Let me guess, Lee and/or her publishers said Americans are still in their childhood as a people. This needs to be a children's book.
I reread "To Kill a Mockingbird" in 1999, when I was invited to respond to another law professor's critique of it. Steven Lubet focused on the way Atticus Finch cross-examined the purported rape victim. Could Mayella have been telling the truth? I objected to Lubet's revisionist view of Atticus Finch precisely because the book is written to be understood by children:
That Mayella’s injuries were on her right side, that her father is left handed, and that Tom’s left arm is so entirely useless it slips off the Bible as he is taking the oath, clearly establishes Harper Lee’s overeagerness to assure us that Tom is innocent and to squelch any speculation to the contrary. (Professor Lubet breaks free of the author’s firm hold.) The author’s decision to forgo the usual subtleties of the novelist’s art undermines attempts at assessing Atticus’s legal skills. Indeed, Lee’s cartoonishly overdone evidence generates its own difficulties: Tom’s left arm is an entire foot shorter than his right arm and it hangs “dead at his side” and dangles a hand so shrivelled that Scout detects its inutility from the balcony, yet Atticus is able to trap both Bob Ewell and Mayella into testifying in a way that would require Tom to have an effective left arm, as if they had never laid eyes on him. Given this glaring lapse in the evidence, it is not surprising that Professor Lubet can pry a number of holes in the evidence and construct an interpretation that Tom is guilty, but I would still maintain that Atticus can be credited with an absolute belief that Tom is innocent and that readers entering Lee’s simplified moral world are compelled to adopt this belief as well.ADDED: Lubet's argument is discussed in this Malcolm Gladwell article from 2009, "The Courthouse Ring/Atticus Finch and the limits of Southern liberalism."
One of Atticus Finch’s strongest critics has been the legal scholar Steven Lubet, and Lubet’s arguments are a good example of how badly the brand of Southern populism Finch represents has aged over the past fifty years. Lubet’s focus is the main event of “To Kill a Mockingbird”—Finch’s defense of Tom Robinson. In “Reconstructing Atticus Finch,” in the Michigan Law Review, Lubet points out that Finch does not have a strong case. The putative rape victim, Mayella Ewell, has bruises on her face, and the supporting testimony of her father, Robert E. Lee Ewell. Robinson concedes that he was inside the Ewell house, and that some kind of sexual activity took place. The only potentially exculpatory evidence Finch can come up with is that Mayella’s bruises are on the right side of her face while Robinson’s left arm, owing to a childhood injury, is useless. Finch presents this fact with great fanfare. But, as Lubet argues, it’s not exactly clear why a strong right-handed man can’t hit a much smaller woman on the right side of her face. Couldn’t she have turned her head? Couldn’t he have hit her with a backhanded motion? Given the situation, Finch designs his defense, Lubet says, “to exploit a virtual catalog of misconceptions and fallacies about rape, each one calculated to heighten mistrust of the female complainant.”
Posts
29 comments:
On the evidence: It has a very "Encyclopedia Brown" feeling to it.
The dumbest thing the slave codes did in the early 1800s was criminalize the education of Negroes. That came back to bite the whites living with uneducated free men. The Eugenics guys preached with that as proof of White superior intelligence.
And at last actual fighting of all races in WWII educated everybody who served and saw it, and Jackie Robinson educated the rest. Suddenly Atticus was the dumb one.
I'm thinking the NY Times is the Guardian, but many people there haven't realized it yet.
If Guardian>Grauniad
then NYTimes>Tinymes
Never read Mockingbird; never saw the movie; never saw a need to see either.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a wymyn claiming rape must be believed.
Atticus is a prime example of White Privilege & why the Confederate Flag must go & Republicans must be defeated (Click, click go the steel balls).
On the evidence: It has a very "Encyclopedia Brown" feeling to it.
Making Tom's left arm effectively crippled is gilding the lily. But if you really want to sock someone, you have to put your body into it.
