The Literature Book

272

I THINK THERE’S

JUST ONE KIND

OF FOLKS. FOLKS.

TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD (1960), HARPER LEE

B

uilding on the traditions

of 18th-century gothic

literature, with its elements

of fantasy and the grotesque,

mid-20th-century writers of

the American Deep South, such

as Tennessee Williams, Flannery

O’Connor, and Carson McCullers,

established a literary genre known

as southern gothic. These writers

used the characteristics of the

traditional gothic style to inspect

the unsettling realities and twisted

psyches beneath the surface of

Southern respectability. With their

damaged or eccentric characters,

macabre settings, and sinister

situations, the texts in this genre

examine Southern social issues

such as racism, poverty, and crime.

Harper Lee’s classic novel To

Kill a Mockingbird incorporates

a coming-of-age theme into the

southern gothic genre, and

highlights racial prejudice in the

American South in the years before

the civil rights movement. It also

explores the behavior of those who

live in a small Southern community.

Challenging convention

The story is set in the mid-1930s in

Maycomb, an Alabama town where

“a day was twenty-four hours long

but seemed much longer.” The

narrator is a young girl, Scout, nearly

six years old at the start of events.

She is a tomboy, who questions

social conventions. Scout lives with

her widowed father, lawyer Atticus

Finch (a morally upright man who

strives to teach his children the

values of understanding and

compassion), her brother Jem, and

their black cook, Calpurnia.

Scout describes daily life in

Maycomb, their neighbors, her

friendship with an unusual boy

called Dill, and her school, creating

a picture of an apparently timeless

society in the Deep South. Heat

IN CONTEXT

FOCUS

Southern gothic

BEFORE

1940 Carson McCullers’

debut novel The Heart Is a

Lonely Hunter encapsulates

the elements of southern

gothic in a story of social

misfits in Georgia in the 1930s.

1955 Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,

by playwright Tennessee

Williams, is set on a cotton

plantation in the Mississippi

delta and challenges Southern

social conventions with its

portrayal of the favorite

son as a repressed gay

man and alcoholic.

AFTER

1980 A Confederacy of

Dunces, by John Kennedy

Toole, is set in New Orleans

and follows the antics of

slob and misfit Ignatius J.

Reilly. Toole is posthumously

awarded the Pulitzer Prize

for fiction for the book a

year after its publication.

You never really understand

a person until you consider

things from his point of

view—until you climb into his

skin and walk around in it.

To Kill a Mockingbird

US_272-273_Mockingbird.indd 272 08/10/2015 13:09