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Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations Alice’s Adventures in A Farewell to Arms Native Son Wonderland Frankenstein Night The Adventures of The General Prologue 1984 Huckleberry Finn to the Canterbury The Odyssey All Quiet on the Tales Oedipus Rex Western Front The Grapes of The Old Man and the Animal Farm Wrath Sea As You Like It Great Expectations On the Road The Ballad of the Sad The Great Gatsby One Flew Over the Café Gulliver’s Travels Cuckoo’s Nest Beloved Hamlet One Hundred Years of Beowulf The Handmaid’s Tale Solitude Billy Budd, Benito Heart of Darkness Othello Cereno, Bartleby the I Know Why the Paradise Lost Scrivener, and Other Caged Bird Sings The Pardoner’s Tale Tales The Iliad A Passage to India Black Boy The Interpretation of Persuasion The Bluest Eye Dreams Portnoy’s Complaint Brave New World Invisible Man A Portrait of the Artist Cat on a Hot Tin Jane Eyre as a Young Man Roof The Joy Luck Club Pride and Prejudice The Catcher in the Julius Caesar Ragtime Rye The Jungle The Red Badge of Catch-22 King Lear Courage Cat’s Cradle Long Day’s Journey The Rime of the The Color Purple Into Night Ancient Mariner Crime and Lord of the Flies Romeo & Juliet Punishment The Lord of the Rings The Rubáiyát of Omar The Crucible Love in the Time of Khayyám Darkness at Noon Cholera The Scarlet Letter David Copperfield Macbeth A Scholarly Look at Death of a Salesman The Man Without The Diary of Anne The Death of Artemio Qualities Frank Cruz The Merchant of A Separate Peace The Divine Comedy Venice Silas Marner Don Quixote The Metamorphosis Slaughterhouse-Five Dracula A Midsummer Night’s Song of Myself Dubliners Dream Song of Solomon Emerson’s Essays Miss Lonelyhearts The Sonnets of Emma Moby-Dick William Shakespeare Fahrenheit 451 My Ántonia Sophie’s Choice Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations The Sound and the The Tales of Poe Waiting for Godot Fury The Tempest Walden The Stranger Tess of the The Waste Land A Streetcar Named D’Urbervilles White Noise Desire Their Eyes Were Wuthering Heights Sula Watching God Young Goodman The Sun Also Rises Things Fall Apart Brown The Tale of Genji To Kill a Mockingbird A Tale of Two Cities Ulysses Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird Updated Edition Edited and with an introduction by Harold Bloom Sterling Professor of the Humanities Yale University Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations: To Kill a Mockingbird, Updated Edition © 2007 by Infobase Publishing Introduction © 2007 by Harold Bloom All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher. For more information contact: Chelsea House An imprint of Infobase Publishing 132 West 31st Street New York NY 10001 ISBN-10: 0-7910-9308-5 ISBN-13: 978-0-7910-9308-5 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Harper Lee’s To kill a mockingbird / Harold Bloom, editor. — Updated ed. p. cm. — (Bloom’s modern critical interpretations) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-7910-9308-5 (hardcover) 1. Lee, Harper. To kill a mockingbird. 2. Fathers and daughters in literature. 3. Race relations in literature. 4. Lawyers in literature. 5. Racism in literature. 6. Girls in literature. I. Bloom, Harold. II. Title: To kill a mockingbird. III. Series. PS3562.E353T6337 2006 813’.54—dc22 2006020212 Chelsea House books are available at special discounts when purchased in bulk quantities for businesses, associations, institutions, or sales promotions. Please call our Special Sales Department in New York at (212) 967-8800 or (800) 322-8755. You can find Chelsea House on the World Wide Web at http://www.chelseahouse.com Contributing Editor: Amy Sickels Cover designed by Ben Peterson Cover photo © Universal/Photofest Printed in the United States of America Bang EJB 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 This book is printed on acid-free paper. All links and web addresses were checked and verified to be correct at the time of publica- tion. Because of the dynamic nature of the web, some addresses and links may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. Contents Editor’s Note vii Introduction 1 Harold Bloom The Issue of Censorship 3 Claudia Durst Johnson The Romantic Regionalism of Harper Lee 23 Fred Erisman To Kill a Mockingbird: Harper Lee’s Tragic Vision 35 R. A. Dave Store and Mockingbird: Two Pulitzer Novels about Alabama 47 William T. Going Hollywood and Race: To Kill a Mockingbird 65 Colin Nicholson Blues for Atticus Finch: Scottsboro, Brown, and Harper Lee 75 Eric J. Sundquist The Female Voice in To Kill a Mockingbird: Narrative Strategies in Film and Novel 103 Dean Shackelford vi Contents Prolepsis and Anachronism: Emmett