To Kill a Mockingbird (Critical Analysis)

A Critical Analysis on To Kill a Mockingbird

To Kill a Mockingbir d Harper Lee A Critical Analysis Prof. J. Antonio (G-Eng03) Academic Writing

Alejandro Dy II-BSCT


Socio-historical Approach

Socio-Historical criticism is interested in identifying the social, cultural, political, religious, and historical dynamics that are embodied within a text. It seeks to understand how a person in the original audience of the text would have perceived it.

To Kill a Mockingbird describes the racism happened in the United States. Racism in the United States has been a major issue ever since the colonial era and the slave era. Legally sanctioned racism imposed a heavy burden on Native Americans, African Americans, Asian Americans, and Latin Americans. European Americans were privileged by law in matters of literacy, immigration, voting rights, citizenship, land acquisition, and criminal procedure over periods of time extending from the 17th century to the 1960s. Many non English European immigrant groups, particularly American Jews, Irish Americans, Italian Americans, as well as other non-English American immigrants from elsewhere, suffered xenophobic exclusion and other forms of racism in American society.

In the story, we can see that Atticus Finch defended a Tom Robinson in the court. Tom was accused by a White Lady for raping her. We know for the fact that White Americans do not believe in the statements of Negros in that era. But because the judge in the court is a White American, Tom was sent to jail. In the story, Atticus believes that

A Critical Analysis on To Kill a Mockingbird there is an equal right for everyone. Atticus did his best to defend Tom, but racism affected the prejudice.

The forces of good and evil in To Kill a Mockingbird seem larger than the small Southern town in which the story takes place. Lee adds drama and atmosphere to her story by including a number of Gothic details in the setting and the plot. In literature, the term Gothic refers to a style of fiction first popularized in eighteenth-century England, featuring supernatural occurrences, gloomy and haunted settings, full moons, and so on. Among the Gothic elements in To Kill a Mockingbird are the unnatural snowfall, the fire that destroys Miss Maudie’s house, the children’s superstitions about Boo Radley, the mad dog that Atticus shoots, and the ominous night of the Halloween party on which Bob Ewell attacks the children. These elements, out of place in the normally quiet, predictable Maycomb, create tension in the novel and serve to foreshadow the troublesome events of the trial and its aftermath.

Counterbalancing the Gothic motif of the story is the motif of old-fashioned, small-town values, which manifest themselves throughout the novel. As if to contrast with all of the suspense and moral grandeur of the book, Lee emphasizes the slow-paced, good-natured feel of life in Maycomb. She often deliberately juxtaposes small-town values and Gothic images in order to examine more closely the forces of good and evil. The horror of the fire, for instance, is mitigated b y the comforting scene of the people of Maycomb banding together to save Miss Maudie’s possessions. In contrast, Bob Ewell’s cowardly attack on the defenseless Scout, who is dressed like a giant ham for the school pageant, shows him to be unredeemably evil.


Reader-Response Criticism

Reader-response criticism is a critical approach that shifts the emphasis to the reader from the text or the work’s author and context. This approach focuses on the individual reader’s evolving response to the text. The readers, through their own values and experiences, “create” the meaning of the text and therefore there is no one correct meaning.

When analyzing a text, from which a student will write a major paper, it is advised that the student should first focus on the elements of a story: plot, setting, atmosphere, mood, character, theme and title. The next logical approach is to look at the language (devices and patterns) and form of the text (structure). Then the student might consider any of the following approaches such as New Historicism, New Criticism, Archetypal Criticism or Cultural Criticism.

To Kill a mockingbird is just like the Philippine setting in Spanish era. It was taught since high school that the Spaniards give more priority to those who have money. The Filipinos became slaves of those Spaniards. Filipinos are also called Indio, means slave. The justice in the Spanish era was in their hands. They punish Filipinos even though they didn’t commit crime.

It was not only the class, also the race of different people living in the Philippines. Spaniard looked down to Chinese people. Chinese people are isolated in only one place. Because of the Spanish presence in the area, the Chinese people, who were living in the

A Critical Analysis on To Kill a Mockingbird area and engaging in free trade relations with the natives, were subjected to commercial restrictions as well as laws requiring them to pay tribute to Spanish authorities. As a result, the Chinese revolted against the Spaniards attacked the city. The said attempt was fruitless, and the Chinese were defeated. In order to safeguard the city from similar uprisings later, the Spanish authorities confined the Chinese residents and merchants to a separate district.

Nowadays, there is a little trace in discrimination in terms of race. The Department of Tourism warned the tourists not to insult the n atives in the northern part of the Philippines. Natives should be treated as a human also and not to be teased or make laugh.


