ENGL2130 Central Georgia Technical College To Kill a Mockingbird Research For the final research assignment, write an expository/literary analysis essay of

ENGL2130 Central Georgia Technical College To Kill a Mockingbird Research For the final research assignment, write an expository/literary analysis essay of approximately 750 to 1250 words based on one of the topic options. (Topic is listed below.) Your paper should be formatted and documented according to MLA 8.0 guidelines. Primary Source(s): Each paper should make reference to at least one primary source from the novel selected. Secondary Sources: Each paper must make reference to a minimum of two secondary sources from one of the Library Databases, using the 8th edition of MLA formatting. The sources should discuss some aspect(s) of any of the primary sources you use. See attachments. Thesis: Your paper should have an identifiable three-part thesis and be thesis-driven. Title:All papers must have a TITLE.The title should reflect your thesis.The Scarlet Letter is not an appropriate title for a paper—it’s been taken! The Function of the Narrator in The Scarlet Letter is an appropriate title. Works Cited: Please include a separate page and make sure to include properly formatted citations for your primary source(s) and all secondary sources. The selected topic and novel is: To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee Take one or more of the forms of discrimination in To Kill a Mockingbird and write an analytic essay in which you explain the forms and, if applicable, compare and contrast the types of discrimination. You should argue whether the lessons about discrimination that Scout learns are applicable to all types of prejudice, or whether they apply to racism alone. The most obvious form of discrimination in To Kill a Mockingbird is racism; however, there are other types of prejudice and discrimination that typify relationships among the novel’s characters. Scout, for example, is ridiculed in To Kill a Mockingbird because she is a tomboy. Boo Radley is ostracized despite the fact that hardly anyone knows him. Reverse racism is also present in the novel, as evidenced by the threats against Atticus Finch and his family as he defends Tom Robinson. ENGL 2130 Final Research Paper Assignment for To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
For the final research assignment, write an expository/literary analysis essay of approximately
750 to 1250 words based on one of the topic options. (Topic is listed below.) Your paper
should be formatted and documented according to MLA 8.0 guidelines.
Primary Source(s): Each paper should make reference to at least one primary source from the
novel selected.
Secondary Sources: Each paper must make reference to a minimum of two secondary sources
from one of the Library Databases, using the 8th edition of MLA formatting. The sources
should discuss some aspect(s) of any of the primary sources you use.
Thesis: Your paper should have an identifiable three-part thesis and be thesis-driven.
Title: All papers must have a TITLE. The title should reflect your thesis. The Scarlet Letter is
not an appropriate title for a paper—it’s been taken! The Function of the Narrator in The
Scarlet Letter is an appropriate title.
Works Cited: Please include a separate page and make sure to include properly formatted
citations for your primary source(s) and all secondary sources.
The selected topic and novel is:
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Take one or more of the forms of discrimination in To Kill a Mockingbird and write an analytic
essay in which you explain the forms and, if applicable, compare and contrast the types of
discrimination. You should argue whether the lessons about discrimination that Scout learns are
applicable to all types of prejudice, or whether they apply to racism alone. The most obvious
form of discrimination in To Kill a Mockingbird is racism; however, there are other types of
prejudice and discrimination that typify relationships among the novel’s characters. Scout, for
example, is ridiculed in To Kill a Mockingbird because she is a tomboy. Boo Radley is
ostracized despite the fact that hardly anyone knows him. Reverse racism is also present in the
novel, as evidenced by the threats against Atticus Finch and his family as he defends Tom
Robinson.
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To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (New York: Warner Books, 1982 reprinting.)
Image courtesy of McCain Library and Archives (de Grummond Children’s Literature Collection and USM Libraries Digital Lab), University of Southern Mississippi,
Hattiesburg.
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Alabama Bound: Reading Harper Lee’s
To Kill a Mockingbird While Southern
J S
Proud of the glory, stare down the shame
duality of the Southern thing
—Drive-By Truckers (“The Southern Thing”)
When I was nine years old—which is the same age as Scout Finch at the
beginning of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird—my family packed into
our Studebaker and headed south on the Dixie Highway from the suburbs of
Chicago to our new home in the suburbs of Birmingham, Alabama. Just outside
of Indianapolis, we merged on to US Highway 31 taking us down through
Louisville, Kentucky; Nashville, Tennessee; and eventually crossing over
the Alabama state line, where a billboard announced “Welcome to Alabama,
the Heart of Dixie”—a motto that appeared on standard issued license plates
beginning in 1955. As the Lead Belly song goes, I was “Alabama Bound.”
