Moral Resonance in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird:

Harold Bloom’s New Criticism After Mark Twain and T. S. Eliot

Nancy Ann Watanabe

“Some say that ever ‘gainst that season comes

Wherein our Saviour’s birth is celebrated,

The bird of dawning singeth all night long;

And then, they say, no spirit can walk abroad;

The nights are wholesome; then no planets strike,

No fairy takes, nor witch hath power to charm,

So hallow’d and so gracious is the time.”

Officer Marcellus in Shakespeare’s Hamlet

U LTIMATELY, THE ETHICAL AND MORAL RESONANCE of an

imaginative literary work undoubtedly determines whether or not it will be

judged by posterity as an enduring classic inviting commendation even to readers who

are far removed from the geopolitical and sociocultural climate of its genesis. It is
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particularly edifying to consider the reasons behind the worldwide readership of

millions for Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1960). Although this novel remains

the only extant book length work by Harper (Nelle) Lee, who was born on April 28,

1926, it contains such a massive configuration of plot, imagery, characterizations, and

symbolism that its continuing longevity as a classic American novel by a Southern

author seems assured. Considered in the light of the most recent theoretical approaches,

Lee’s novel obviously passes, and surmounts, it seems to me, the litmus test of

originality. Already, T. S. Eliot has given us his valuable pointers on the critical

necessity of balancing individual talent and originality against the rules of order

imposed by historical tradition. Eliot praises tradition in observing that it “cannot be

inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour. It involves, in the first

place, the historical sense.” This historical sense “involves a perception, not only of the

pastness of the past, but of its presence.” Writers should write not merely of their own

generation but “with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer”

and within it “the whole of the literature” of their own country “has a simultaneous

existence and composes a simultaneous order” (Eliot, The Sacred Wood, 49).

One of the most graphic illustrations of the presence of the past in Lee’s novel is in

the way it sparkles with epic allusions. The name ‘Heck Tate’ conjures up an image of

Hector in Homer’s The Iliad. As Joyce Milton notes, “Atticus’ name is a reference to

the district (Attica) of ancient Greece in which Athens was located. Atticus’ rational

approach to life is similar to that of ancient philosophers” (14). Furthermore, writing

with the pristine conciseness of Jane Austen, whom she reads, Lee has embellished a
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Shakespearean tragic vision of decadence in the American South with glints of

Chaucerian satire. The best satirical portrait in To Kill a Mockingbird is a sketch of Mr.

Dolphus Raymond, who lacks the courage of his convictions. Significantly, the

vignette of the fastidiously vain country gentleman whose tipsyness is a ruse

immediately precedes Atticus’ closing argument at the climactic trial. In addition to

heightening suspense, the given name Dolphus invokes the dictatorial manic depression

of Adolph Hitler (1889-1945), who is actually the subject of a school lesson in Chapter

26. These historical allusions to dictatorial oppression foreshadow the guilty verdict

handed down by the homologously constituted 1930s jury. The cumulative effect of

these allusions is to build a sense of tragic doom. Tom Robinson is fatally doomed for

having kissed the daughter of Bob Ewell. In contrast to Dolphus Raymond, lawyer

Atticus pleads heartrendingly with the jury, demonstrating the courage of his

convictions. Consciously abjuring any hint of courtroom histrionics, Atticus Finch, torn

apart by emotion, nonetheless appeals directly to the intellect and judgment of the jury.

Except for a member of the Cunningham clan who was dissuaded by Atticus’ daughter

not to kill Atticus the night before, the informal appeal falls upon deaf ears.

Nevertheless, the congregated assemblage of negroes, with Atticus’ children, Jean

Louise Finch and Jem Finch, in their midst, responds intuitively to the attorney’s

aggressive use of untrammeled wit. Although justice is not particularly well served by

the jury’s decision, poetic justice is an important novelistic thread delineating the warm

appreciation of many of the local townspeople for the support given in the name of

justice by the Atticus Finch family.

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Operating within the venerable, often admired though rarely emulated tradition of

Poe, Harper Lee deploys an overwhelming array of tactical, deceptively simple, yet

invincible stratagems that attract and hold the interest of readers. For instance, Lee’s

novel anticipates and dissipates some conservative concerns about orthodox works in

the realist tradition that contain heterodox solicitation of the popular fancy. In its use of

colloquialisms, To Kill a Mockingbird is reminiscent of Mark Twain’s The Adventures

of Huckleberry Finn, which imitates the substandard English of some of its characters.

Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex is a locus classicus, mainly owing to Aristotle’s choice of the

play as a model of tragedy, despite the play’s violation of the rules against showing

violence on the stage. When Oedipus tears out his eyes, the action taken by the

character is essential to the plot. According to Aristotle, “Tragedy . . . is a process of

imitating an action which has serious implications, is complete, and possesses

magnitude; by means of language which has been made sensuously attractive, with each

of its varieties found separately in the parts; enacted by the persons themselves.”

Characterization is secondary to plot. While “the persons who are acting have a defined

moral character,” Aristotle insists that “Tragedy is an imitation not of men but of a life,

an action, and they have moral quality in accordance with their characters but are happy

or unhappy in accordance with their actions” (Poetics, 25-27).

Lee has constructed her novel using the design of a grand synthesis. She avoids

overtly censuring her characters by portraying their symbolical verbal and physical

actions. At a deeper level, the plot attains universal significance beyond the verbal and

physical actions committed by the characters. The core of meaning resides in Lee’s
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portrayal of members of a family, who belong to a community, Maycomb. In

Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the setting in Denmark refers to the historic kingdom of that

Scandinavian nation. Moreover, Shakespeare’s revisionary imagination portrays

Denmark as a case history among nations. As Denmark is an emblematic model of an

archetypal state in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, so, too, Maycomb comes to represent the

family of mankind. Shakespeare’s revisioned Denmark is a paradigmatic model of the

State undergoing a tragic process of moral decay. Lee’s novel is essentially comedic;

however, its symbolic dimensions invoke its underlying moral concerns, which are

profoundly serious, and, in the final analysis, tragic. In contradistinction to Dante, who

titled his trilogy The Divine Comedy, Lee puts into the title of her novel an indication of

the violent power fueling her novelistic depiction of American wrath. The wit of

Harper Lee's child narrator, Jean Louise Finch, mediates between the echoes of “an eye

for an eye, a tooth for a tooth” and Christian benevolence, which are reflected in the

novel’s title.

In To Kill a Mockingbird, swearing and cursing are associated with bodily injury

by way of overt references to Einstein’s relativity theory and Mendel’s law governing

transmission of hereditary character traits among relatives in successive generations.

Vulgar language is not used to depict character; instead, it contributes to the plot. The

multidimensional theme of relativity is central to the meaning of Lee’s novel. Although

Albert Einstein (1879-1955) is mentioned only passingly in Lee’s novel, his importance

should be evaluated based not on a word count but by the context in which he appears.

The dramatized narrator’s reference to relativity is a medical one. When Uncle Jack, a
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physician, makes Jean Louise laugh to numb the pain as he extracts a splinter from her

swollen foot, Uncle Jack’s good bedside manner becomes, instead, “what was known as

relativity” (86). Moments later, when Uncle Jack (Doctor John Hale Finch) makes a bad

joke about “leftover fingers and ears from the hospital,” Jean Louise expresses scornful

derision by using unladylike language. The brunt of the episode forges together the

issues of tasteless language and immoral conduct. By implication, the novel draws a

connection between disease or an injury requiring medical attention and unwholesome,

irreverent language.

On a more humorous note, Jean Louise’s narratorial reflections on relativity

extend to the relativity of family members. Jean Louise dislikes having to kiss Cousin

Ike Finch, but the familiar sight of Uncle Jack pecking Atticus, his brother, on the cheek

tickles her funny bone. Exchanging gifts and greeting relatives with a kiss at

Christmas-tide are time honored, ritualized familial customs.

A Mendelian aspect of familial relativity is in purely developmental physical

differences. Atticus is a head taller than Jack, who looks more like Aunt Alexandra,

while Jean Louis more closely resembles Atticus. Together, Atticus and Alexandra, his

sister, come to represent dichotomous poles of the conventional heredity versus

environment theme. In Atticus’ mind, the town of Maycomb is afflicted with the

“disease,” Atticus says, of ignorance and prejudice. Alexandra Finch is a specialist of

sorts in the study of familial lineage and heredity. She attributes specific character traits

to inbreeding. Jean Louise notes that “Everybody in Maycomb, it seemed, had a Streak:

A Drinking Streak, a Gambling Streak, a Mean Streak, a Funny Streak.” More

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concerned with environmental matters, such as upbringing and a good standard of ethics

and sound moral values in society, Atticus mocks Alexandra (“Sister, when you stop to

think about it, our generation’s practically the first in the Finch family not to marry its

cousins. Would you say the Finches have an Incestuous Streak?”) Alexandra provides

a Post-Darwinian and Post-Mendelian point of information concerning the laws

governing the inheritance of certain traits among pedigrees (family trees) when she

informs her family members, “No, that’s where we got our small hands and feet” (97).

