A few years ago I read The Grapes of Wrath for the first time, noting that a (now defunct) page purporting to list the hundred most commonly studied works of American literature in U.S. classrooms had placed it at #7, making it a conspicuous gap in my knowledge of the canon. But it wasn’t the most conspicuous. A common topic of conversation among teachers of literature is “What haven’t you read?”—a game of sheepish one-downsmanship to see who’ll confess to the most embarrassing hole in her résumé. And my answer has long been the #5 work on that list: To Kill a Mockingbird. I was mildly surprised to find that none of my fellow teachers has been particularly shocked by this; one of my colleagues in my teacher credentialing program said that she loathed the book, though for years I’ve been trying to get her to spill why and she’s been tight-lipped about it up to this point. So the person who’s expressed the most surprise has been Ellie. She said it was a very important book to her. Why? I may now shake my head at the way I was educated about racism growing up in Orange County, California—namely, that the United States had sadly once had racism, but then came the civil rights movement, and now racism is over and Bill Cosby has the top TV show—but her experience was rather different. In places like Orange County, Florida, and Orange County, Texas, and Orange County, Virginia, and even Orange County, Indiana, schools tended to teach kids the same message Nikki Haley has been touting: that the United States has never been racist, and that the Civil War was not about the enslavement of a race of people but rather about “the role of government” or some such pablum. At home, kids may have learned that the United States was a racist country, but often from parents who said so with pride, and with KKK hoods in their closets. So to have a novel celebrated for its anti-racist consciousness raising placed before her, and to see the way it shook up her classmates’ understanding of the world around them, struck her as an important milestone. Her school was fulfilling its mission in a way that the school in To Kill a Mockingbird never did.
Anyway, as noted in my writeup of our trip to the symphony, I have been looking for opportunities for us to take advantage of the kind of cultural amenities you can only get in a major city, in order to justify the rent we pay to live here, so I looked up what was playing on the local stages. I discovered that Aaron Sorkin (previously written up here for The Social Network and Moneyball) had written a theatrical adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird that was playing at the Golden Gate Theatre in San Francisco town, with John-Boy from The Waltons playing Atticus Finch and Scout Finch from the movie playing Mrs. Dubose (having since aged from nine to seventy-one). That seemed pretty interesting, and since Ellie had previously talked up the novel, I booked tickets for December 16. For her, it was an early anniversary gift. For me, it was a deadline—I had to read the novel first!
| Harper Lee, 1960 |
It’s much better than I had anticipated! It wasn’t until I started writing this article that I realized why I went into the book with such low expectations, but it suddenly hit me. I was going to say that the issue was probably that To Kill a Mockingbird is generally assigned in ninth grade—when English classes tend not to assign young adult novels the way they do in middle school, but do select YA-ish works from the canon: Romeo and Juliet rather than Hamlet, Of Mice and Men rather than The Grapes of Wrath. And thus when I started Lee’s novel I was expecting training-wheels literature. But no, that’s not really it. I think the main issue is actually that because To Kill a Mockingbird tends to get assigned in the first half of high school, it was one of the most frequently discussed works in the SAT essays written by my tutoring students! And they didn’t make it sound very good! Which is no surprise. Consider The Great Gatsby, which is #1 on the list mentioned above, and with good reason—it’s a phenomenal book. But as I’ve mentioned a few times over the years, in high school I didn’t really get anything out of it. In college, I could analyze the motifs and whatnot, but the novel still left me cold. In grad school, I finally enjoyed it. But it wasn’t until I was well into adulthood that I finally had enough life experience for the themes to speak to me in a deep way. I don’t think that Lee’s book has quite the same learning curve, but still, I’ve read dozens of To Kill a Mockingbird essays over the years and every last one of them made the book sound like a sententious YA novel about a brave lawyer who defends a black man from an unjust accusation in the Jim Crow South. A handful of them made offhand references to the fact that the lawyer has a daughter. None mentioned that she’s the narrator—that the story is told from the perspective of an elementary school girl, and that it is her preoccupations, from a teacher angry that she’s ahead of the curriculum, to a ragamuffin who spends his summers in the neighborhood and plays with her and her brother, to the reclusive boogeyman down the street, that dominate the book, especially in the early going. Nor did they mention that the book is funny! Again, maybe that’s no surprise—I didn’t realize Gatsby was funny when I was their age, and in fact a lot of my SAT tutoring from 2005 to 2016, when the test had a “critical reading” section that went beyond mere information retrieval, by necessity focused on teaching students how to spot jokes. I imagine that if I found myself back in the classroom teaching this novel, I’d spend at least a day analyzing some of those jokes with the students:
Atticus Finch tells the dirt-caked ragamuffin, “I’m just going over to tell Miss Rachel you’re here and ask her if you could spend the night with us—you’d like that, wouldn’t you? And for goodness’ sake put some of the county back where it belongs, the soil erosion’s bad enough already.”