Arriving in the heart of Dixie, we slowly made our way through Athens,
Cullman, and ?nally into Birmingham, nicknamed The Magic City. The
two-lane highway that we traveled on for years now has been replaced by
an multi-lane expressway, but in many places, Highway 65 runs concurrent
with old Highway 31. Things change, but they often stay the same.
When I teach To Kill a Mockingbird in my college-level young adult
literature course, I bring in James Agee’s and Walker Evans’s Let Us Now
Praise Famous Men (1941), the non?ction account of three families of
white sharecroppers living in the same area of Alabama in the 1930s as the
setting for Lee’s novel. Evans’s haunting, black-and-white photographs of
the families and their homes serve as the introduction to Agee’s prose. The
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photographs provide a historical visual companion to the poverty of the lives
of the Cunninghams and the Ewells in Lee’s novel. After showing students
the photographs from Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, I then share the
photographs from Dale Maharidge’s and Michael Williamson’s And Their
Children After Them (1989), which revisits the locations and families that
Agee and Evans interviewed and photographed in 1936. Between 1986 and
1988, Maharidge and Williamson were able to locate twelve of the original
twenty-two individuals who were featured in Let Us Now Praise Famous
Men (257). Williamson frequently pairs Evans’s earlier photographs with his
more recent images of the same places and people. The children that Agee and
Evans met have become adults. While trailers have replaced simple cabins,
rural poverty remains a constant.
Two years after Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird was published and
awarded a Pulitzer Prize in Literature in 1960, my family moved to Alabama.
It was the year of the release of Robert Mulligan’s popular ?lm adaptation of
the novel. The ?lm went on to win three Academy Awards, including “best
actor” for Gregory Peck, who played Atticus Finch. The roles of Scout and
Jem Finch were played by the ten-year-old Mary Badham and the thirteenyear–old Philip Allford, both child actors from Birmingham; neither had
much previous acting experience prior to the ?lm. Badham was the youngest
actress to ever be nominated for the best supporting actress role, but she lost
that year to sixteen-year-old Patty Duke (who played Helen Keller, another
Alabamian, in Arthur Penn’s The Miracle Worker). Mulligan’s ?lm adaptation
of To Kill a Mockingbird, with a screenplay by Horton Foote, is a rare example
of a critically acclaimed novel being successfully translated to the movie
screen. Taken together, the novel and the ?lm have probably done more to
help change and improve race relations in Alabama than any other literary
work. While To Kill a Mockingbird appears to some contemporary readers
and literary critics as dated and less progressive in its racial politics when
viewed in light of contemporary attitudes toward racial justice, it was—and
remains—an in?uential and enduring ?rst step. Even before the publication
of Go Set a Watchman (2015), in which Harper Lee presents the aging Atticus
Finch as a racist, critics had begun to question the protagonist’s attitudes and
his weak defense of Tom Robinson. Malcolm Gladwell in “The Courthouse
Ring: The Truth about Atticus Finch,” published in The New Yorker in 2009,
argues that Atticus is “about accommodation, not reform” (28) and that Lee’s
novel informs readers of “the limitation of Jim Crow liberalism in Maycomb,
Alabama” (32). However, in 2012, when John Grisham, the lawyer turned
successful novelist, was asked to name the best book about the law in the
“By the Book” section of The New York Times Book Review, he promptly
responded, “To Kill a Mockingbird” (7).
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In “It’s a Sin to Kill a Mockingbird: The Need for Idealism in the Legal
Profession,” published in the 2016 Michigan Law Review, law professor
Jonathan Rapping observed that in 2010 the American Bar Association named
Atticus Finch as America’s favorite lawyer and that long after the novel’s
publication, Atticus remains an inspiration for many progressive lawyers
(852). While acknowledging Atticus’s ?aws, Rapping argues that readers,
including lawyers, “should continue to hold him up as a role model for the
profession” (849). President Barack Obama, a former law professor, also
invoked Atticus Finch as an inspirational ?gure in his “Farewell Address,”
given in Chicago on January 10, 2017. Obama said:
But laws alone won’t be enough. Hearts must change. It won’t
change overnight. Social attitudes oftentimes take generations
to change. But if our democracy is to work the way it should
in this increasingly diverse nation, then each of us needs to
try to heed the advice of a great character in American ?ction,
Atticus Finch, who said “You never really understand a person
until you consider things from his point of view, until you
climb into his skin and walk around in it.” (Obama)
While To Kill a Mockingbird is frequently taught and discussed in law
schools as well as high schools, it is a novel that works on the reader’s
emotions rather than by the force of the argument. The novel sets out to
change an attitude toward race, rather than to promote speci?c laws about
race. President Obama recognized that the goal of the novel is to change
hearts. That goal has been enormously successful in evoking empathy and
encouraging readers to see the world as others do. Lee shows readers the
actions and attitudes of adults as viewed from the point of view of three
young children—Scout, Jem, and Dill—who transition from innocence to
experience. In a similar manner, I came to understand Alabama through the
eyes of a young person.
