Is "To Kill a Mockingbird" (by Harper Lee) a novel about racism?

Résumé du document

Writing To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee has chosen to make a description of the Deep South during the Great Depression of the 30's through the eyes of a young girl, leaving us uncertain about the qualification of this novel. Indeed, reading the biography of the author, the reader realizes that To kill a mockingbird could be a fictional way to describe her own childhood, both having a lot of common points: is it the beginning of an autobiography or simply a novel describing social conflicts in a small town in the south of the United States? Even if trying to qualify the novel would be an interesting exercise, we are more interested in this essay by the fact that the novel is actually told by a young girl who discovers the conflicts of life through naïve eyes. Indeed, her first experience with evils of the world is going to be racial prejudice , with her father defending in courts an African American from trumped-up rape charges.

Extraits

[...] Reading what Chris Jones thinks about To kill a mockingbird[6], we are told that this novel has several main themes. Indeed, it deals with personal responsibility, paternal obligation, alienation, importance of empathy and racial conflict, which all appear to be as much important as the others. The fact that Scout is ‘used' as the narrator let the author to emphasise most of the first themes later quoted than the last one. Indeed, through the young girl eyes the reader is given a view of the society which is not objective at all: lacking the perspectives of an adult she does not see Maycomb's society with its main features: racist and narrow minded[7]. [...]

[...] The town where the novel takes place seems to be a caricature of one of these southern cities at this time could be. Indeed, black and white people live in very different places as if both did not want to get mixed. The separation between both communities seems obvious when Calpurnia, the Finchs' black cook drive Scout and Jem to the church where black people use to pray. Indeed, the reactions of one of the black woman and Aunt Alexandra who both get indignant about the presence of two white children in a black church is one of the numerous illustration of the boundary existing in Maycomb between the different coloured people. [...]

[...] If the treatment of racism in To kill a mockingbird has this purpose to Scout, it aims above all at denunciating it through an original point of view which obliges the reader to make his own opinion: the subjective point of view used by the author makes the plea against racism much stronger. Bibliography Diann L. Baecker. ‘Telling it in black and White: the importance of the africanist presence in To Kill a Mockingbird'. R.A. Dave kill a mockingbird: Harper Lee's tragic version'. Claudia Durst Johnson kill a mockingbird: threatening boundaries'. Carolyn Jones ‘Atticus Finch and the mad dog: Harper Lee's To kill a mockingbird'. [...]

[...] Carolyn Jones ‘Atticus Finch and the mad dog: Harper Lee's To kill a mockingbird'. [...]

[...] The novel starts and finishes with Boo Radley who appears to be the most important mockingbird in the novel. Thus, the question which has to be asked is whether or not he book minimizes racial critiques because of the use a chills narrator. Some authors such as Mr Baecker think that the African presence is muted in spite of the prominence of the trial in which an innocent black man is accused of rape. The age of Scout does not let her to realise the importance of the trial and it is only through Jem's reaction to the sentence that the reader is told the result of the horror of the injustice on the assistance. [...]