Why’s it funny? Hyperbole (the notion that the boy has accumulated so much dirt that he’s contributing to the sort of soil erosion that led to the Dust Bowl) and word choice (referring to the dirt as “the county”, as if the patch of the earth designated as Maycomb County remained Maycomb County when relocated to a child’s skin).
The state starts a program in which students give presentations on current events, but it doesn’t go well given the level of media literacy in Maycomb County, leading one teacher to interrupt, “Charles, that is not a current event. That is an advertisement.”
Why’s it funny? One big reason we laugh at things is that they defy our expectations; in this case, we’re prompted to think of the current events of the 1930s, and a fertilizer promo doesn’t fit the pattern. But historically a lot of comedy has been based on power differentials, and this one pretty clearly is punching down. We get to feel superior to the hick who can’t tell the difference between a news story and an ad.
Scout discusses her ambition to become a baton twirler: “Having developed my talent to where I could throw up a stick and almost catch it coming down, I had caused Calpurnia to deny me entrance to the house every time she saw me with a stick in my hand.”
Why’s it funny? Euphemism: to “almost catch” a stick means to fail to catch it. There’s also an implied backstory of the stick crashing to the floor and startling Calpurnia—this could be taken as either punching down or punching up depending on whether you view her as a servant or as an authority figure.
The boys are impressed by the sight of a man urinating, and Scout narrates the follow-up: “Dill said he must drink a gallon a day, and the ensuing contest to determine relative distances and respective prowess only made me feel left out again, as I was untalented in this area.”
Why’s it funny? Word choice. The possession of a particular configuration of excretory anatomy is not a talent.
Scout reflects on the fact that while she and her brother are still children, they’ve been through enough over the course of the novel that they’ve accrued no small amount of bitter wisdom. “As I made my way home, I thought Jem and I would get grown but there wasn’t much else left for us to learn, except possibly algebra.”
Why’s it funny? This line concludes a long passage that to a great extent serves as the culmination of the novel. It is perorative and lyrical—and then she punctures the effect with those last three words! And yet that somehow improves an already great passage, by making the prose both graceful and amusing.
But let’s close the Chuckle Box and turn to the substance of the novel, whose second half does indeed revolve around a trial. This is also better than I expected—it is compelling to follow the twists and turns that allow Atticus Finch to prove that Thomas Robinson could not possibly have raped Mayella Ewell, and that her father quite possibly did, and I can see how ninth graders expecting a happy ending to logically follow could receive a rude awakening when the verdict comes in. But this is a Pattern 38 novel: it’s about other stuff as well, stuff that the SAT essays never talked about. Every time I watch a movie or read a book about slavery I am struck by the fact that we don’t need to imagine sci-fi scenarios to explore dystopia: it’s sitting right there in the relatively recent past. Harper Lee puts forward a postbellum South that is nearly as dystopic as the antebellum version. It is not just racist but benighted, where even children of the privileged race have hookworm and head lice, and most require multiple attempts to graduate from any given grade. And she tells the story of a family that does’t fit in—and not in the simplistic “What if an enlightened man headed up a progressive household in a Depression-era Southern town?” way the SAT essays had led me to expect. In some ways, the Finch clan might stand out for being ahead of social trends: for instance, before the trial gets underway, the book is much more about gender than race, as Scout could hardly be more of a tomboy and one running thread in the book is the women of Maycomb County trying to teach her to be more ladylike. I’m sure that many of the same readers inclined to applaud Lee’s message about the continuing scourge of racism would also subscribe to the notion that people shouldn’t be shoved into an assigned gender role. But what about the fact that Scout and her brother call their father by his first name? Even in progressive households, that’s weird! It’s what you might expect in the hippie era, or in some sci-fi scenario like The Dispossessed in which the relationship between parents and children has been radically rethought. And I think that goes a long way toward making the Finches seem stranger to us than just “1960 family in 1934” or even “2024 family in 1934”. And they’re not the only family that deviates from what the local culture deems normal. The Ewells are considered even stranger than the Finches. So are the Radleys. We don’t really see any examples of households that do stick to the script. We do meet a character who follows a different script, that of the town drunk, even though, secretly, he doesn’t even drink, because the locals “could never, never understand that I live like I do because that’s the way I want to live”. Put it all together and I think you end up with a thematic statement that is more broadly opposed to conformity and the hypocrisy that comes with it than the basic “racism is bad, mmkay” message the SAT essays had led me to expect.
