Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird by Michael J. Meyer Read Free Book Online

(such as the Ewell family and the hypocritical schoolteachers). The central symbol of the mockingbird—which is identified in numerous answers by teachers, all or nearly all of whom uncritically follow the novel’s prompting, as a pure and innocent creature that does nothing but sing—can similarly be interrogated or deconstructed through a parallel reading of Ted Hughes’ poem “Thrushes,” which portrays the little song birds of the title as cold, calculating killers.
    Life Lessons
    The bulk of the answers contributing to the emerging theme of Life Lessons similarly demonstrate only a limited degree of critical literacy, particularly in the area of gender criticism. The answers do not demonstrate the thoughts of resisting readers, readers who question both the promptings of the text and their own presuppositions as they make sense of the reading. The answer in the working sample that addresses Scout’s education in gender identity or gender performance talks without irony about what “true Southern ladies” do and do not do. While a theoretical sampling of the full collection of answers shows that some teachers gently criticize what they see as Aunt Alexandra’s “zeal to feminize Scout” by making her wear a dress and attend a formal tea party, for example, the teachers’ posts in the full Question & Answer section tend toward a normalized reading of Scout’s gender identity development. The transition from wearing overalls to wearing a dress is commonly described by teachers as desirable progress or maturation. Scout “moves through her tomboy stage,” one teacher writes. Another teacher writes that she “has developed from a little rascal to a young lady who was just escorted from her home” (this teacher’s reading or recollection contradicts the text, which repeatedly asserts that Scout, dressed in her overalls, does the escorting: “he allowed me to lead him,” “I led him,” “I would lead him” [ TKAM 319]). A third teacher comments that “[p]art of the charm of the novel is watching Scout, the character, mature from a tomboy to the young lady who is narrating the story” and, in a separate answer, that “Scout has grown from a naive, tom boy to a sensitive and compassionate young lady.” Only one answer outside the working sample, written by a doctoral student, identifies “gender ambiguity” and “gender slippage” in several characters in the novel. Critical literacy might be improved by encouraging readers to resist taking gender identities for granted, to focus on what the text says (e.g., Scout escorts Boo, she is not escorted by him), and to explore a wider range of possible meanings for the particular words, phrases, and scenes in the novel. For example, there are only two brief discussions in the full set of answers of the “morphodite snowman” in the novel and no consideration by teachers of the different meanings of the word “morphodite.” In the American South, as demonstrated in various entries cited in the Oxford English Dictionary , “morphodite” has been used not only as a shortened form of “hermaphrodite” but also as a term for homosexual men or women, particularly those who engage in gender-transgressive behavior or dress. The term “morphodite” is used in this sense in the United States before 1941 and appears in Truman Capote’s 1952 play Grass Harp as well as in later writings by other gay men, including Edmund White (see The Beautiful Room Is Empty , 1988) and Will Roscoe (see Zuni Man-Woman , 1991).
    Text and Context
    The answers contributing to the emerging theme of Text and Context again demonstrate little critical literacy. The teachers’ answers often pay close attention to the “world” within the novel but little attention to the world around it. Answers often include glancing historical references