I just think there’s a difference between showing that it was not at all a realistic depiction of what happened in that time and showing that it’s racist apologetics. As far as I can tell, the general thrust of the book is against racism.
Now, if you want to get into how people lionized Atticus Finch so much that they freaked out when they found out he was always intended to still hold racism (as in the original work mentioned above that was nearly posthumously published), then there I can agree. But I would argue that’s because they misunderstood what the book was saying. Atticus was never supposed to be a paragon of anti-racist sentiment, but a racist man who became a little less racist. And that, presumably, Scout saw this and would be even less racist as she grew up.
This scene was mentioned in the OP. My girlfriend’s daughter was assigned TKAM in her high school English class and, in fact, she had the same interpretation as the OP when she was reading the passage to me.* This was a rather intense scene and I had her read it twice before we stopped to analyze it carefully.
The passage depicts Scout being cheerful and innocent (naive) as she’s greeting Mr. Cunningham, the lynch mob’s leader. But Scout didn’t win-over the lynch mob’s leader just by being cheerful and innocent. It was the extended implications of what she was saying that made Mr. Cunningham reconsider. Scout was telling him that she was friends with his daughter and close enough that his daughter would be pleased just to hear a second-hand greeting from Scout.
Killing Atticus would have been simple enough – and probably assumed to be part of the lynch mob routine. Even killing Scout would have been considered a matter of collateral damage. But news of the lynching would quickly spread through town and include the identities of the victims. Even if you never tell your kid about your involvement, how do you placate your conscience knowing you killed your own daughter’s good friend? How do you console your kid over that loss while also saying, “There, there. It had to be done. Let go of it.”?
The scene shows Scout to be stupidly naive and the lynch mob leader to be conscientious enough to think ahead and back away from the onerous task of having to face his own child after killing his child’s friend – and he knew Scout wouldn’t escape harm once the mob started shooting. Welcome to the human race, Mr. Cunningham! A conscience shows you’re not worse than the rest of the world – but don’t mistake that to mean you’re better than anyone, either.
And that, as many have noted, is the point.& Nobody in that town in that era was willing to boldly kill someone when they knew they would have to answer for the deed afterward. They were, on the other hand, quite willing to fall into an anonymous-and-presumably-passive role within a mob or biased jury.#
–G
*For some reason she liked reading aloud to me.
&In other words, I think ToxGoddess and I concur. #In the modern USA, it’s a partisan lobby or a stacked congress or…
Well, that’s what makes it a timeless classic, right?
We can’t tell that from Watchman. Watchman was a poorly done first draft of TKaM, which she had her arm twisted into releasing and shame on Harper Collins for doing so. We really dont know how Atticus would have been in a real sequel.
It was similar to an earlier draft that was sent to publishers and actually bought by Lippincott and Company. It was Lee’s Editor Therese von Hohoff Torrey who convinced her to change the period it was set in.
“Watchman” wasn’t a sequel, TKAM was a prequel and it is documented that the narrative changed as her fathers own views changed during the writing process.
We don’t know where Atticus would have ended up in a sequel but it does show that while it doesn’t invalidate readers perceptions the hero narrative wasn’t the Authors intent.
Not that it matters as audiences interpreting stories in a way that the author didn’t personally intend is the rule and not the exception.
I’m honestly not sure how you got that from TKaM. In the copy I read, it was made quite clear that lynch mobs were considered normal and to be expected: That’s precisely why Atticus was at the jailhouse that night, because he was confident that there would be an attempted lynching. And it wasn’t “those other people” behind it, like the Ewells: It was the family of one of Scout’s friends, the kind of folks she’d be inviting over for dinner (and sure, they were country folks while she was city folk, but she certainly didn’t consider that to be a distinction that mattered).
This thread is about equally divided between those who got what I meant and those who didn’t. That’s fine … but for those who think I don’t “get” fiction: Go read The Grapes of Wrath or The Great Gatsby and then tell me that fiction can’t be a lot more honest than this.
