Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird (5 page)

Moral Character

The answers contributing to the emerging theme of Moral Character demonstrate only a limited degree of critical literacy. The answer identifying “perhaps the only chink in [Atticus'] armor” is critically sophisticated in that it challenges the easy and widespread classification of characters into good and evil and even hints at the power of Lee's narrative in shaping the readers' opinion of the characters: “we [as readers] are supposed to like Atticus.” Even the double turn in the short paragraph of this teacher's answer—with one “however” after another—shows an interest in ongoing exploration rather than premature judgment and closure. This answer thus demonstrates an approach aligned with reader response criticism and perhaps even with deconstruction, as the answer presents (in comparison to many of the other answers) a “reading against the grain.” Two posted questions outside of the working sample also draw explicitly on reader response criticism; these questions come from tenth-grade students and ask how the reader “has . . . been positioned” to respond to specific characters in the novel. No other clear instances of reader response criticism are evident in the working sample or the full collection of postings. Instead, when talking about the characters in the novel, the answers tend to reduce the literary work to a moral lesson on how and how not to behave. Such answers pursue what is called a pre-critical approach; they seek to find a moral or general truth rather than to examine the particulars of the narrative being discussed. Critical literacy might be improved by exploring how the narrative is not impartial; the novel establishes for the reader a strong sense of familiarity with some characters (the Finches, in particular) and a lack of identification with others (such as the Ewell family and the hypocritical schoolteachers). The central symbol of the mockingbird—which is identified in numerous answers by teachers, all or nearly all of whom uncritically follow the novel's prompting, as a pure and innocent creature that does nothing but sing—can similarly be interrogated or deconstructed through a parallel reading of Ted Hughes' poem “Thrushes,” which portrays the little song birds of the title as cold, calculating killers.

Life Lessons

The bulk of the answers contributing to the emerging theme of Life Lessons similarly demonstrate only a limited degree of critical literacy, particularly in the area of gender criticism. The answers do not demonstrate the thoughts of resisting readers, readers who question both the promptings of the text and their own presuppositions as they make sense of the reading. The answer in the working sample that addresses Scout's education in gender identity or gender performance talks without irony about what “true Southern ladies” do and do not do. While a theoretical sampling of the full collection of answers shows that some teachers gently criticize what they see as Aunt Alexandra's “zeal to feminize Scout” by making her wear a dress and attend a formal tea party, for example, the teachers' posts in the full Question & Answer section tend toward a normalized reading of Scout's gender identity development. The transition from wearing overalls to wearing a dress is commonly described by teachers as desirable progress or maturation. Scout “moves through her tomboy stage,” one teacher writes. Another teacher writes that she “has developed from a little rascal to a young lady who was just escorted from her home” (this teacher's reading or recollection contradicts the text, which repeatedly asserts that Scout, dressed in her overalls, does the escorting: “he allowed me to lead him,” “I led him,” “I would lead him” [
TKAM
319]). A third teacher comments that “[p]art of the charm of the novel is watching Scout, the character, mature from a tomboy to the young lady who is narrating the story” and, in a separate answer, that “Scout has grown from a naive, tom boy to a sensitive and compassionate young lady.” Only one answer outside the working sample, written by a doctoral student, identifies “gender ambiguity” and “gender slippage” in several characters in the novel. Critical literacy might be improved by encouraging readers to resist taking gender identities for granted, to focus on what the text says (e.g., Scout escorts Boo, she is not escorted by him), and to explore a wider range of possible meanings for the particular words, phrases, and scenes in the novel. For example, there are only two brief discussions in the full set of answers of the “morphodite snowman” in the novel and no consideration by teachers of the different meanings of the word “morphodite.” In the American South, as demonstrated in various entries cited in the
Oxford English Dictionary
, “morphodite” has been used not only as a shortened form of “hermaphrodite” but also as a term for homosexual men or women, particularly those who engage in gender-transgressive behavior or dress. The term “morphodite” is used in this sense in the United States before 1941 and appears in Truman Capote's 1952 play
Grass Harp
as well as in later writings by other gay men, including Edmund White (see
The Beautiful Room Is Empty
, 1988) and Will Roscoe (see
Zuni Man-Woman
, 1991).