Since it's a novel, the evidence is just as clear or as murky as Harper Lee wants to make it. If she wanted to emphasize doubt, she could have made the point more disputable. But the book isn't about the difficulty of the legal case, it's about the difficulty of doing the right thing.
Which also goes to the point that Truman didn't write this story as this is belabored evidence of lazy composition - one accusation never leveled at TC.
"...that readers entering Lee’s simplified moral world are compelled to adopt this belief as well."
Interesting point.
How much does a reader have to give up what they know to enter an author's world?
Pandora's box contains a lot of books.
I am Laslo.
And in contrast to Lubet's argument that "Finch does not have a strong case. The putative rape victim, Mayella Ewell, has bruises on her face, and the supporting testimony of her father, Robert E. Lee Ewell. Robinson concedes that he was inside the Ewell house, and that some kind of sexual activity took place. The only potentially exculpatory evidence Finch can come up with is that Mayella’s bruises are on the right side of her face while Robinson’s left arm, owing to a childhood injury, is useless" (from the New Yorker article), I would say that the book has a strong element of people not looking at Mayella's story very critically.
In the book, it's quite possible that every authority figure knows Mayella is lying, but doesn't feel comfortable actually saying that. They don't want to go on record defending the black man. So they turn to Finch, whose main virtue is that he will go ahead and say that, and suffer the consequences. Remember, the judge picks Finch as Robinson's attorney, and the sheriff holds no ill will, even though they're putatively on opposite sides of a controversial case.
But seriously folks, the trial scene, especially in the movie, which I just saw again on the telly the other day, reminded me at the time & still of the old Perry Mason show where Perry trips up a witness every week. Or another movie like Paul Newman in the Young Philadelphians where Paul, a tax lawyer, apparently handling a Murder One case as his first trial, trips up witnesses (&, BTW, as a junior associate, finds a tax loophole that the smartest lawyers in Philly had missed). I took a girl to that movie while I was a law student & she was not happy with my brilliant deconstruction of it which she loved. (Boy meets girl; boy loses girl; boy gets girl.)Oh well, Alexis Smith & Barbara Rush were well worth the price of admission.
The most comical scene in the book/movie is the one in which three or four men amble up to the jail and politely ask Atticus to free his prisoner and Scout shames them away.
In reality--when most lynchings happened entire towns took part. Everyone went blood-thirsty mad, raving for vengeance. Hundreds of people--the best people in town--would turn out. The victims, even pregnant women, would be mutilated, their bodies dismembered and photographed, often as tourist souvenirs. Postcards of the hanging, says Bob Dylan, referring to a Minnesota lynching, I believe.
Man, this sort of thing happened not just in the South...but all over U.S. There were even instances where entire neighborhoods went up in smoke. It's unbelievable and is something I will bet few white people know anything about. Down the memory hole. I sometimes wonder how much black people know of this part of U.S. history.
Anything that can get the Mockingbird off its perch as a fine example of literature and moral instruction is fine with me. The book is crap.
I agree with David at 12:12. The book is crap. For a much, much better literary consideration of similar issues, read Faulkner's Light in August.
Has anyone read the Hispanic version of the book: Tequila Mockingbird?
David, Grant
Now, now just because the book is overrated as an example of literature, moral instruction, wymyn's right to claim rape, & how real trials work doesn't mean it's crap!
Look, it's served its purpose of showing how the South was EVIL & is still electing all those Republicans.
And it helps show that the Confederate Flag is only there because Republicans keep it there.
And, you gotta admit that this work, however flawed, has solved the problems of Black-on-Black crime and killings, out-of-wedlock Black birthrate, the need to make schools in the South better, & has lowered the Black unemployment rate.
So stop your criticism. Because. Racist.
Mockingbird is an outdated lesson in doing the right thing to ensure equal protection under the law. The lesson isn't the quality of the trial, im but that there is a trial at all. Of course, I say outdated notion of equal protection because Title IX apparently requires greater than equal protection for accusers of rape and sexual assault - and we're back to the question of if there will even be a trial.