Till and the Historicity of To Kill a Mockingbird 115 Patrick Chura The Rise and Fall of Atticus Finch 141 Christopher Metress Harper Lee and the Destabilization of Heterosexuality 149 Gary Richards Chronology 189 Contributors 191 Bibliography 193 Acknowledgments 195 Index 197 Editor’s Note My introduction centers upon Scout Finch as the fictive person who prevents To Kill a Mockingbird from dwindling into one more Period Piece. Claudia Durst Johnson traces the history of early censorship of the novel, after which Fred Erisman emphasizes the more hopeful mode of Southern Romanticism he attributes to Harper Lee. R. A. Dave, from an Anglo-Indian perspective, inflates the book’s sta- tus to tragedy, and oddly compares it to Jane Austen, while William T. Going contrasts Mockingbird to another Alabama novel, T. S. Stribling’s The Store. Colin Nicholson compares the film version of the novel to Harper Lee’s story and finds it somewhat inadequate, which would not be my own judgment. Eric J. Sundquist severely criticizes Harper Lee for over-idealizing Atticus, and thus falsifying the actual desegregation of the South. The film and novel again are contrasted by Dean Shackelford, who emphasizes Scout’s augmenting feminism, after which Patrick Chura centers on the historical relationship between the novel and the Emmett Till case. Christopher Metress traces the gradual decline of Atticus Finch in crit- ical esteem, while Gary Richards examines the subtle intimations of Truman Capote’s homosexuality in Dill, for whom Capote served as model, and in Scout Finch’s perpetual boyishness. vii HAROLD BLOOM Introduction I find that rereading To Kill a Mockingbird (wonderful title!) is, for me, a somewhat ambivalent experience. Scout Finch charms me, as she has so many millions of people, and yet she seems to me better than her book, which has dated into a period piece, while she herself remains remarkably vital and refreshing. Since Scout is her book, I find my own reaction an enig- ma, and hope to enlighten at least myself in this introduction. No one could expect Scout to rival Huck Finn (from whom she serenely derives), and yet her sensibility, intelligence, and decency strongly recall aspects of Huck. This, I think, is all to the good: a younger, female Huckleberry Finn fills a void in American fiction. The aesthetic problem is not Scout Finch, but her father, Atticus, and the entire range of major and minor characters in the story. Atticus and all the others are ideograms rather than people, while Harper Lee’s portrait of the artist as a young girl has the individuality, of con- sciousness and of speech, that allows the representation of a person to be much more than a name on a page. Harper Lee cannot sustain comparison with Eudora Welty and Flannery O’Connor, or even with Carson McCullers. It would be wrong to make such a contrast, except that to see the limits of To Kill a Mockingbird is also to perceive better the novel’s relative success in portraying Scout Finch. It is very difficult to represent any healthy consciousness in literature, whether we are being shown an eight-year-old girl or a fully mature woman. 1 2 Introduction Shakespeare, most prodigious of all writers ever, has an astonishing triumph in the Rosalind of As You Like It, a heroine who is not only a superb wit, like Falstaff and Hamlet, but who manifests an absolutely normative conscious- ness, free of all neuroses and darknesses. As an audience, we cannot achieve any perspectives upon Rosalind in which she has not preceded us. She sees all around, as it were, and has a largeness that inspired Jane Austen to emu- lation. A wholesome sensibility attracts us in life, yet rarely confronts us in literature. One cannot expect Scout Finch to grow up into Rosalind; Scout is perceptive and quick, but her mind is essentially conventional. And yet her spirit is free, in a kind of proto-feminist variation upon Huck Finn’s. The story that Scout tells is circumscribed by time and by region, and also by an America before the Fall, in our final Age of Innocence, the Fifties. Harper Lee and her book emerged from a country yet to experience the Vietnam War, and the subsequent advent of the Counterculture. The United States is a nation desperately losing faith in all authority, whether govern- mental or familial. To Kill a Mockingbird, in its societal aspects, is already a period piece, and its faith in essential human nature can seem very naive. The book’s continued popularity, still extraordinary, partly suggests that we find in it a study of the nostalgias. Yet nostalgia itself dates; the reader becomes alienated from it, when nothing restores a sense of its relevance.

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