Marxist Criticism

Based on the writings of Karl Marx (1818-1883 ) this school of thought contends that history and culture is largely a struggle between economic classes, and literature is often a reflection of the attitudes and interests of the dominant class. An often-repeated statement from Marx expresses a basic idea specific to this form of criticism. “It’s not the consciousness of men that determines their being, b ut on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness”.

Class, for Marx, is rooted in social relations of production, and cannot be referred in the first place to relations of distribution and con sumption or their ideological reflections. In considering the class consciousness of the proletariat, Marxists are therefore not concerned with the ideas of individual workers about their position in society so much as with the following series of categories: relations of production; conflict of workers and employers on this basis; conflict at the level of class; the theoretical and practical struggle to build revolutionary parties of the working class, in conflict with non-revolutionary and counter-revolutionary tendencies in the class and their reflection inside the revolutionary party.

In the story, we can see that there is discrimination between the poor and the rich. Scout Finch knew that the Cunningham’s are poor because they are farmers. She asked Atticus, “Are we poor?” Atticus replied that they were not. Being poor for them were a burden. They think that cannot survive or they were not be belong to the community.

A Critical Analysis on To Kill a Mockingbird There will be a social discrepancy among the poor and the rich. In the time the novel was written, poor people are slaves.

Differences in social status are explored largely through the ove rcomplicated social hierarchy of Maycomb, the ins and outs of which constantly baffle the children. The relatively well-off Finches stand near the top of Maycomb’s social hierarchy, with most of the townspeople beneath them. Ignorant country farmers like the Cunningham’s lie below the townspeople, and the white trash Ewells rest below the Cunningham’s. But the black community in Maycomb, despite its abundance of admirable qualities, squats below even the Ewells, enabling Bob Ewell to make up for his own lack of importance by persecuting Tom Robinson. These rigid social divisions that make up so much of the adult world are revealed in the book to be both irrational and destructive. For example, Scout cannot understand why Aunt Alexandra refuses to let her consort with young Walter Cunningham. Lee uses the children’s perplexity at the unpleasant layering of Maycomb society to critic the role of class status and, u ltimately, prejudice in human interaction.


Formalism

Formalism is a movement in literary criticism that proposes close reading and textual analysis of the text itself. It operates contrary to the previously favored focus on the author’s biography, the historical context, and the perceived parallels between these and the text. Practitioners focus on both the “external form” (e.g. ballad, ode) and the “internal forms” (e.g. structure, repetition, patterns of figurative language, plot/content, syntax/diction, tone, mood, context/setting, style, literary devices, theme). These practitioners reject consideration of the author’s intention and the affect on the reader as illegitimate.

Nelle Harper Lee born on April 28, 1926, in Monroeville, Alabama, a sleepy small town similar in many ways to Maycomb, the setting of To Kill a Mockingbird . Like Atticus Finch, the father of Scout, the narrator and protagonist of To Kill a Mockingbird, Lee’s father was a lawyer. Among Lee’s childhood friends was the future novelist and essayist Truman Capote, from whom she drew inspiration for the character Dill. These personal details notwithstanding, Lee maintains that To Kill a Mockingbird was intended to portray not her own childhood home but rather a nonspecific Southern town. “People are people anywhere you put them,” she declared in a 1961 interview.


Lee began To Kill a Mockingbird in the mid-1950s, after moving to New York to become a writer. She completed the novel in 1957 and published it, with revisions, in 1960, just before the peak of the American civil rights movement. Critical response to To Kill a Mockingbird was mixed: a number of critics found the narrative voice of a nine-year-old girl unconvincing and called the novel overly moralistic. Nevertheless, in the racially charged atmosphere of the e arly 1960s, the book became an enormous popular success, winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1961 and selling over fifteen million copies. Two years after the book’s publication, an Academy Award– winning film version of the novel, starring Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch, was produced. Meanwhile, the author herself had retreated from the public eye: she avoided interviews, declined to write the screenplay for the film version, and published only a few short pieces after 1961. To Kill a Mockingbird remains her sole published novel. Lee eventually returned to Monroeville and continues to live there.

The most important theme of the Novel is the book’s exploration of the moral nature of human beings. That is, whether people are essentially good or evil. Scout and Jem assume that people are good because they have never seen evil. And must incorporate it into their understanding of the wo rld

The sub themes of the novel involve the threat that hatred, prejudice, and ignorance pose to the innocent. People such as Tom Robinson and Boo Radley are not prepared for the evil that they encounter, and as a result, they are destroyed.


Feminist Criticism

Feminist Criticism is literary criticism based on feminist theories. It considers texts with the knowledge that societies treat men and women inequitably. Feminist criticism will analyze texts in light of patriarchal (male dominated) cultural institutions, phallocentric (male centered) language, masculine and feminine stereotypes, and the unequal treatment of male and female writers. Feminist criticism developed primarily in the 1960’s and 1970’s, although it is evident in earlier works as well, for example in the works of Virginia Woolf and Mary Wollstonecraft. More recent feminist and gender studies investigate social constructions related to gender as they ap pear in literature.

