How Does Harper Lee Present the Community of Maycomb and Use It to Reflect the Wider Attitudes/Values of American Society?

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To Kill a Mockingbird is a classic novel that explores the irrational and prejudice attitudes to social class and race within a fictional town set Deep South in the 1930’s. The novel is a bildungsroman, its principal subject being the moral and intellectual development of youth. In this case Scout and Jem Finch who are searching for a meaningful existence within society. During the novel Harper Lee draws upon the community of Maycomb, to reflect the wider attitudes of society of America at the time. The book was written during the 1950’s in America, and coincided with the civil rights movement. At this time, racism was still evident in society and this is a key theme of this text. In the book Maycomb is a small town within Alabama itself and is a microcosm of American society during the 1930’s; although we do not hear anything about the rest of Alabama or America throughout the entire novel we feel it in there within the values of Maycomb. During the first description of the town in chapter one, Harper Lee makes gives Maycomb a very negative atmosphere. She repeats the adjective old, which emphasises how dull it is. She personifies the town by saying it was tired, giving it quite a slow, aimless feel which is enhanced by the long syntax and use of lots of colons and semi-colons. Alliteration and sibilance, “flicked flies” and “sagged on the square” emphasises daily life in Maycomb as repetitive and unsurprising. Another way Lee shows the sluggish pace in this town is the verbs she uses when describing the people of Maycomb: “ambles” and “shuffled” emphasise the leisurely lives the people lead, and how well the town and the residents suit each other. The sentence “a day was twenty-four hours long but seemed longer” is another example that shows the reader even time was drawn-out there. Lee’s choice of Maycomb as a setting, developed through narrative point

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