Flannery O'Connor on Mockingbird: "It's interesting that all the folks that are buying it don't know they are buying a children's book."
"In the book, it's quite possible that every authority figure knows Mayella is lying"
-- They all quietly know about her abuse [several of the Ewell kids are too young to have been her mom's, for example], and no one is shocked to hear her say that what her dad to her doesn't count. That's the whole point for Atticus doing it. He's forcing them to come face to face with what they're going to do.
"Oh well, Alexis Smith & Barbara Rush were well worth the price of admission."
-- We'll tack saying that to the girl as other potential "ways to screw up a first date."
Wait -- why are we saying it is a BAD thing that it is a children's books? Children's books are perfectly fine, and in fact, can be good literature.
Atticus Finch is almost as much a rape denialist as Hillary Rodham Clinton. At least he doesn't get caught in public laughing at his tormenting of Mayella Ewell.
I remember being very annoyed when I read the book: Tom Robinson says she saved up for a year to pay for all her little siblings to go buy ice creams - to get them out of the way. She says they were playing nearby. Would it have been too hard for Atticus Finch to bring in the drug-store proprietor and check if half-a-dozen Ewell kids showed up, for the very first time, exactly then?
I haven't the slightest interest in reading the new book. The criticisms of TKMB are beside the point. Of course the girl lied about the "rape" by the Black man. That's the point of the story. Deconstructing the story as a law school hypothetical is fine, but it's got nothing to do with the literature and the drama. Today we care more about women victims and "victims" than about falsely accused Black males, but when the book was published and the movie was made, enlightened people cared about the false accusations against stereotypical Black males studs (they were very powerful sexually you know). This was a basic reason for Jim Crow laws, that Black men were a threat to demure White women. When Gregory Peck (in the movie) pulls out his ancestral pocket watch and puts in on the rail of the jury box, we know he's paying with his honor in a lost cause.
So the feminists are pissed that "racist" is still a worse charge than "sexist", and bent out of shape that people look at Mayella and say "she's a lying sleaze, a tease or a slut"?
Tough.
OK, I got this far in life without reading it, so I am reading it now. It is embarrassing. It *is* a children's book. It is Tom Sawyer without the literary value.
I have to say that the trial seems to be just one more episode in the endless summer lives of these kids in Maycomb. Like the house fire, and the time they build that "nigger snowman." You know, the one Jem built out of mud, then covered with snow? Wasn't that a hoot? If you are writing a deep novel about race, and you have a thing in your book that starts out a black man, and gets covered in snow to become a white man, do you then put a lady's hat on it and make it an object of neighborhood tomfoolery?
People say that the movie is never as good as the book, but a lot of times, Hollywood can find a germ of a great movie in pile of dreck. Last of the Mohicans comes to mind.
I will finish the book, but I am thinking that Harper Lee was a daughter of her time and place, like all of us. Just sayin' that when Atticus, several chapters in, tells Scout to stop using the word "nigger" it sounds like Lee's editors admonishing her.
Oh well, Alexis Smith & Barbara Rush were well worth the price of admission."
-- We'll tack saying that to the girl as other potential "ways to screw up a first date."
I agree. Never said that to my date. I was too busy pontificating about law & lawyers :-)!
Godfather:
Deconstructing the story as a law school hypothetical is fine, but it's got nothing to do with the literature and the drama.
Please look up "Deus ex Machina"
Stories about lawyers, doctors, or Indian Chiefs which claim realism should not rely on unexpected & improbable incidents to make important points, OK?
You do see the difference in the characters in West Side Story & the characters in The Godfather, no?
By today's standards, both Abraham Lincoln and Lyndon Johnson would be considered stone cold racists. Historical context is everything.
Based on press reports and early reviews, I've pre-ordered "Go Set a Watchman," and I'll likely re-read "Mockingbird" to prepare to read it.
Based on those early reports, I will not be surprised to find that "Watchman" is a good platform from which to launch a debate about the naivete and profound historical ignorance of today's Social Justice Warriors.
Post a Comment