In the novel, Scout is the protagonist. Scout is a female. Female symbolizes equality. We can see that Scout is a neutral to all. She believes in herself. She led the characters to open their minds in truth. We can see that Scout prove that Boo is not a bad person. We saw that Boo helped Jem from the unknown man attempting to kill him. Boo also the one who gives presents to Jem and Scout inside the tree hole.

Another thing is men not considered capable of nurturing children. This was disagreed by the novel because we see that Atticus, father of Scout and Jem, was the one who guided them in growing up. Atticus proved that men are also capable of nurturing children in good aspects.


Philosophical Approach

Philosophical analysis is a general term for techniques typically used by philosophers in the analytic tradition that involve "breaking down" (i.e. analyzing) philosophical issues. Arguably the most prominent of these techniques is the analysis of concepts (known as conceptual analysis). This article will examine the major philosophical techniques associated with the notion o f analysis, as well as examine the controversies surrounding it.

From the novel, the important thing is to appreciate the good qualities and understand the bad qualities by treating others with sympathy and trying to see life from their perspective. It teaches us to look people in their good perspective so that we can accept them. People who looked at the negative side of a person will be his burden. The novel approaches this question by dramatizing Scout and Jem’s transition from a perspective of childhood innocence, in which they assume that people are good because they have never seen evil, to a more adult perspective, in which they have confronted evil and must incorporate it into their understanding o f the world. As a result of this portrayal of the transition from innocence to experience, one of the book’s important subthemes involves the threat that hatred, prejudice, and ignorance pose to the innocent: people such as Tom Robinson and Boo Radley are not prepared for the evil that they encounter, and, as a result, they are destroyed. Even Jem is victimized to an extent by his discovery of the

A Critical Analysis on To Kill a Mockingbird evil of racism during and after the trial. Whereas Scout is able to maintain her basic faith in human nature despite Tom’s conviction, Jem’s faith in justice and in humanity is badly damaged, and he retreats into a state of disillusionment.

The moral voice of To Kill a Mockingbird is embodied by Atticus Finch, who is virtually unique in the novel in that he has experienced and understood evil without losing his faith in the human capacity for goodness. Atticus understands that, rather than being simply creatures of good or creatures of evil, most people have both good and bad qualities. The important thing is to appreciate the good qualities and understand the bad qualities by treating others with sympathy and trying to see life from their perspective. He tries to teach this ultimate moral lesson to Jem and Scout to show them that it is possible to live with conscience without losing hope or becoming cynical. In this way, Atticus is able to admire Mrs. Dubose’s courage even while deploring her racism. Scout’s progress as a character in the novel is defined by her gradual development toward understanding Atticus’s lessons, culminating when, in the final chapters, Scout at last sees Boo Radley as a human being. Her newfound ability to view the world from his perspective en sures that she will not become jaded as she loses her innocence.

Another philosophy from the novel is “It’s a sin to kill a mockingbird” mockingbirds are only singing from their heart. They were shooting by the rangers for their fun. Mockingbirds didn’t do anything to the rangers. Mockingbirds are innocent from all happenings. Just like in the novel, every character is innocents


Psychoanalytic Criticism

Psychoanalytic criticism is literary criticism grounded in psychoanalytic theory of the founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud (1856-1939). Practitioners attempt to psychoanalyze the author’s unconscious desires, the reader’s responses, and the characters in the work. The last approach involves examining the text for symbols and psychological complexes.

Mockingbird represents innocence. Like hunters who kill mockingbirds for sport, people kill innocence, or other people who are innocent, without thinking about what they are doing. Atticus stands firm in his defense of innocence and urges his children not to shoot mockingbirds both literally and figuratively.

Boo Radley represents fear. Small town folks fear that if they act eccentric and fail to adhere to social rules they too will end up like Boo, isolated and remembered as a grotesque monster. In this fear that supports the social status quo and keeps individual from standing up for that which they believe. Until people can understand and accept boo, as scout does at the end of the book, they will always be stuck in a world filled with fears, lies, and ignorance.

A Critical Analysis on To Kill a Mockingbird Guns represent false strength. According to Atticus, guns do not prove manhood or bravery. Manhood and bravery come from a man’s ability to preserve and fight using his wits, his heart, and his character.

The most important theme of the Novel is the book’s exploration of the moral nature of human beings. That is, whether people are essentially good or evil. Scout and Jem assume that people are good because they have never seen evil. And must incorporate it into their understanding of the wo rld

The sub themes of the novel involve the threat that hatred, prejudice, and ignorance pose to the innocent. People such as Tom Robinson and Boo Radley are not prepared for the evil that they encounter, and as a result, they are destroyed.

To Kill a Mockingbird (Critical Analysis)

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