Perhaps the awareness of what constitutes a “lynch mob” is not common anymore. I submit that “a crowd consisting entirely of middle-aged men who are thoughtful and calm enough to be shamed into going home by a 7-year-old girl” does NOT constitute a lynch mob. That’s more like a meeting of the local Kiwanis Club or Rotary. That’s typical of this book, as others have pointed out: a point of view shared by an entire culture that allowed public murder as social control is treated as if it could be merely talked out. No, don’t claim it was “fiction” or “just a story” and that makes it okay. Lee was knowingly writing about a situation people–and not old people–living at the time would’ve experienced personally. Her depiction of an event so common that people put it on postcards is about as close to reality as Buck Rogers.
I was reading with interest but not involvement until I got to this. The Grapes of Wrath or The Great Gatsby as examples of honest fiction? Propaganda and glamorous criminals in their own tragedy?
TKaM is a white book about white people. I can understand that could be a little wearing if you’re not a white middle class person like me. But it’s not dishonest like TGoW or TGG.
Because that is not what TKAM is remotely about. Had Mayella Ewell accused a white man of raping her or even tried to get protection from being raped by her father, she would have been dismissed as a slut who deserved whatever happened to her.
One of the only people in the book who was able to empathize with someone else was Robinson. He saw Mayella as a poor abused child to showed kindness to her. One of things the jury reacted most strongly to was that a black man felt pity for a white person. This highlights the hypocrisy of that society but also allows hope in that if the children can actually learn empathy then maybe there is a way out.
"*You didn’t want to come. The average man don’t like trouble and danger. You don’t like trouble and danger. But if only half a man–like Buck Harkness, there–shouts ‘Lynch him! lynch him!’ you’re afraid to back down–afraid you’ll be found out to be what you are-- cowards–and so you raise a yell, and hang yourselves onto that half-a-man’s coat-tail, and come raging up here, swearing what big things you’re going to do. The pitifulest thing out is a mob; that’s what an army is–a mob; they don’t fight with courage that’s born in them, but with courage that’s borrowed from their mass, and from their officers. But a mob without any man at the head of it is beneath pitifulness. Now the thing for you to do is to droop your tails and go home and crawl in a hole. If any real lynching’s going to be done it will be done in the dark, Southern fashion; and when they come they’ll bring their masks, and fetch a man along. *
I was talking more about chronology, Therese von Hohoff Torrey convinced Lee to change the decade of Scout’s life that the book was set in over the three year editing period. The change in characters and story happened during that time.
Therese von Hohoff Torrey working for J. B. Lippincott & Co and the sale of the unreleased draft “watchmen” to J. B. Lippincott & Co and that 3 year editing period is well documented.
The later challenges and actions by Harper Collins do not impact this claim at all. I am not saying those events didn’t happen, merely that they are immaterial to the changes I referenced.
I concur, lynch mobs and even racism are dependent on ignorance and dehumanizing the victims.
IMHO this is directly related to where Atticus failed in the trial as he tried to play the white knight and failed to humanize Tom Robinson in the eyes of the Jury by focusing on his own self. Atticus obviously didn’t see Tom Robinson as an equal.
I do wish that the movie hadn’t cut the parts establishing Calpurnia and Scout’s relationship and their visits to church etc…
While neither work is perfect in my opinion the movie is a lot closer to several posters criticisms here. While Calpurnia and Tom Robinson are still not fully developed in the book, the movie does reduce the reasons Scout has to potentially avoid the mistakes of her father.
That is absurd. There are isolated incidents of law enforcement successfully standing up to lynch mobs, but stories like this one are more common:
This is probably the most comprehensive survey of lynching written for a general reader. There are occasional incidents of lawmen standing up to lynch mobs, but absolutely none of children doing so.
Technically in this case it was Atticus who initially stood up to them and this was in progress when the kids arrived. Scouts questions do require a bit of suspension of disbelief but Scout was not uniquely positioned to be able to dissuade the mob.
The events have more to do with Scout’s character development arc. The conflict surrounding the trial is minor compared to the conflict surrounding Boo in the overall story.