Foreshadowing the wisdom of Alexandra, Harper Lee has Jean Louise begin the

novel with a tall, but true, tale, which is also a half-proud confession. Simon Finch, a

prodigious patriarchal ancestor, left England and “worked his way across the Atlantic to

Philadelphia, thence to Jamaica, thence to Mobile, and up the Saint Stephens,” where he

found a wife, “and with her established a line that ran high to daughters.” Then we

learn that “because of Simon Finch’s industry, Atticus was related by blood or marriage

to nearly every family in the town” (140). In Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher,”

Roderick and Lady Madeline Usher’s “entire family lay in the direct line of descent,

and had always, with very trifling and very temporary variation, so lain” (96).

Similarly, faint echoes of the Sophoclean Oedipus legend are detectable in the itinerant

lifestyle of the wife seeker Simon Finch. In Yeats’s Sophocles King Oedipus (1928), a

troubled Oedipus confesses to his wife, Jocasta, that he journeyed away from his house

in Corinth, because Apollo, Athenian god of medicine, said that Oedipus was doomed

to marry his own mother, and to shed his father’s blood (Sophocles, King Oedipus 385).

In the sequel, Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus (1934), Oedipus discovers that he has
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been exiled in a city whose inhabitants are all related by blood or marriage. A stranger

informs him that “The spot where you are seated protects Athens and is called the

Brazen Threshold. And the first Lord of the Manor was named Colonus and all his

people bear his name as well as their own” (Sophocles 403). Club-footed Oedipus and

his three daughters find refuge among an inbred populace.

Although Harper Lee has her precursors in Sophocles, Poe, and Yeats, To Kill a

Mockingbird is not imitative. It is traditional in Eliot’s sense of the concept, which lays

emphasis on the historical sense and the presence of the past. Yet, imaginative art and

literature have led the way. Postmodern era critics riding the crest of the wave of New

Criticism that accompanied the Modern Period of Picasso, Stravinsky, Fitzgerald,

Hemingway, Yeats, and Eliot, have engaged in storming axiomatic battlements by

shaking the theoretical foundations of literary criticism and theory. Of these

postmodern critics, Harold Bloom serves as an antithetical foil to Eliot, while,

interestingly enough, reconstituting Aristotle’s doctrine of imitation, with an ethically

charged oblique argument in defense of originality. Among the most influential of

literary theorists, Aristotle, Eliot, and Bloom are immensely persuasive. They argue the

need for authors, as individuals, to maintain artistic creativity, which is to say,

originality, at the highest levels. Individual authors should respond with every ounce of

energy to an unending challenge to balance knowledge of the literary canon against

their own creative abilities. Any critical assault upon the ontological bastions of

cultural and historical tradition is bound to have far-reaching significance. Ever since

the battle cry of the surrealists--to make everything new again, whatever else has to be
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sacrificed--revolts against complacency and obsolescence, more than ever before, serve

art and civilization, as humanity speeds irrevocably into the twenty-first century. The

leading post-medievalist champions in ongoing neocritical jousts promulgated by

deconstructionists, feminists, structuralists, new historicists, and other trend setters can

behold a worthy paradigmatic opponent of their more nihilistic pronouncements in

Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird.

