To Kill a Mockingbird - Themes, Motifs & Symbols

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To Kill a Mockingbird - Themes, Motifs & Symbols

The Existence of Social Inequality

Differences in social status are explored largely through

the overcomplicated social hierarchy of Maycomb, the ins and outs

of which constantly baffle the children. The relatively well-off

Finches stand near the top of Maycomb’s social hierarchy, with most

of the townspeople beneath them. Ignorant country farmers like the

Cunninghams lie below the townspeople, and the white trash Ewells

rest below the Cunninghams. But the black community in Maycomb, despite

its abundance of admirable qualities, squats below even the Ewells,

enabling Bob Ewell to make up for his own lack of importance by

persecuting Tom Robinson. These rigid social divisions that make

up so much of the adult world are revealed in the book to be both

irrational and destructive. For example, Scout cannot understand

why Aunt Alexandra refuses to let her consort with young Walter

Cunningham. Lee uses the children’s perplexity at the unpleasant

layering of Maycomb society to critique the role of class status

and, ultimately, prejudice in human interaction.

Motifs - recurring structures, contrasts, and literary

devices that can help to develop and inform the text’s major themes.

Gothic Details

The forces of good and evil in To Kill a Mockingbird seem

larger than the small Southern town in which the story takes place.

Lee adds drama and atmosphere to her story by including a number

of Gothic details in the setting and the plot. In literature, the

term Gothic refers to a style of fiction first popularized in eighteenth-century

England, featuring supernatural occurrences, gloomy and haunted

settings, full moons, and so on. Among the Gothic elements in To

Kill a Mockingbird are the unnatural snowfall, the fire

that destroys Miss Maudie’s house, the children’s superstitions

about Boo Radley, the mad dog that Atticus shoots, and the ominous

night of the Halloween party on which Bob Ewell attacks the children. These

elements, out of place in the normally quiet, predictable Maycomb,

create tension in the novel and serve to foreshadow the troublesome

events of the trial and its aftermath.

Small-Town Life

Counterbalancing the Gothic motif of the story is the

motif of old-fashioned, small-town values, which manifest themselves

throughout the novel. As if to contrast with all of the suspense

and moral grandeur of the book, Lee emphasizes the slow-paced, good-natured

feel of life in Maycomb. She often deliberately juxtaposes small-town

values and Gothic images in order to examine more closely the forces

of good and evil. The horror of the fire, for instance, is mitigated

by the comforting scene of the people of Maycomb banding together

to save Miss Maudie’s possessions. In contrast, Bob Ewell’s cowardly

attack on the defenseless Scout, who is dressed like a giant ham

for the school pageant, shows him to be unredeemably evil.

MockingbirdsThe title of To Kill a Mockingbird has

very little literal connection to the plot, but it carries a great

deal of symbolic weight in the book. In this story of innocents

destroyed by evil, the “mockingbird” comes to represent the idea

of innocence. Thus, to kill a mockingbird is to destroy innocence.

Throughout the book, a number of characters (Jem, Tom Robinson,

Dill, Boo Radley, Mr. Raymond) can be identified as mockingbirds—innocents

who have been injured or destroyed through contact with evil. This

connection between the novel’s title and its main theme is made

explicit several times in the novel: after Tom Robinson is shot,

Mr. Underwood compares his death to “the senseless slaughter of

songbirds,” and at the end of the book Scout thinks that hurting

Boo Radley would be like “shootin’ a mockingbird.” Most important,

Miss Maudie explains to Scout: “Mockingbirds don’t do one thing

but . . . sing their hearts out for us. That’s why it’s a sin to

kill a mockingbird.” That Jem and Scout’s last name is Finch (another

type of small bird) indicates that they are particularly vulnerable

in the racist world of Maycomb, which often treats the fragile innocence

of childhood harshly.