Text and Context

The answers contributing to the emerging theme of Text and Context again demonstrate little critical literacy. The teachers' answers often pay close attention to the “world” within the novel but little attention to the world around it. Answers often include glancing historical references as well as implicit or explicit references to timeless “human behavior” or “human nature.” One such answer includes the statement “[A]s so often happens, people turn their hatred upon the person who simply reminds them of what they are. So, Bob Ewell threatens Atticus.” Critical literacy might be improved by encouraging students to view the narrative of Lee's novel as a retelling of or a response to one or more “real-world” developments in the civil rights struggles. The fate of Tom Robinson may be viewed in connection with rape trials or lynchings of black men, such as the Scottsboro boys' trial in the mid-1930s or the murder of Emmett Till in the mid-1950s. The small detail at the trial scene that “[f]our Negroes rose and gave [Jem, Scout, Dill, and Reverend Sykes] their front-row seats” (
TKAM
164) may bring to mind the Montgomery bus boycott. The visit to Calpurnia's church, the relegation of blacks to the “far corner of the square” before the trial (
TKAM
160, 162), and a number of other details in the novel may encourage students to reflect on the doctrine of “separate but equal” and the
Brown v. Board of Education
ruling. Finally, Mrs. Merriweather's condemnation of Northern hypocrites in chapter 24—“People up there set 'em free, but you don't see 'em settin' at the table with 'em” (
TKAM
234)—may provide an opportunity to explore the sit-ins at lunch counters across the South that were just about to start as Lee's novel went to press.

A theoretical sampling of the entire Question & Answer section on
To Kill a Mockingbird
supports this characterization of the teachers' answers as lacking familiarity with different approaches in critical literacy and literary theory. In addition to other text searches, a search for the formal terms for different critical approaches yielded no instances of use of the following terms (and, where applicable, the adjectival forms of the terms): New Criticism, Marxism, New Historicism, and feminism.

Limitations

The strong presence of the three emerging themes and the weak presence of critical literacy perhaps cannot be generalized beyond the group of teachers who have recently contributed to the Question & Answer section on Lee's novel at eNotes.com. Such generalization is limited by the examination in this study of postings on only one Internet site. Reviewing a range of online discussion forums and using surveys and interviews to reach teachers who are not active in online discussion forums may reveal additional emerging themes and varying levels of critical literacy. Indeed, such a wider study may lead to a fuller understanding of how teachers at the middle school, high school, and first-year college level talk about Lee's novel. This limitation is true of all qualitative research; there is always more data to consider. Grounded theory and other methods of qualitative research seek to maximize the opportunities for gaining in-depth information and new insights, explains Michael Patton; these methods do not seek to produce a general “truth” that can be applied with absolute certainty across different settings and different populations.

Conclusion

Teachers in middle school, high school, and first-year college classrooms do have a lot to say about
To Kill a Mockingbird
, and what they say about the novel often reflects their strong attachment to the work and their equally strong interest in sharing that passion with students. Furthermore, what they say reflects a strong familiarity with text-based approaches to literature but a weak familiarity with critical literacy and literary theories and their possible applications to the novel for the purpose of moving past initial, often predetermined readings of the text. Perhaps surprisingly, the answers posted by teachers active at the senior high school and first-year college level do not show a higher level of theoretical sophistication than answers posted by teachers at the middle school and junior high school level.

Teachers should not be expected to engage their students solely in the abstract realm of critical literacy and literary theories, of course, and the absence of critical content in the answers posted by teachers in the
To Kill a Mockingbird
part of the Question & Answer section at eNotes.com should not be taken as an indication that the project of critical literacy has failed across the board. The project is worthwhile and, given more time and the creation of more resources tailored specifically to the needs of teachers of the novel at the secondary level, may very well produce more sophisticated students as well as new, insightful approaches to Lee's novel. When it comes to
To Kill a Mockingbird
—or pretty much any other complex work, for that matter—there is always much more to say.

Notes

1. This essay may be the first to apply a simplified grounded theory approach to the
To Kill a Mockingbird
part of the Question & Answer section at eNotes.com, but it does not represent the first time that Lee's novel has been mentioned in a study using grounded theory. At least two earlier studies have used grounded theory to explore the impact of different literary works on readers, including
To Kill a Mockingbird
. See the cited works by Els Andriga and by Caroline Clark and Carmen Medina.

2
.
I am not interested in taking part in the “persistent rhetorical wrestle” (Holton i) between the two cofounders of the grounded theory method, who now argue publicly over its methodology, but my approach draws more from the model of Barney Glaser than from the more highly complex one of Anselm Strauss and Juliet Corbin.

Works Cited

Andringa, Els. “The Interface between Fiction and Life: Patterns of Identification in Reading Autobiographies.”
Poetics Today
25.2 (Summer 2004): 205–240.

Bogdan, Robert C., and Sari K. Biklen.
Qualitative Research for Education: An Introduction to Theory and Methods
. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1998.

