The intricacies of racial and other kinds of prejudice and the possibilities for transcending them as they are dramatized in Harper Lee’s classic novel “To Kill a Mockingbird” were the subject of a lecture and discussion program at the Mid-Hudson Auditorium at 105 Market St. on Sunday, Sept. 23. Part of a month-long “Big Read” series focusing on the 1960 book, the event, titled “Southern Culture and History in ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ “ featured Dr. Anne Constantinople and Dr. Rebecca Edwards of Vassar College in spirited dialogue with a passionately interested audience about the book’s deep and enduring themes.
Billed as an effort at “restoring reading to the center of American culture” by having a single community focus on a single work for a period of weeks, the “Big Read” is an ongoing initiative of the National Endowment For The Arts that is sponsored here by the Poughkeepsie Public Library District. Previous events had focused on author Lee’s life, the story’s social context in the “Jim Crow” laws and gender and legal issues raised by the novel.
“The response of the Poughkeepsie community has been very enthusiastic,” Gareth Davies, development officer of the library district, said at the beginning of the program. “The ‘Big Read’ has been a big success.”
“To Kill a Mocking Bird” tells the two intertwined stories of individualistic and enlightened lawyer Atticus Finch’s defense of a black man who is unjustly accused of raping a white woman, and the coming of age and self-discovery of his equally individualistic and spirited tomboy daughter Jean Louise, nicknamed “Scout.” Between these two lenses, a variety of issues relating to race, conformity, class, gender, psychology, the law and society are brought into powerful focus.
Constantinople, whose specialty is developmental and social psychology, began the discussion by focusing on Atticus’ problematical identity as a father.
“To me, that is a major part of who he is,” she told her listeners. “Yet he does not fit the father mold as defined by traditional Southern ideas about a man of his class.”
A nonconformist who does not participate in sports, hunting and other social rituals that defined the ideal Southern male, Atticus also goes against the Jim Crow laws that discriminated against African-Americans in subtle ways, even before his controversial public defense of his client. For this behavior he experiences a certain degree of social alienation, because he is defying the traditional southern code of honor. This revolved around living up to predefined expectations and spending one’s whole life worrying about how other people viewed you – a psychology based upon shame. But as Edwards, who teaches 19th century American history, explained, Atticus’s ethos is closer to the Northern culture of dignity, in which one’s own sense of self worth is the most important thing – a culture of blame.
“Atticus is a person who doesn’t care a whole lot about what people think of him,” she said. “Small town obsessions with things being exactly a certain way don’t register with him, nor is he afraid of the kind of social backlash you get if you don’t conform. But this creates terrible problems for Scout, who has to wrestle with her father not being honored by the community.”
Constantinople pointed out that the false value system behind the Southern culture of honor is turned on its head when Atticus, who is believed to be a man who does not live up to it, comes forward at a crucial moment and fulfills the Southern ideal of manhood as no one else is able to. When a rabid dog is threatening the town, it is he who performs the life-and-death function of shooting it.
“Atticus turns out to be the best shot in the county,” she said. “When they need him to perform a particular service, he delivers, drawing on experience from 20, 30 years before. The point proven is obvious – good people come in all shapes and sizes and colors.”
Edwards pointed out that segregation was largely a system designed to keep “respectable” white women from encountering black men, for imagined reasons of “honor.” It did not apply, for instance, to racetracks, brothels and saloons, where no “respectable” Southern women ever went. Segregation was a subtle and complicated system, the product of a contradictory culture, a culture which Harper Lee herself did not entirely reject.
“The novel is not a sweeping critique of Southern culture,” Edwards affirmed. “It left a lot of things in place. Instead it took on the one key thing that needed to be addressed – the perpetual injustice in the criminal justice system.”
One failing of the novel in her view was the “assumption that racism in its worst form was the work of poor rural whites. That was not true. In fact the history of lynching shows that there was deep participation by white elites, who sought to divide poor whites from poor blacks.”
And that division has not entirely left the historical stage, in Edwards’ view. Speaking of the Jena case in Louisiana, she concluded the program by saying, “The fact that we’re reading this book as this case is evolving might suggest that there’s a long way to go.”
The final event of the “Poughkeepsie Big Read” of “To Kill a Mockingbird” will be a reception featuring Dr. Peter Antelyes, professor of English at Vassar College, to be held in the Mid-Hudson Auditorium on Sunday, Sept. 30 at 1:30 p.m.