Themes, Symbolism, and Historical Events in to Kill a Mockingbird

Harper Lee was an American novelist who was born in Monroeville, Alabama on April 28, 1926. She was the youngest child of four. Lee studied law at the university of alabama for four years and left before taking a degree, moving to New York, and pursuing her career as a writer. She began to write satires, reviews, and columns all at the age of seven. While in New York, she was working as an airline reservations clerk and began to write several essays and short stories, which neither of them were published, but an agent encouraged her to expand one of her stories into a novel. 

Lee was most known for one of her most successful novels, To Kill a Mockingbird. Since its publication, it then received some awards such as the Pulitzer Prize, for fiction in 1961 and was made into a major motion picture in 1962 (Rollyson 1), the Alabama Library Association Award, and the Brotherhood Award of the National Conference of Christians and Jews. In the book, To Kill a Mockingbird is narrated by Jean Louise 'Scout' Finch, a mature lady who is pondering her transitioning in the South during segregation. Scout, her brother, Jem; their dad, Atticus; the legal counselor; and Scout’s friend; Dill depend on Lee's recollections of her own adolescence with her siblings, father, and future creator Truman Capote (Ashburn 1). The kids are lucky in having a dad who boldly won't fall down before the prejudice of the townspeople, rather looking after the man he knows is honest. The novel appears to have suffering intrigue principally on account of its treatment of racial bias (it is just plain wrong to slaughter a mockingbird, the kids are told, and the mockingbird is compared to Tom Robinson, the wrong blamed dark man). Lee's aptitude in bringing out Scout's excursion to development, the sentimental and Gothic components of the story, and Lee's misleadingly straightforward style assist her with recounting to a specifically unpredictable story.

A theme in one of Harper’s novels in To Kill A Mockingbird, is courage and cowardice. Scout experiences a few various types of courage during her childhood. The most widely recognized meaning of boldness is being strong even with physical threat. Atticus shows this when he stops in the way of a rabid dog and drops it with a rifle shot. Different sorts of courage, however, depend more on moral determination. For example, Atticus talks charmingly to Mrs. Henry Lafayette Dubose, despite the fact that she consistently heaps verbal abuse on him and his kids. On occasions like these, Scout says, she thought 'my father, who hated guns and had never been to any wars, was the bravest man who ever lived.' Mrs. Dubose shows the children another exercise in mental fortitude when Jem is sentenced to go through two hours daily perusing to her as repayment for the blossoms he harmed. Scout follows along as Jem visits after school to peruse Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe, a story of chivalry and heroism. Mrs. Dubose's conduct appears to be odd; she regularly floats off during the readings and starts to slobber and have seizures. After her death a few months after, the children find that she was attempting to overdose on morphine, a painkiller. Jem's reading filled in as an interruption that helped her pass on liberated from the addiction. Attucs tells his kids that in spite of her issues, Mrs. Dubose was the most valiant individual he at any point knew, for genuine courage is 'when you know you’re licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what.' Atticus shows a similar sort of courage in battling a similar Robinson case; in spite of the fact that he realizes it would be impossible for a white jury to restore a decision for 'not guilty,' he in any case contends the case as well as could be expected. As opposed to Atticus' courage stands the fearful conduct of Bob Ewell, who never legitimately faces those whom he thinks have wronged him. He vandalizes Judge Taylor's home when he thinks nobody is there; he tosses rocks and agitates Helen Robinson, Tom's widow, from a distance; and ambushes Atticus' kids as they walk alone on an abandoned road around night time.

The story of Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird is set in the 1930's, where blacks were all the while being discriminated against. In spite towards the end of slavery just about a century prior To Kill A Mockingbird was distributed in 1960 (President Lincoln gave the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863), African Americans were as yet prevented numerous from securing their essential rights. Even though Lee sets her novel in the South of the 1930s, conditions were minimal improved by the mid 1960s in America. The Civil Rights development was simply coming to fulfillment during the 1950s, and its standards were starting to discover a voice in American courts and the law. The well known 1954 U.S. Supreme Court trial of Brown v. the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas declared the long-held practice act of isolation in state funded schools unlawful and immediately prompted integration of other open foundations. Though, there was as yet significant protection from these changes, and may states, particularly those in the South, took a very long time before they completely incorporated their schools. Different ways blacks were underestimated by society incorporated the isolation of open bathrooms and water fountains, just as the act of driving blacks to ride in the back of transports. This prejudice form was tested by a retail establishment store worker named Rosa Parks. After she was captured for neglecting to yield her seat to a white passenger, social equality pioneers started a boycott of the transport system in Montgomery, Alabama, on December 5, 1995. The primary chief of the boycott was the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. Alongside other black ministers, for example, Charles K. Steele and Fred Shuttlesworth, King sorted out the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in January, 1957, one of the main associations that helped end segregation by the mid-1960s. That year that Lee won an agreement for the incomplete composition of To Kill A Mockingbird, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1957, which gave punishments to the violation of voting rights and made the Civil Rights Commission. African Americans would not see security and enforcement of every one of their privileges, however, until well into the following decade, when the Civil Rights Act of 1968 were passed. These laws restricted racial segregation from open spots, working environments, surveying spots, and housing. The justice system was likewise unfair during the 1950s, as blacks were avoided from juries and could be captured, attempted, and sentenced with little reason. One prestigious case happened in 1955, when two white men were accused of the homicide of Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old African American youth who had supposedly harassed a white lady. Like the jury in Tom Robinson's trial, the jury for the Till case was all white and all male; the trial was likewise held in an isolated court. Despite the fact that the barrier's case laid on the improbable cases that the body couldn't be explicitly recognized as Till and that the defendants had been framed, the jury took just a single hour to clear the men all things considered. The men later conceded their violations to a journalist in extraordinary detail, yet were never punished for the homicide.

As the title of the novel implies The Mockingbird fills in as a symbolic image all through the story. At the point when the kids get guns for Christmas, Atticus reveals to them that it is okay to take shots at blue jays, however 'it's a sin to kill a mockingbird.' as Miss Muddie Atkinson clarifies, it would be neglectfully brutal to slaughter innocent animals that 'don't do one thing but make music for us to enjoy.' The mockingbirds are quiet as Atticus goes to the road to shoot a rabid dog, and Scout depicts a similar silence in the court only preceding the jury articulating Tom Robinson liable. The innocent enduring mockingbird is reviewed in a publication B.B Underwood writes on Robinson's passing, and again when Scout discloses to her dad that revealing Boo Radley's job in Bob Ewell's death would be 'like shootin' a mockingbird.' Another symbolic image is contained in the snowman Scout and Jem work after Maycomb's uncommon snowfall. Since there is not really much snow, Scout makes the base of the figure from mud; they at that point change their 'morphodite' from dark to white with a coating of snow. At the point when Miss Maudie's home bursts into flames that night, the snow dissolves and the figure becomes dark again. Its change proposes that someone’s race is a constrained differentiation that reveals minimal about and a person's actual worth.

All in all, Harper Lee was an American novelist who was well known for her successful publication of her novel To Kill A Mockingbird. In the book, there are various things that can be analyzed such as themes, symbolism, and historical events.