Capote, Truman.
The Grass Harp, a Play
. New York: Random House, 1952.

Clark, Caroline, and Carmen Medina. “How Reading and Writing Literacy Narratives Affect Preservice Teachers' Understandings of Literacy, Pedagogy, and Multiculturalism.”
Journal of Teacher Education
51.1 (January–February 2000): 63–76.

Glaser, Barney G.
The Grounded Theory Perspective: Conceptualisation Contrasted with Description
. Mill Valley, CA: Sociology Press, 2001.

Glaser, Barney G., and Anselm L. Strauss.
The Discovery of Grounded Theory: Strategies for Qualitative Research
. Chicago: Aldine, 1967.

Hagood, Margaret C. “Critical Literacy for Whom?”
Reading Research and Instruction
41 (2002): 247–264.

Holton, Judith A. “From the Editor.”
The Grounded Theory Review
6.3 (June 2007): i–iii.

Lee, Harper.
To Kill a Mockingbird
. 1960. New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2006.

McLaughlin, Maureen, and Glenn De Voogd. “Critical Literacy as Comprehension: Expanding Reader Response.”
Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy
48.1 (September 2004): 52–62.

Patton, Michael Q.
Qualitative Evaluation and Research Methods
. 2nd ed. Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1990.

Petry, Alice H., ed.
On Harper Lee: Essays and Reflections
. Knoxville: U Tennessee P, 2007.

Roscoe, Will.
Zuni Man-Woman
. Albuquerque: U New Mexico, 1991.

Smith, Marie K.
Teaching Harper Lee's “To Kill a Mockingbird” from Multiple Critical Perspectives
. Clayton: Prestwick House, 2007.

Strauss, Anselm, and Juliet Corbin.
Basics of Qualitative Research: Grounded Theory Procedures and Techniques
. Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1990.

White, Edmund.
The Beautiful Room Is Empty
. New York: Knopf, 1988.

Wimsatt, W. K., and Monroe C. Beardsley. “The Intentional Fallacy.” In
The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry
, W. K. Wimsatt. Lexington: U Kentucky P, 1954. (3–18).

Derek Blair and Cecilia Donohue

To Kill a Mockingbird
(1960) has achieved the canonical staying power usually denied the “one hit wonder,” the term used by Alice Hall Petry to describe author Harper Lee (144). Despite the novel's status as the lone full-length fiction Lee ever wrote and published, this Pulitzer Prize-winning work has been vigorously analyzed through the lenses of diverse critical schools while remaining a popular literary selection in the unit plans of secondary schools both across and outside North America.
To Kill a Mockingbir
d
's designation as a favorite high school reading has led to a proliferation of Approaches to Teaching publications, both print and online, presenting anticipatory sets, writing prompts, and detailed lesson plans that provide instructors with a multiplicity of suggestions for teaching the texts of both the book and its film adaptation.

However, most of this material was compiled and published prior to today's technological revolution. This essay suggests that by harnessing the power of this technology, ELA (English Language Arts) educators can access an unprecedented array of learning tools that students will find engaging and, most importantly, that will prove remarkably effective in promoting higher-learning skills. Since we are in the midst of an era in which high school students are used to retrieving and receiving information quickly and visually, it has become, arguably, increasingly difficult to engage students with a 323-page novel and/or a 130-minute black-and-white motion picture. In light of these conditions, this essay will review the recent criticism relative to teaching the text; argue the rationale for
Mockingbird
lesson plans in which students learn with, rather than from, technology; and expand upon the existing pedagogical literature in its presentation of state-of-the-art, multi-genre approaches to teaching
Mockingbird
.

Critical Approaches Providing
Teachable Moments

Recent scholarship on
To Kill a Mockingbird
runs the gamut from traditional to modern approaches that address issues evoking relevant talking points for classroom discussion. New Critical studies focusing on symbolism within the text are offered by Laurie Campion and John Carlos Rowe. Campion's 2003
Explicator
entry suggests consistent representation of the concepts of “right” and “left” throughout the text, “‘right' suggesting virtue and ‘left' suggesting iniquity” (234). Rowe's 2007 essay, combining New Critical and Marxist approaches, explains the economic/symbolic significance of three material goods that figure prominently in the novel: the gifts Boo Radley deposits in the tree that are found by Scout, Jem, and Dill (of increased community value because they are shared); the chifforobe Mayella asks Tom to destroy (representing the class-based hopelessness of Mayella's situation); and Scout's ham costume (emblematic of the agrarian economy upon which Maycomb, Alabama, the novel's setting, is highly dependent). Hence, both writings provide a point of departure to launch a discussion of symbolism within the novel.

