Friday, August 30, 2019
Racism In Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird Essay
Racism is about control. In southern literature this control is very prevalent. In this essay the focus of racism in southern literature will be scrutinized, dissected, and analyzed. Since racism is about control, the unfettering of such belligerence becomes didactic in the making of a novel.            In Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird racism is ubiquitous with the young culture in the town. Just as Atticus is a lawyer in the book, Scout the narrator and child depicts the scene of racism thusly, â€Å"My fists were clenched I was ready to make fly. Cecil Jacobs had announced the day before that Scout Finch’s daddy defended niggers.†Though Scout continually defends Atticus on the playground and in other parts of town, the racism remarks do not stop. Even Scout’s cousin Francis is overwhelmingly supplied with racist remarks, â€Å"At a safe distance her called, `He’s nothin’ but a nigger-lover’.† It is in racism, and the reality of that prejudice that the entire town’s lives are changed, and the political arena of the courtroom shows itself as discriminatory.            In Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell the story is thriving with racism. Of course the novel takes place during the Civil War and this was the apex of the struggle for slave freedom. In the novel it almost seems as though slavery is glorified because of the way they are depicted: as subservient, and loyal. Scarlett herself, in the novel, is ebullient with her way of life, she loves to be pampered and catered to by both men, and servants. Slavery for her is ideal because she does not have to do anything for herself. The analysis then, is that in order for her to become a dynamic and more than a flat character she must give up her antebellum Southern ways, and accept that in a free world her type of egoism is no longer warranted.            Due to the novel taking place during the Civil War it is to be expected that slavery is a crux by which the author writes. Slavery in the South has always been an issue. There lies deep-seeded resentfulness towards the history yet racism is still alive today. The reason that southern literature still focuses its story line after such prejudice is to make readers aware of the sentiments in southern culture. Just because the history of slavery is over with, doesn’t mean that racism isn’t a stigma still exercised in the South today.            In the novel, Fried Green Tomatoes by Fanny Flagg, the issues of bi-racial marriage and racism tear the town asunder while at once building an umbrage by which the main characters form a support for each other, and defend each other against such prejudices. What racism in southern literature ultimately teaches is that even though decades have transpired, the issues of racism that were current during the Civil War and prior are still in societal conceptions.            It is through language use, and the continual torturing of blacks in each novel, and the prejudices that they suffer and their friends are exposed to that the authors of southern literature want their audience to realize happened, and is still happening. In To Kill A Mockingbird Lee wants to represent how racism filters in through all facets of society. In Southern Literature it is not about how racism affects only the black population but how it affects the entire community, how demonic a person can become because they seek power and control over another person, and how that persuasion can emphasis the evil in humanity. Southern black literature represents how racism destroys a person, how in each novel, characters either succumb to the power or it depicts how protagonists rise with subjective humanity and try to scotch the brutality that is racism. Racism is such a strong theme in each of these books because the characters in the books fight against a juggernaut force, and against odds, hopefully overcome the misconceptions that thrive in racism. Southern black literature and especially in the aforementioned novels, needs to present racism in order for racism to be stopped, for only after the causes are found can the entire prejudice cease, that is the purpose of the novels. Bibliography Harper, L. (1988). To Kill a Mockingbird. Grand Central Publishing, New York.
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