Analyse how an important setting was made realistic or believable.
In Harper Lee’s novel, To Kill a Mockingbird important Gothic settings were used and made very realistic. This was achieved in a variety of ways. Firstly, the courthouse has been used to symbolise uncompromising racial attitudes within the town and this was made believable by comparisons to its prejudiced citizens. Secondly, the jail has been employed as a symbol of racism.
The Maycomb County Courthouse is an important setting used by Lee throughout the novel. The author describes the courthouse as an ‘early Victorian building’, presenting an unoffensive vista when seen from the North. However, this tower is also affixed to the big Greek revival columns of the original courthouse which ‘clash with a big nineteenth century clock housing a rusty unreliable instrument’. The present state of the courthouse therefore becomes symbolic of the people it serves – a people determined to preserve every physical scrap of the past including their old ideas and prejudices towards Negroes. It is this aspect perhaps which causes the portrayal of the courthouse to become realistic. The attitudes of the prejudiced Maycomb citizens are reflected through the physical appearance of the courthouse and are seen particularly in the trial scene, where the Negroe Tom Robinson is wrongly convicted of raping Mayella Ewell. The white jury of the courthouse are compared to its physical state as they are determined to keep hold of their long-lived, deep rooted racism. They simply accept the word of a lying, desperate white man despite knowing that Robinson is innocent. Nevertheless they convict him of rape simply because he is black. Therefore the courthouse has been used to reflect and symbolise these uncompromising racial attitudes and thus in the mind of the reader its appearance is made believable.
The Maycomb jail has also been portrayed as a symbol of racism. Lee describes the architecture of the jail as the most ‘hideous and venerable of all the couny’s buildings’, enclosed between a hardward store and newspaper office. Thus the jail becomes somewhat a ‘miniture Gothic joke [being] one cell wide and two cells high, complete with tiny battlements and flying buttresses’. The lopsided design of the building therefore is a reflection of the crooked legal system in which only Negroes are imprisoned in it. This concept has been used to cause the architecture of the jail to become realistic in the mind of the reader. It is particularly seen in the case of Boo Radley, a white man, who is locked in the basement of the courthouse to segregate him from the black prisoners in the jail. Thus one can see that the jail has been physically used to represent this main idea and as it is revealed those who agree with the jails bizarre design are portrayed as the prejudiced citizens of Maycomb.
Finally the segregation of housing has been employed by Lee. The Finches represent the well-off middle class in Maycomb, ‘living on the main residential street’ in the area. The Cunninghams and Ewells however are portrayed as desperate, poor whites and they live in the Old Sarrum’ beside the dump. Furthermore the Negroes are separated from even these poor whites and occupy cabins beside the ‘old Sarrum’. This setting and segregation of housing has been used to emphasise the deep rooted prejudice within Maycomb society. It is particularly made believable through the discrimination each of these classes holds onto, especially in the calling of names such as ‘niggers’ and ‘white trash’. Thus the reader is able to see that it would be impossible for these residents of Maycomb to live in one area unless they let go of their racial attitudes towards one another.
Author, Harper Lee has cleverly portrayed a number of Gothic settings within the novel. Each has been made realistic through the comparisons to the prejudice held by Maycomb society. However in the end, one can see that these racial attitudes are harmful to a society. Appropriately then the narrator comments on its destructiveness by saying, ‘Maycomb had been told it had nothing to fear but fear itself.’
Excellence
2006
672 words