KidLit Forum

“It’s a sin to kill a mockingbird. (…)Mockingbirds don’t do one thing but make music for us to enjoy. They don’t eat up people’s gardens, don’t nest in corncribs, they don’t do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That’s why it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.”
- Episodic plot with funny moments, politically correct sentences with ironical innuendoes, gender roles issues, sexist remarks, witty vocabulary:
funny sentences:
“Mr. Avery said it was written on the Rosetta Stone that when children disobeyed their parents, smoked cigarettes and made war on each other, the seasons would change: Jem and I were burdened with the guilt of contributing to the aberrations of nature…”
“Now don’t eat it (snow), Scout, you’re wasting it.”
“Could Scout and me borrow some of your snow?”
“Jem, I ain’t ever heard of a nigger snowman.”
“You can’t go around making caricatures of the neighbors.”
“Ain’t a characterture, said Jem” (the use of malapropism like in Five Children and It)
“Come on, Scout, he whispered. Don’t pay any attention to her, just hold your head high and be a gentleman.”
“Her mouth seemed to have a private existence of its own.”
“Miss Rachel Haverford’s excuse for a glass of neat whiskey every morning was that she never got over the fright of finding a rattler coiled in her bedroom closet, on her washing, when she went to hang up her negligee.”

Politically correctness: with ironical innuendoes
“Little Chuck Little was another member of the population who did not know where his next meal was coming from…”
“He was among the most diminutive of men…”

Sexist remarks
“(…) Jem told me I was being a girl, that girls always imagined things, that’s why other people hated them so, and if I started behaving like one I could just go off and find some to play with.”
“Rose Aylmer was Uncle Jack’s cat. She was a beautiful yellow female Uncle Jack said was one of the few women he could stand permanently. ”

Gender roles and tomboyish attitude
“Aunt Alexandra was fanatical on the subject of my attire. I could not possibly hope to be a lady if I wore breeches; when I said I could do nothing in a dress, she said I wasn’t supposed to be doing things that required pants. Aunt Alexandra’s vision of my deportment involved playing with small stoves, tea sets, and wearing the Add-A-Pearl necklace she gave me when I was born; furthermore, I should be a ray of sunshine in my father’s lonely life. I suggested that one could be a ray of sunshine in pants just as well, but Aunty said that one had to behave like a sunbeam, that I was born good nut had grown progressively worse every year. ”

Gender roles reversed
“Grandma says all men should learn to cook, that men oughta be careful with their wives and wait on ‘em when they don’t feel good.”

If we were to draw Calpurnia and Atticus as template figures and colour them in black and white, we could colour both of them half black, half white as both behave as if they belonged to both races.
e.g. Atticus has a tolerant attitude towards Negros, he makes no differences between Whites and Blacks, he defends them when the case
Calpurnia, even if she is the cook, she is treated as a member of the family with equal rights; she can read and write, she is not judged by the members of the Black community when she takes the children to their church, she can talk like the Whites as well as the Black people.
“Calpurnia had more education than most colored folks. (…) she had taught me to write and it was her fault.”
Atticus trusts her:
“(…)Calpurnia is not leaving this house until she wants to.(…)She’s a faithful member of this family. (…)I don’t think the children’ve suffered one bit from her having brought them up. If anything, she’s been harder on them in some ways than a mother would have been… she’s never let them get away with anything, she’s never indulged them the way most colored nurses do. She tried to bring them up according to her lights, and Cal’s lights are pretty good- and another thing, the children love her. ”

FOOD FOR THOUGHT
“The Whites enslaved the Blacks with chains in the last century. The Blacks will enslave the Whites in the next century by drowning them in a sea of incoherence” (The Hour of the Milk is no Longer White – A Novella of Philosophic Transcendence by Ronald Isaac Landau)

FOR FUN

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Monika Bandi

This is a book set on proving that things are not what they seem to be, people are deceiving. For example, Scout's teacher speaks about Jews' persecutions and argues against it but she does not agree with the idea of mixed marriages. As my colleague said in the above post, they seem quite interested in being politically correct and in showing the right image of themselves in society. Even Atticus has sides that we don't know about; everybody is shocked when they see how well he could use a rifle when he shot the dog.

I also agree with what my colleague said about Atticus and Calpurnia. I would dare say they are colourless, they seem out of that world depicted in the novel. For example, Calpurnia takes the children to her church, which is quite bold, in my opinion. She is asked why she is taking the children there. The answer is obvious since in their house there does not seem to be any difference between blacks and whites. More, she considers them to be her children. I don't think that the black people going to that church did not want them to be there. they were more afraid of what might happen to them having such a close relationship with some white people.

Atticus is the perfect example of a father who wants to do what's best for his children, to teach them about life every time he gets the chance. And in the end we see that Atticus has really taught his children, they took from him his bravery and his honesty.

The writer succeeds in depicting two different worlds, that of the children and that of the adults without mixing them, she actually does this very well and we can see it especially during Scout's conversations with her father, two representatives of the two worlds.