Boo Radley

As the novel progresses, the children’s changing attitude

toward Boo Radley is an important measurement of their development from

innocence toward a grown-up moral perspective. At the beginning

of the book, Boo is merely a source of childhood superstition. As

he leaves Jem and Scout presents and mends Jem’s pants, he gradually

becomes increasingly and intriguingly real to them. At the end of

the novel, he becomes fully human to Scout, illustrating that she has

developed into a sympathetic and understanding individual. Boo,

an intelligent child ruined by a cruel father, is one of the book’s most

important mockingbirds; he is also an important symbol of the good

that exists within people. Despite the pain that Boo has suffered,

the purity of his heart rules his interaction with the children. In

saving Jem and Scout from Bob Ewell, Boo proves the ultimate symbol

of good.

Symbols- objects, characters, figures, and colors

used to represent abstract ideas or concepts.

The moral voice of To Kill a Mockingbird is

embodied by Atticus Finch, who is virtually unique in the novel

in that he has experienced and understood evil without losing his

faith in the human capacity for goodness. Atticus understands that,

rather than being simply creatures of good or creatures of evil,

most people have both good and bad qualities. The important thing

is to appreciate the good qualities and understand the bad qualities

by treating others with sympathy and trying to see life from their

perspective. He tries to teach this ultimate moral lesson to Jem

and Scout to show them that it is possible to live with conscience

without losing hope or becoming cynical. In this way, Atticus is

able to admire Mrs. Dubose’s courage even while deploring her racism.

Scout’s progress as a character in the novel is defined by her gradual

development toward understanding Atticus’s lessons, culminating

when, in the final chapters, Scout at last sees Boo Radley as a

human being. Her newfound ability to view the world from his perspective

ensures that she will not become jaded as she loses her innocence.

The Importance of Moral Education

Because exploration of the novel’s larger moral questions

takes place within the perspective of children, the education of

children is necessarily involved in the development of all of the

novel’s themes. In a sense, the plot of the story charts Scout’s

moral education, and the theme of how children are educated—how

they are taught to move from innocence to adulthood—recurs throughout

the novel (at the end of the book, Scout even says that she has

learned practically everything except algebra). This theme is explored

most powerfully through the relationship between Atticus and his

children, as he devotes himself to instilling a social conscience

in Jem and Scout. The scenes at school provide a direct counterpoint

to Atticus’s effective education of his children: Scout is frequently

confronted with teachers who are either frustratingly unsympathetic

to children’s needs or morally hypocritical. As is true of To

Kill a Mockingbird’s other moral themes, the novel’s conclusion

about education is that the most important lessons are those of

sympathy and understanding, and that a sympathetic, understanding

approach is the best way to teach these lessons. In this way, Atticus’s

ability to put himself in his children’s shoes makes him an excellent

teacher, while Miss Caroline’s rigid commitment to the educational

techniques that she learned in college makes her ineffective and

even dangerous.

Themes - the fundamental and often universal ideas

explored in a literary work.

The Coexistence of Good and Evil

The most important theme of To Kill a Mockingbird is the book’s exploration of the moral nature of human beings—that is, whether people are essentially good or essentially evil. The novel approaches this question by dramatizing Scout and Jem’s transition from a perspective of childhood innocence, in which they assume that people are good because they have never seen evil, to a more adult perspective, in which they have confronted evil and must incorporate it into their understanding of the world. As a result of this portrayal of the transition from innocence to experience, one of the book’s important subthemes involves the threat that hatred, prejudice, and ignorance pose to the innocent: people such as Tom Robinson and Boo Radley are not prepared for the evil that they encounter, and, as a result, they are destroyed. Even Jem is victimized to an extent by his discovery of the evil of racism during and after the trial. Whereas Scout is able to maintain her basic faith in human nature despite Tom’s conviction, Jem’s faith in justice and in humanity is badly damaged, and he retreats into a state of disillusionment.

To Kill A Mockingbird - Themes - Prejudice