The year after we moved, George Wallace was elected governor of
Alabama for the ?rst time. I can still remember asking my father how
historians were able to recognize and separate the many ordinary and ?eeting
daily events from those that would be subsequently recognized as signi?cant
and form a lasting part of history. He walked over to the co?ee table and
picked up a copy of The Birmingham News featuring a headline about a
march from Selma to Montgomery and explained, “This is history.” Until
then, I had always assumed—based on my textbooks that I was provided in
school—that American history was a series of events that had occurred many
years ago and took place elsewhere, generally somewhere in New England.
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I had assumed that history was never local, but that assumption was about
to be challenged.
My family moved to Alabama after my father had accepted a faculty
position at the Pharmacy School at Samford University, a Baptist college in
Homewood, Alabama, a suburb just “over the mountain,” or the other side
of Red Mountain. At the time, Birmingham was a steel town. The Sloss
Furnace was in operation and made an impressive, if not frightening sight,
especially at night. You could view it up close if you drove past the huge
furance on First Avenue in downtown Birmingham. We could also see the
rows of company houses that Walker Evans had photographed in the 1930s
for the Farm Security Administration that were still being occupied by steel
workers. Atop Red Mountain, overlooking the city was the impressive ?fty?ve-foot statute of Vulcan, the symbol of Birmingham, the largest iron ore
statue in world.
Birmingham was famous for being the Pittsburgh of the South, or the
Magic City, although its reputation would quickly change with the civil
rights movement and subsequent events, not the least being the bombing of
the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in 1963.
I ?rst read To Kill a Mockingbird when I was in high school. I don’t
recall the novel being assigned in any of my English classes, so I must have
found a copy in the library. It has always been a popular—although rather
controversial—book in Alabama. Harper Lee was a beloved, but somewhat
reclusive ?gure, within the state. She had once stated her ambitions as, “all I
want to be is the Jane Austen of south Alabama” (Blackall 19). As a careful
observer of a select group of families in the country, with a keen eye and a
wicked ear for social satire, Lee was amazingly successful. Referring to her
by the name she used with those close to her, Lee’s childhood friend Truman
Capote—the model for Dill—said, “Most of the people in Nelle’s book are
drawn from life” (qtd. in Shields 127). For readers who have lived in Alabama,
one of the most striking things about the novel is how accurately Lee captures
the sense of place and people who live there. She gets the little details right.
If you grew up in Alabama, when you read To Kill a Mockingbird, you can
smell the pine trees, the azaleas, and the magnolias; you can see the red dirt
and feel the oppressive, damp summer heat. Anyone who has spent quality
time in Birmingham’s Botanical Gardens or Mobile’s Bellingrath Gardens
has overheard extended conversations of older women exhibiting their vast
knowledge of gardening and the Old Testament, just like Miss Maudie
Atkinson in the book.
Monroeville, Alabama, didn’t have a public library when Lee was
child. Alabama: A Guide to the Deep South (1941), the Works Progress
Administration (WPA) guide for Alabama, makes little mention of
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Monroeville, other than it having a modest population of 1,355 people
(Jackson 363). The 1975 revised version of the WPA guide for Alabama does
include a brief reference to Lee in the “Books, Arts and Crafts” section of the
volume: “Harper Lee, who won national acclaim for To Kill a Mockingbird,
is an Alabamian” (Walker 113). But “The O?cial Travel Site of Alabama”
website has since made up for that oversight and features Alabama Road Trip
No. 10: Monroeville: The “To Kill a Mockingbird” Experience. Alabama now
celebrates Monroeville as the “Literary Capital of Alabama,” since it is the
hometown of Harper Lee, Truman Capote, and Mark Childress, the author of
Crazy in Alabama (Parten). Since 1990, the Monroeville County Courthouse
has been transformed into a museum, and a theatrical version of the novel is
performed there in the summers in which members of the audience can be
selected to become members of the jury.
Capote received a slightly longer mention in the 1975 WPA guide
for Alabama, which noted that he is a native of New Orleans, but “widely
known in Alabama” (Walker 113). One of the most impressive readings that
I attended as an undergraduate at Samford University was witnessing Capote
read in the early 1970s at the University of North Alabama in Florence.
He was clearly drunk, and it looked like the reading was going to be bust.
A scene from the play To Kill a Mockingbird, performed in Monroeville, Alabama, 23 April
2010. Photographed by Carol M. Highsmith. Image courtesy of the George F. Landegger
Collection of Alabama Photographs in Carol M. Highsmith’s America, Library of Congress,
Prints and Photographs Division, LC-DIG-highsm-07105..