Harper Lee and Aaron Sorkin, 2018
directed by Barlett Sher, 2023
Now, Aaron Sorkin certainly recognized that To Kill a Mockingbird was impressively comic when it was’t being tragic—and sometimes even when it was. He also recognized that while it may be fine for an author to put some dry wit into a novel so that, sixty-three years later, some readers might re-enact the “Sensible Chuckle” GIF, for a group of live actors that mild a reaction would mean they were bombing. Thus, Sorkin engineers the stage adaptation to play as a full-fledged comedy: setup, punchline, pause for laughter, repeat. A lot of the comedy is given to Scout and the two boys, all of whom are played by adults and function as narrators outside the story more often than as characters within it. But plenty of laughs also come from regular dialogue, an area of storytelling for which Sorkin is highly acclaimed. He also hands out a number of serious speeches engineered to win applause from a live audience. Ellie didn’t like the performative playing to the crowd, but I figure, it’s theater, it’s going to be theatrical. And, hey, many of the punchlines work. All in all, I liked it more than I didn’t. But I’ve read that Sorkin intended not just to adapt but also to interrogate Lee’s text. I’ve read interviews in which he has suggested that Atticus Finch is put forward as a perfect man, carved out of granite, with no need to change or grow. Sorkin has also registered discomfort with the idea that the hero of a story about racial injustice is a white guy. So he decided that Atticus needed to be taken down a few pegs. He changed the character’s personality and made him ever so slightly self-congratulatory, so that the African-American characters could chew him out and teach him some lessons. The play also, particularly as it came to its conclusion, explicitly spelled out a lot of things that were implicit in the novel. Reading those interviews with Sorkin, I found myself wondering whether Lee needed to spell out something that seemed pretty clear to me: that Sorkin’s project was unnecessary, because even in the book, Atticus Finch is very much not perfect.
Ellie’s objection to Sorkin’s fretting about “white savior” narratives is that Atticus Finch doesn’t save anybody. I think that’s a good point. He doesn’t save Thomas Robinson from the lynch mob—Scout does that. He fails to win an acquittal, and his client winds up dead in short order. He doesn’t even save his son from the revenge of Bob Ewell—Boo Radley does that. And, yes, Atticus Finch may be in some sense carved out of granite, with his inflexible commitment to high-minded principles: that hatred is always wrong, that turning the other cheek is always right, that all people are fundamentally good at heart. But Sorkin isn’t boldly reading against the grain when he has his versions of the characters argue back against Atticus. Not unless you think that Harper Lee, like Kanye West, actually thinks that Atticus Finch is right when she has him tell Scout that it’s wrong to hate Adolf Hitler, and that Scout is wrong when she ascribes blame for the atrocities of the Nazis not to Hitler alone but to “one maniac and millions of German folks”. The first line of the novel is about a horrific injury Scout’s brother has suffered; by the end of the book, we’ve learned that Atticus’s blanket empathy (“Put yourself in Bob Ewell’s shoes a minute”), and his insistence that no one had anything to fear from a man who was just getting some frustration out of his system, are largely responsible for his son’s fate. Hell, the very title of the novel is a reference to the final consensus among its characters, Atticus included, that Atticus was wrong about not wanting the last bit of Bob Ewell business swept under the rug.
My biggest issue with the play, though, was actually just the pacing. As noted, the structure of the novel is pretty strange, in that the part that most people (or at least my students) focus on to the exclusion of all else is confined to the second half of the novel. The first half is mostly Boo Radley stuff, which has nothing to do with the trial. But Harper Lee is trying to engineer an effect: when Boo Radley finally reappears, we’re supposed to think, whoa, that guy! The two halves of the novel have finally come together! If instead we think, “Who?”, the climax is a failure. So Lee had to hammer Boo Radley for page after page so she could then drop him for the duration of the trial without us forgetting who he was. Well, the production we saw only ran for three hours, and that’s including an intermission. Sorkin just didn’t have enough running time to pack in all the stuff he wanted to focus on plus Boo Radley. So Boo Radley got ushered into and out of the narrative in a couple of flashback scenes, and when he reappeared, I could see and hear the confusion among the audience members who weren’t already familiar with the novel. Ellie reported overhearing some conversation in the bathroom among audience members trying to figure out what they’d just seen. Who was that guy again…?
Harper Lee, Horton Foote, and Robert Mulligan, 1962
And the movie, despite its critical acclaim, has a lot of the same pacing issues. Ellie was not at all surprised to hear that I preferred the novel to both the film and the play, but was shocked to hear that I preferred the play to the film. I just felt that both adaptations were wonky due to their limited running time, but at least the play had the excuse that it was trying to do something quite different from the book. The movie felt to me like it was trying to be a faithful translation of the novel to cinema, but with only two hours available, something is lost. Many would argue that something is also gained: Gregory Peck’s celebrated performance, bringing Atticus Finch to life. But I think Atticus Finch comes through quite memorably on the page already. In fact, maybe without Gregory Peck’s performance shaping their perception of the character, more people might be able to see the extent to which the Atticus of the novel already has feet of clay, making Sorkin’s attempt to remove him from a pedestal redundant.
 |
 |
 |
 |
||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Tumblr |
this site |
Calendar page |
|||