To kill a mocking bird by Harper Lee is a story of racial prejudice and social class, set in a time when such narrow mindedness was considered acceptable and apart of every day life in the small town of Maycomb. A widower, Atticus raises his children by himself, with the help of kindly neighbours and a black housekeeper named Calpurnia. Scout and Jem almost instinctively understand the complexities and machinations of their neighbourhood and town. This novel takes place in 1930’s in a typical southern society. Once Atticus chooses to defend Tom Robinson, a black man, Scout faces many challenges and she discovers numerous facts about life.
Describe at least one important setting in the text. Explain how the setting helped you to understand one or more important ideas in the text. In Harper Lee’s novel To Kill a Mockingbird, both the time and place in which it was set help the reader to understand the important ideas of racial prejudice and classism which are present in the text. The novel takes place in Maycomb County, a fictional district in the south of Alabama, during the Great Depression of the 1930s. The town is portrayed through the words of Scout Finch as a small, sleepy town, in which “a day was twenty-four hours long but seemed longer.” Due to the Great Depression, the people of Maycomb, even the well-off citizens like Atticus Finch, are all very poor and the exaggerated length of the days appears to owe to the fact that “there was no hurry, for there was nowhere to go, nothing to buy and no money to buy it with, nothing to see outside the boundaries of Maycomb County.” The poorer citizens have to rely on trading with farming supplies and livestock as they, already indigent, were so further crippled by the depression that they have no real money to spend.
The modern day novel and movie The Help shows many similarities that were portrayed in the classical novel To Kill a Mockingbird. Both The Help and To Kill a Mockingbird go into depth about the struggle humanity has been threw over the years. Although they both contain the same themes the way the authors create the situations and display the harsh reality of society’s make these two stories very different. During the depression prejudice was at its peak, with the Jim Crow laws and no rights for blacks it made it near impossible for the African American community to live a normal life. In the book To Kill a Mockingbird the rape trail of Tom Robinson vs Mayella Ewell, an African American man accused of raping a white teenage girl was held in a bias court room of Maycomb County.
In the novel To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee incorporates the theme, prejudice, to portray the feelings and thoughts that people had during the time period of the Great Depression; this was described in the Trial where Tom Robinson fought for his life. throughout the 1930's, most people were raised with prejudice beliefs in the South. Whites were taught from generations before them that african americans do not deserve respect. Therefore, it should not be brought to them. Most whites believed that African Americans were to do what they were told, by them.
Nick Salamone June 9th, 2009 Theme Analysis To Kill A Mockingbird is set in Alabama before civil rights cases were properly exposed of justices and cases against African-Americans were considered open. You find out that society can hurt innocent individuals who have littler power because of who they are. Through this novel, you put on the shoes of a small girl, Scout, and walks through a town where they learn of social inequality, coexistence of good and evil, and racism by seeing it through her father and life experiences. Race is a central issue in this time period. People aren't willing to accept change and theirs not much you can do in the 1930's to change that because it was "sociality acceptable" not to.
To Kill A Mockingbird Analysis Social commentary is one of the driving forces of fiction writers. All have opinions of the society from in which they were reared causing many of their story driving characters to come from similar situations. One southern born woman, Harper Lee, followed this formula when writing her staunchly moral yet surprisingly youthful novel To Kill a Mockingbird. To Kill A Mockingbird is set in Alabama before civil rights cases flooded the benches of justices and cases against African-Americans were considered open and closed. Through To Kill A Mockingbird, the reader puts on the shoes of a little girl, Scout, and traipses through this familiar town and learns of social injustice by seeing it affect not only a member of the town, but her own father.
Christopher Dietz Professor Becky Hubbard Course EDU241: Learners and Diversity 18 September 2013 Prejudice in Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird Throughout the film To Kill a Mockingbird there were several different themes that were very evident. These themes were growing up, being brave, and being prejudice. However the theme that was the most profound and that we will be discussing is prejudice. Prejudice is defined as an "opinion formed without taking the time and care to judge fairly". The movie takes place in Maycomb, Alabama in the 1930’s during the Great Depression, a time in which our country was at its lowest economic point in its history.
Some of the major issues and concerns conveyed by Harper Lee in To Kill a Mockingbird (TKAM) are the concepts of prejudice, courage and innocence and childhood and how these are represented in the novel through various techniques and symbols. In the novel we see the racial morals of characters, like Atticus Finch and Bob Ewell, conflicting to create events that instigate racial uproar in the town of Maycomb. We explore the issues through Scout's interpretation of the events, as well as experiencing her innocence from the situation because of her childhood. Through the trial of Tom Robinson, readers are able to witness the courage of Atticus Finch, defending a Negro in a racially biased society when knowing he may not be successful with his endeavours. The main concern and issue in TKAM is the concept of prejudice.
Discrimination Discrimination, surely everyone has heard of it, but in To Kill a Mockingbird, everyone somehow experiences it. The story takes place in Maycomb, Alabama in the 1930's during the Great Depression. This, of course, is a fictional place, but the discrimination we see here is a reflection of what happened in the South during the 1930's. There are various forms of discrimination in this book some examples of these are racial, religious, age and gender discrimination. Racial discrimination was very prevalent during the 1930's especially in the South.
Atticus thought that it was Jem but the sheriff said that Bob Ewell fell on his knife. The person that really killed Bob Ewell was Boo Radley and the sheriff hides that fact to protect Boo Radley from trials in court. For readers to be able to tell that it was Boo Radley who killed Bob Ewell they had to pay attention to quotes like “Thank you Arthur….. Thank you for my children” (Lee chap 31). The Author gives readers clues and makes them think to figure out questions, she never gives a straight out answer.