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But once he began reading “A Christmas Memory,” his short story set in
Alabama about a young boy who makes fruitcakes with his elderly cousin,
an astonishing transformation occurred. Capote sobered up and gave—clearly
from memory—one of the most impassioned and moving readings I have
ever witnessed. Alabama is the home of such di?erent and larger-than-life
artistic personalities, such as Hank Williams, Sun Ra, and Zelda Sayre and
its citizens are a bit more diverse than is often assumed. Harper Lee is part
of the constellation of creative people from Alabama.
Like Monroeville, Hoover (the suburb south of Birmingham where I grew
up) didn’t have a library. Once a week, my family waited for the bookmobile
to arrive in the parking lot near my elementary school. As fun as a traveling
library can be to a young child, the book selection was limited. Eventually,
my parents decided it would be better to drive to the Birmingham Public
Library, an impressive four-story building adjacent to Woodrow Wilson Park.
Built in 1902, the library features beautiful WPA murals of famous literary
?gures by Ezra Winters in its reading room on the ?rst ?oor and fairy tale
murals in its children’s department. We would drive Highway 31 on Saturdays,
passing under the statue of Vulcan watching over Birmingham, and spend
the afternoons in the library, wandering in a park, and visiting the nearby
Birmingham Art Museum. It was on one of those trips that I ?rst came across
To Kill a Mockingbird.
But as a child, I never realized that Kelly Ingram Park and the Sixteenth
Street Baptist Church—the epicenter of the civil rights movement in
Birmingham—were only four blocks away from the Birmingham Public
Library. Even though we drove by the area on our trips to the library, it
remained a separate world. In 1992, the Civil Rights Institute opened next
to the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church; the area has been designated as the
Civil Rights District and has become a popular tourist destination.
My ?rst recognition of segregation in Birmingham occurred when we
visited Birmingham’s Jimmy Morgan Zoo. It was there that I saw water
fountains marked “Colored” and “White.” I had assumed that the colored
water fountains featured multicolored water and was disappointed when they
did not. I quickly learned the actual meaning behind the two signs.
Scout, Jem, and Dill go through a similar experience as they observe
the trial of Tom Robinson. Jem is con?dent that his father has successfully
presented the facts of the legal case and convinced the jury of Robinson’s
innocence. But what Jem and the other children have not taken into account
is that the members of the jury (like Mr. Cunningham, who had previously
led the mob to the jail to lynch Robinson before the trial) have, “blind spots
along with the rest of us” (Lee 179). After Tom’s conviction, Jem is forced
to re-evaluate members of his hometown: “I always thought Maycomb folks
were the best folks in the world, and least that what they seemed like” (246).
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Like Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, To Kill a
Mockingbird could have only been written by someone who grew up in
the South and eventually left. Lee wrote the novel in New York City, but it
clearly re?ects her knowledge and appreciation of Alabama. I suspect most
white readers of To Kill a Mockingbird from Alabama prefer to identify with
Atticus Finch, or perhaps Scout or Jem, but readers from outside of the state
are more likely to assume Alabamians are versions of Bob Ewell or Miss
Gates. The truth is more likely found somewhere in-between. As Lee would
suggest, Alabama is full of all sorts of folks. Jem disagrees with Scout when
she announces, “I think there’s just one kind of folks. Folks” (Lee 259). Lee
clearly reveals that, “There was indeed a caste system in Maycomb” (149)
and it makes deep and lasting divisions by race, social class, and gender.
But is also a community made up of a range of folks who resemble Miss
Maudie, Miss Stephanie Crawford, Mr. Cunningham, Mr. Underwood, Bob
Ewell, and Dolphus Raymond. It is both a highly racist community and a
place where, “Neighbors bring food with death and ?owers with sickness
and little things in between” (320).
When I began third grade at Shades Creek School, the class would begin
each day by standing next to our desks and singing. We would start with
folk songs such as “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad,” “Erie Canal,” and
“Oh Susanna” and then move on to more patriotic tunes such as “The Battle
Hymn of the Republic” and, of course, “Dixie.” These were the songs that Pa
sang to Laura in Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books, and the songs that Carl
Sandburg collected in The American Songbag in the 1920s. It was a clever
way to calm down a classroom of hyperactive third-graders. That year, the
class was introduced to Alabama history, which included memorizing the
names of all the previous governors. But it is also when I learned to sing and
appreciate folk songs and develop my interest in local history. During my
childhood, it seems to me that whenever my family traveled, we would stop
at every historical marker that appeared along the road. There were quite a
few historical landmarks in Alabama. My parents kept a copy of the state
WPA guide in the car and read it out loud to entertain the three ?dgeting
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