Most character analysis studies focus on Atticus Finch, primarily in his role as public defender of Tom Robinson. In a nod to deconstruction and reader response, Steven Lubet, in his 1999 article, asks us to consider the possibility that Mayella Ewell was telling the truth and that Tom Robinson was guilty of rape and how this scenario would impact reader impressions of Atticus Finch. Lubet inquires, “Whether Tom was innocent or guilty, Atticus no doubt fulfilled his obligations . . . but that only brings us directly to the hardest question of all: Is Atticus still a hero?” (1361). Tim Dare's 2007 study also challenges the oft-unassailed image of Atticus Finch. Dare cites a trio of points in the novel that he considers “of particular significance for lawyers and legal ethics” as they directly address the rule of law: “The first is Atticus' summation to the jury. . . . The second moment occurs after Tom's death [when the local newspaper publishes an editorial condemning the jury's guilty verdict]” (85). The third plot point, in which the rule of law is dismissed, provides ample fodder for discussion of ethics and equal treatment under the law. It revolves around the joint decision by Atticus and the sheriff not to prosecute Boo Radley for the death of Bob Ewell. As Dare expresses it, judgment of an individual in the “secret court of men's hearts” (
TKAM
276), “a wicked thing in Tom's case is a good thing in Boo's case” (87). The question of Atticus Finch's status as unblemished champion of civil rights has been recently challenged again in a
New Yorker
article by Malcolm Gladwell, who, in examining Finch's actions, sees him as a “good Jim Crow liberal [who] dare not challenge the foundations of [white Southern male] privilege” (32).

Another approach is taken in Chris Crowe's article from 1999 and Kathryn Lee Seidel's 2007 essay, both of which focus on Atticus less as an attorney and more as a father. Seidel's article hails the powerful and positive influence Atticus exerts on Scout, his daughter and the first-person narrator of the novel. Seidel states that Atticus “counters [traditional] southern dicta for southern culture with a philosophy of calm courage and rational strength” (80). In Crowe's writing, Atticus is cited, alongside David Logan of Mildred D. Taylor's
Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry
(1976) and Raymond Mendoza of Graham Salisbury's
Blue Skin of the Sea
(1992), as a highly desirable paternal exemplar in the burgeoning genre of young adult literature: “These father characters don't dominate the novels, but they do play key roles in the lives of their respective children” (Crowe 121). Crowe's declaration that “the involvement of a concerned and loving father is often crucial in a young person's development” (120) has obviously been heeded by authors of young adult novels published since this article. Kate DiCamillo's
Because of Winn-Dixie
(2000) and Gennifer Choldenko's
Al Capone Does My Shirts
(2004) are but two award-winning examples of young adult fiction featuring father figures who proactively participate in the maturation of a youthful protagonist/narrator. Most significantly, in 2007 Loretta Ellsworth published
In Search of Mockingbird
, in which the main character, Erin Garven, seeks closer connection with her late mother through reading her yellowed journals and her torn, much-read copy of
To Kill a Mockingbird
. Erin's quest, partnered with her apprehension about her father's impending remarriage, inspire the teenager to take a Greyhound bus trip to Alabama, intending to meet Harper Lee and ask if the writer ever answered the letter Erin's mother had sent to her. This novel is worthy of consideration as a tandem or supplemental text, and not only because of its strong referential connection with
To Kill a Mockingbird
. The character parallels between Scout and Erin also provide multiple teachable moments. In addition, Ellsworth's work treats the subject of father-child connections in the modulated yet positive way about which Crowe has written.

Feminist/gender, Marxist, and New Historical approaches to
To Kill a Mockingbird
have also served as interpretive lenses through which Lee's novel has been viewed and provide content for the literature classroom. Dean Shackelford's 1997 essay examines gender-based voicing both in the novel and in its film translation, along with his assessment of female characters in the novel (“few women characters . . . are very pleasant”) (4). Shackelford attributes these characterizations to “Harper Lee's fundamental criticism of gender roles for women” (arguably accurate given Scout Finch's resistance to trading her tomboy togs for
taffeta), and suggests that Lee's criticism of prescribed gender roles is manifested in the “novel's identification with outsider figures such as Tom Robinson, Mayella Ewell, and Boo Radley” (112). A gender-based/queer reading serves as the basis for Laura Fine's 2007 article on the character of narrator Scout Finch. Noting Scout's narrative laden with explicit “dissatisfaction with conventional [female] roles” (76), Fine sees Scout's potential as a “boundary breaking” young woman (66) and asserts that the novel's “narrative opens a path that will allow Scout to challenge her culture's prescribed sexual identities in the future (62).

