobody has the courage to challenge. Instead it is in the interests of some people to preserve it, and most individuals prefer not to think about its negative consequences too closely.