Malcom Gladwell and Harper Lee – Expanding How to Teach “To Kill a Mockingbird”

In the August 10 & 17th New Yorker, the talented Malcom Gladwell weighed in with his thoughts about Southern liberalism in To Kill a Mockingbird with a piece entitled “The Courthouse Ring: Atticus Finch and the limits of Southern liberalism”.  Last Saturday, the early morning was soggy and damp again. When I  poured the coffee and sat at the kitchen table, I opened the latest New Yorker and was delighted to find that the Mail page contained four letters talking about the article. Here’s a link to this issue: scroll down to mail and click on each writer’s name to read their thinking on the piece.

I thought, “What an interesting place to begin a novel study.”

To Kill a Mockingbird has long been on high school summer reading lists, being taught ubiquitously around the country. First question to mull over: Why is this book part of the high school canon? Gladwell paints a very direct picture of Jim Crow that is still largely submerged in the secondary school classroom (in our culture, too). Ideas appeared before me as I thought about providing background knowledge. How about including Strange Fruit sung by Billie Holiday? Breaking the silence about lynching in America is long overdue and is background knowledge that will add to the study of this novel by offering a realistic view of the 1930s South.

Then I started thinking about the film. So many of us see Gregory Peck when we hear the name Atticus. The film is widely used in teaching the book and Horton Foote’s screenplay is an excellent example of what author John Nickel calls liberal conscience films. You may want to retrieve a copy of Nickels excellent article Disabling African American Men: Liberalism and Race Message Films from Cinema Journal, Vol. 44, No. 1 (Autumn, 2004). Nickels states:

In the history of race message movies, no character better fills the shoes of the
uplifting white father figure than lawyer Atticus Finch (Gregory Peck) in To Kill a
Mockingbird. He is benevolent paternalism writ large.

Harper Lee and Horton Foote as author and screenwriter were involved in the zeitgeist of the times. McCarthyism had taken a toll and at the same time a nascent civil rights movement was coming to the foreground of our culture. Go ahead and rent the movie and look at Atticus through the lens offered by Nickel. See if you can observe his assessment:

White paternalism seeps into all facets of To Kill a Mockingbird. Even one of
the central themes of the film and of liberalism generally-the importance of understanding-
is not immune. Understanding is one of the lessons Atticus teaches
on the swing: “You never really understand a person until you consider things from
his point of view … until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it.” The
concept of understanding, though, is not always innocent, particularly if, in the
terms of Atticus’s comment, “you” are white and the other person’s “skin” is black.
Viewed in this way, white Americans are likely to treat a black person as a specimen
to be examined under a microscope.

The fame accorded this book, a Pulitzer Prize winning classic is of great interest to me. While I agree that the novel is a terrific piece of fiction, isn’t it possible that it’s hallowed place in the canon is part of an awakening white American need to have a way to assuage the way we denied  genuine equal rights for so long?