Theodore and Grace-Ann Hovet's 2001 article addresses the nature of narrative in
To Kill a Mockingbird
, focusing on economic and regional (along with gendered) discourse as the means of painting an accurate and comprehensive societal portrait of the town of Maycomb to the reader: “Lee, following very closely the goals of the great female realists of the nineteenth century like Louisa May Alcott and Rebecca Harding Davis strives to present a ‘realistic' portrayal of small town southern life which will make it known to readers outside the region” (69). Marxist theory also informs John Carlos Rowe's study of the “inherently racist” economy of Maycomb, “reliant on unquestioned hierarchies of gender, class and age that make southern racism . . . difficult to identify and overcome” (2). Patrick Chura's New Historicist approach to
To Kill a Mockingbird
details the similarities between the fate of Lee's Tom Robinson and the true story of Emmett Till, the African American teenager who was lynched in 1955 in Mississippi due to his alleged wolf-whistles at a white woman. Chura argues that Lee's novel presents “racial and social ideology that characterized not the Depression era [in which
To Kill a Mockingbird
is set] but the early civil rights era [concurrent with the novel's publication]” (2). Introducing the Robinson/Till case parallels in the secondary school classroom, as incorporated by Carol Ricker-Wilson in her teaching of
Mockingbird
in Toronto, Canada, fosters deeper student understanding of race-based attitudes in the mid-twentieth-century American South, while enhancing an interdisciplinary unit on literature and history (69).

“Approaches to Teaching” Articles and Volumes

A simple googling of “
To Kill a Mockingbird
lesson plans” will yield an extensive volume of information and advice for the instructor teaching this novel. Fully developed lesson plans featuring multidisciplinary and multimedia perspectives on the novel abound on such Internet sources as www.readwritethink.org/lessons,
the lesson plan website of the NCTE (National Council of Teachers of English); www.pbs.org/teachers (the official website of public television); www.
webenglishteacher.com; www.memory.loc.gov; and
www.aresearchguide.com.
In addition, print articles have discussed both implemented and potential lesson plan foci. For example, Leslie Marx's 2007 essay chronicles assignments utilized in South Africa, where
To Kill a Mockingbird
was taught in diverse classroom settings “during the height of the [human rights] struggle years” (117). These assignments include discussing race relations, Scout's coming of age, and the heroism of Atticus; shifting the setting to South Africa and having students write excerpts based on the sociocultural differences; comparing and contrasting Maycomb with South African cities; and interpreting the content of photographs based on the messages conveyed in the novel. Susan Arpajian Jolley's 2002 article identifies numerous poems appropriate for study alongside
Mockingbird
in conjunction with the novel's themes of “courage . . . compassion, as well as what we can learn from history” (34).

Despite the wide variety of knowledge and guidelines shared on these websites, the teaching of
To Kill a Mockingbird
is not without its challenges. Ricker-Wilson discusses the “problematic reader response” to the novel from students who were uncomfortable with some of the characterizations. One example: “Somewhat troubling to my students was how . . . Lee invited her readers to have an informed and sympathetic understanding for . . . white characters who kept racism alive and well” (72). Other potentially controversial aspects of the novel, such as the frequent use of racial epithets, are discussed in Louel Gibbons' recently published NCTE volume,
“To Kill a Mockingbird” in the Classroom: Walking in Someone Else's Shoes
(2009).

Gibbons' volume packs a load of information within its 121 pages of text, including a generous selection of writing prompts to stimulate student/reader engagement; assignments connected to students' identification of the traditional elements of fiction; strategies to ensure close reading of the text as it informs punctuation and word choice; ideas for written responses to critical and evaluative essays on
Mockingbird
; and recommendations for teaching the film as a “text separate from the original novel” (103). Given the virtually up-to-the-minute copyright on this NCTE volume, references to teaching
To Kill a Mockingbird
with technology are likely to be expected by educators who read or consult this work. While Gibbons recommends “multimedia presentations” to illuminate character analysis (21) and reports her success using library “print and technological resources” to assemble a research project (37), she fails to make such approaches an integral focus. In this essay, we argue that multimedia/technology-related activities can and should be central to the lesson/unit plan and that it is no longer sufficient to implement technology as a supplementary or add-on classroom activity. Our conclusion is based on recent research, which suggests that student learning is directly related to the integration of technology into the curriculum, which is essential in developing media literacy and assuring overall student engagement in the twenty-first century. Since strategies related to teaching
To Kill a Mockingbird
can foster such connections, we offer some suggestions in the remainder of this essay.