By means of a strategic maneuvering away from other postmodern works

depicting marital and familial demographic patterns in isolated towns and ethnically

homogenous populations--such as ones authored by William Butler Yeats, John

Steinbeck, Juan Rulfo, and George Stevens, Lee swerves away from mimetic

representation of pathological phenomena. Instead of stressing the moral power of

ancient mythology, Lee has creatively contributed to the building up of postmodern

tradition by inventing a mythopoeic pantheon of Southern ‘divinities.’ In the nickname

of Jean Louise Finch, which is Scout, Lee has seemingly staked out a claim to

participation in the pastness of the present. Not William Faulkner’s mythic

Yoknapatawpha County, but James Fenimore Cooper’s mythopoeic Natty Bumppo

comes immediately to mind. As a heroic figure, Atticus Finch seems to be on a par

with Natty Bumppo, though not quite. Although Natty Bumppo appears prominently in

the foreground of The Pathfinder (1840), Cooper submerges the revered

backwoodsman, deerslayer, and Indian scout deep in the background of The Pioneers

(1823) and The Prairie (1827). Similarly, Scout’s Uncle Jack, Doctor John Hale Finch,

figures less in any plot action than as a mythopoeic symbol of the spiritual idealism of a
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new nation.

Paradoxically, Doctor Finch places himself at the other end of the sociological

spectrum from Robert E. Lee Ewell’s daughter, the novel's provocative token burlesque

of democratic America's teeming, unnamed, motherless forebears. When John Hale

Finch announces to his widower brother Atticus his own decision not to take a wife so

as to avoid having children, he assumes a role of heroic foil familiar in the American

realist tradition. Repeatedly in Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales, Natty Bumppo is

portrayed as a simple, separate individual who is bound up with God, nature, and the

society of his fellow beings, including his trusted companion, a hound named Hector.

Natty Bumppo describes his life in The Pathfinder: "I, having neither daughter, nor

sister, nor mother, nor kith nor kin, nor any thing but the Delawares to love" (196).

Terence Martin observes, "When Natty, in The Pathfinder, says that Chingachgook 'has

no children to delight with his trophies; no tribe to honor by his deeds,' that he 'is a lone

man,' who 'stands true to his training and his gifts,' he could well be looking into a

mirror (or a pond) and describing his red self" (239). In a tilted parallel, John Hale

Finch and Alexandra Finch come to represent an ideal Christian man and an ideal

Catholic woman in the mind of the novel's central consciousness, with John a Christ

figure and Alexandra a Virgin Mary figure. Jean Louise notes that "he and Aunty

looked alike, but Uncle Jack made better use of his face: we were never wary of his

sharp nose and chin" (86). Uncle Jack reminds Jean Louise of Aunt Alexandra most

strongly when he stands in judgment of her misbehavior: "When Uncle Jack looked

down at me, his features were like Aunt Alexandra's" (93). Comparable to Cooper's
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Natty Bumppo, respectfully called Hawkeye by Chingachgook, and also to

Hemingway's Al, the tank man, in "Night Before Battle," John Hale Finch sizes up the

situation in a developing climate of catastrophe. Portrayed by Lee as a pioneer in the

avant-garde of a new breed of rugged individualists, John Hale Finch is the antithesis of

Oedipal Simon Finch. For this reason, John Hale Finch is the novel's figuralized

symbol of sublime originality and heterogeneity.

Mockingbird imagery in Lee's novel is not decorative but ontologically and

epistemologically significant. A crucial identification of Arthur Boo Radley with

mockingbird imagery occurs when Jean Louise recounts, "As Mr. Radley passed by

Boo drove the scissors into his parent's leg, pulled them out, wiped them on his pants,

and resumed his activities. . . . When the sheriff arrived he found Boo still sitting in the

livingroom, cutting up the Tribune. He was thirty-three years old then" (17). As the

nickname suggests, Boo Radley's character is vivified by a supernatural quality, that of

a scary ghost. The novel's very first chapter has created a distinct impression that there

is something awry in Maycomb, as when officer Marcellus observes in Shakespeare's

Hamlet, upon seeing King Hamlet's ghost, "Something is rotten in the state of

Denmark" (215). Boo is a blameless symbol of lawless abandon, for he is exempt from

all laws known to civilized society. Boo hovers between yin and yang, not knowing if

he is mockingbird or man. Significantly, the mockingbird (Mimus polyglottos), a

member of the Mimidae family, resembles its cousin, the scissor-tailed flycatcher

(Muscivora forticata), a member of the family Tyrannidae. Both families belong to the

Order Passeriformes. Both sing not one idiosyncratic song but a medley of up to twenty
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tunes borrowed from other birds. Evidently, the songs are sung by rote memorization,

for, after the entire repertoire is aired, the haunting medley recommences in much the

same order. Left undisturbed, a mockingbird sings for hours. At the slightest

disturbance, the song ends. