Um…no, Gatsby is gazing at the green light all along simply because it’s shining from the dock of the woman he loves across the bay.
I agree with Shodan. The point of To Kill a Mockingbird was not about knowing the difference between right and wrong. The point was about having the courage to do what is right when the cost of doing so is high. So Lee made the issue of who was right and who was wrong crystal clear so that side-issue wouldn’t be a distraction to the main issue of the book.
Barra sounds like that character in the Thurber story who thought Hamlet was supposed to be a murder mystery and considered it a poorly written one.
I see Mayella as a very sympathetic character. You know that her life is absolute hell, and that she turned for solace to a married black man because he was the only decent person who’d give her the time of day and this became a love for him. She’s so downtrodden that when Atticus is polite to her she thinks she’s being “sassed”, and you know that her father has probably beaten her within an inch of her life to point the finger at Tom Robinson. At the same point, she is pointing the finger at him- she could end the trial at any time, and the first time I read the book many many years ago I remember thinking that’s what was going to happen- a tearful confession that she was lying.
Of course another reason Atticus is a total hero is because the book is told first person from the perspective of a worshipful daughter. If it were third person and longer we might find out about a darker side (that he’s got a humpbacked mistress and three other kids on the other side of the railroad tracks or that his wife drowned under suspicious circumstances or that he sells secrets to the Soviets while using a 7 percent solution and helping Calpurnia perform abortions in the garage or whatever).
As for the KKK story, Atticus isn’t talking about the entire Klan going away- he’s talking about the Klan in Macomb, his little town, and it’s a matter of record that the KKK was much more active and much less active in some places in the south than it was in others. (It was also hardly limited to the south at this time- the KKK was playing hell in the Midwest especially and had a rally attended by tens of thousands on Long Island, and this was only a few years after Tulsa, OK and L.A. both had major race riots.)
This guy is as bitter as most critics. Perhaps next week he’ll be back to tell us how The Andy Griffith Show wasn’t gritty enough for a law & order show and should have had more racial violence, sex crimes, and domestic violence for realism.
The novel is great because it led to the movie which gave us Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch, there is nothing left to be said except … Hubba, hubba.
Well, I agree with Shodan Johnson and Little Nemo Johnson.
The story isn’t about Atticus Finch or Tom Robinson or the rape. Duh. It is a coming of age story for a little girl and her friend (played in real life by Harper Lee and her childhood friend Truman Capote). It was about Scout getting up and talking to the racist town folks ready to lynch a man, which they later did from the jury box. It was about Scout standing up for her father and what was right, even when he prohibited it. And it was about Arthur Radley watching out for the neighborhood children when he was frightened beyond belief about leaving the house.
And this book is usually taught to students in high school, along with books like Catcher In The Rye. Crime and Punishment it is not, it is a movie about courage in standing up against racism.
No surprise that the racist WSJ would buy a column that trashes the most cogent indictment of racism in literature. I hope Barra enjoys the paycheck.
Mr. Barra’s diatribe was badly reasoned, but it was NOT racist. And he’s NOT criticizing the book from a conservative perspective.
My hunch is, he’d say (and many modern blacks would agree) that Harper Lee represented a kind of anemic liberalism, when something much tougher was called for.
Barra is NOT saying “This book is evil because darkies need to stay in their place.” He’s saying “I’m FROM the South, and I know first-hand that racism is a lot MORE prevalent and MORE vicious than you’d ever guess from reading Harper Lee.”
I love Flannery O’Connor, but her professional jealousy is sort of glaring in the bit the writer quotes. Funny that he took it as an objective statement of fact.
Also keep in mind that the Tom Robinson story has some autobiographical basis. A lot of people believe its based on the trial of the Scottsboro boys - which was a travesty. Or it could have been closer to home - a similar case happened in her home town when Lee was ten. Very little in the book is made up out of whole cloth - and its told through a child’s memory.
Barra is not the only one criticizing the book from the left. Others have argued that Atticus Finch doesn’t do enough to fight racism and was too complicit in it to be called a moral hero.
From the first link:
People like Monroe Freedman and Malcolm Gladwell can sit in Manhattan in 2010 and talk about what they would have done in they had been there in Alabama in 1960. But I doubt either of them would have been half as brave as they now claim.
What cause have they chosen to defend? They’re openly declaring their opposition to Jim Crow. Well there’s a daring stand to take nowadays.
Freedman and Gladwell strike me as the kind of people who are looking for an easy moral posture that doesn’t require any courage or risk. Does that strike you as the kind of people who would have been fighting for civil rights in 1960 Alabama?
And the book isn’t set in 1960. Its set in the 1930s. The rural South pre-WWII was a different place for African Americans (and African Americans were different themselves) and Whites pre-WWII. The Civil Rights movement owes a lot to us all being AMERICANS during WWII, and that we are “better than” those racist Nazis.
Atticus himself, older than his contemporaries with children his age, is the product of the 19th century, not the 20th. If he is sexist and racist, he is fairly revolutionary for his time.
Removed for redundancy. Just pointing out what Dangerosa did, but too late to matter. 
The complaint I’ve most often heard about TKAM is that its plot is mainly “white man comes to save all the poor helpless black people”. And while I will always think of it as one of my favorite books, largely for its coming-of-age story, I think this is fairly valid.
Atticus Finch is of course a fictional character. When people criticize what Atticus Finch did they’re really criticizing what Harper Lee did. They’re not talking about the racial attitudes of a trial that took place in the thirties; they’re talking about the racial attitudes of a novel that was written in 1960.
Re: the excerpt Lakai posted:
It’s almost as if Atticus Finch wasn’t a miracle working holy man who had the power to change centuries of segregation and systemic racism with a wave of his staff… though certainly he would really have helped Tom’s case if he’d started by demanding they integrate the courthouse.:rolleyes:
I wonder if Freedman knows that Atticus Finch is based on the author’s father, Amasa Lee, who not only encouraged his daughters to become lawyers but saw his older daughter Alice through and shared his practice with her. I’m not sure if she’s still alive but if she is she’s about 99 and as of a few years ago she was the oldest practicing lawyer in Alabama. (Harper’s brother, who s he admits Jem was closely based on, became career military and died suddenly of a brain aneurysm when he was young several years before the book came out.)
In the era when TKAM was set Tom Robinson probably couldn’t have gotten a black attorney (they existed but not in small towns and it certainly wouldn’t have helped his case, not that the verdict would have been any different). If he could have found a black attorney willing to take the case he’d have probably been talked out of it by everybody he knew as would the black attorney’s family.
I just finished Kathryn Stockett’s The Help, which is a decent book but is MAJORLY guilty of the White Savior cliche, as was John Grisham’s A Time to Kill [a Mockingbird].
I don’t think that people who complain about somebody like Atticus Finch not working harder to change segregation quite realize what they’re asking of him. He wasn’t a rich man, he had a family, and to say that the south was a dangerous place to those who rocked the boat is a bit like saying 1936 Berlin was a difficult place to be a rabbi. Not all white southerners were militant segregationists to be sure, but there were enough who were that you were LITERALLY (accentuated because this is not just a figure of speech) risking your life to change it. These people weren’t playing- a burning cross on your lawn was the least of your dangers (the worst that is going to do is kill some grass); Judge Horton of the Scottsboro Boys trials received death threats for the next 40 years for not bowing to public pressure and he was a LOT richer, better protected, and better armed that Atticus Finch. (Horton was of the gentry but was known to be well armed and able to use it.) You might just as easily ask why black people accepted the Jim Crow Laws- was it because they were happy with them or just saw them as occasionally a minor nuisance? No, it was because they were scared shitless and with absolutely excellent reason; if you’re lynched then you become a martyr to the liberals perhaps but that’s not a lot to comfort you as you’re being killed and thinking about how your family, IF they’re not physically attacked, is going to live in anything beyond dire poverty now that you can’t support them and they’re untouchable because of their connection to you.
Being white: not much protection. In downtown Montgomery AL the big library is named for Juliette Hampton Morgan, a white librarian of a very old and aristocratic southern family (Wade Hampton, Civil War general and owner of 3,000 slaves, was a close relative of her grandparents); for protesting even before Rosa Parks became famous the way blacks were treated on the buses and for writing an editorial that there was nobody more frightening than “good white Christians” (i.e. an editorial on the hypocrisy of the e’er religious southern countryside) she was literally tormented to death: constant harassing phone calls, spit at in the library, bomb threats and at least one of them sincere [though the bomb was a dud], the knowledge that she put the lives of everybody she worked with in danger (to their credit the Montgomery County Library Board refused to fire her in spite of direct orders from the mayor and city council- they cited a loophole that gave them this autonomy), the threats to her mother and her relatives and her friends, the isolation, the never ending harassment and attempts to run her over as she walked to work (she didn’t own a car and the bus drivers wouldn’t stop for her) and the crosses burned on her lawn all proved too much and she quit her job then committed suicide the next day. Again, this wasn’t some Mayella Ewell but a genuine “southern belle of good family” and she wasn’t marching on D.C. or even driving around maids during the boycott but basically saying that blacks had a point and to deny their humanity was gross hypocrisy.
The Civil Rights movement that Rosa Parks and MLK et al were a part of began in the 1950s for many reasons: WW2 had given blacks their first taste at middle class jobs, there were more educated blacks, a nation that was already in major transition due to WW2’s aftermath and an age of militarized men and new technologies, the ACLU lawsuits that made some small openings in the fortified lines of the southern establishment, and many other reasons.
TELEVISION gave them the strongest weapon they could ever possibly have hoped for (it’s one thing to read about non-violent protesters being hosed and attacked or to hear about it on the radio, but it’s a lot harder to brush aside with “That’s a shame” when you’re seeing it). As horrible as the Emmett Till murder was there were many others on par with or worse in the barbarism and injustice that came before, but the images of his faceless remains appearing all over the nation (which NEVER would have happened 20 years before) and the interviews with his family and the killers and their families all made it into a catalyst that would have been impossible in the 30s. (For those not familiar, Rosa Parks claimed in her autobio that it was a meeting about the aftermath of Till’s murder and seeing the pictures of his corpse that steeled her resolve to not be budged.)
Well, that’s a little silly. If I write a novel set in Regency England and its overtly classist, that doesn’t mean I’m classist, I’m writing a novel set in a very classist time.
Also, the book was published in 1960. It was written from 1956-1959, by a woman from the South. (And a lot of people believe it was started much earlier.)
1948 is the integration of the Armed Forces by Executive Order. 1954 is Brown vs. Education. 1956 is the death of Emmett Till. December 1956 is Rosa Parks. She is done writing the book before the Woolworth’s Counter Sit ins, before “I have a Dream” before SNCC or the Freedom Riders, before the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church.
I think from this distance its hard to understand how quickly things changed from 1954 to the 1968 Civil Rights Act. Its worthwhile, if you haven’t, to read about the Scottboro boys for a historical portrayal of black men accused unfairly of raping white women in 1931.
The thing about Harper Lee is that she managed to capture that, and yet create a readable book that is beloved because you feel good about it. That isn’t easy, and its because the book isn’t really about Tom Robinson or the trial.
Wasn’t Atticus named the most trustworthy character in film by the AFI or something like that?
We can look at the book through the lens of 2010, but we have to remember it was written in a different time about a different time through the eyes of a child who idolized her only parent.
So while there can be valid criticisms made of the book or studying it as to how it holds up in today’s world, dismissing it in its entirety is… well… killing a mockingbird.
i don’t think of it as a kids’ book, but I read it first at 14. I think it’s a good book for high schoolers, although I’ve read it many times since.
Its language is nice, the characters are vivid. There is tension and suspense and laughter. If you took all the overt and subtle racism and race issues, it’d still be a charming glimpse (albeit with a lot of holes) of America in the 30s.
There’s the simile the OP was looking for. 
But novels don’t write themselves. Authors write them. So anything appearing in a novel is there because an author made a choice for it to be there. Nothing just happened.
On an unrelated note, I started reading two new novels yesterday, The Passage by Justin Cronin and Supreme Courtship by Christopher Buckley. Both books mentioned To Kill a Mockingbird in their opening pages.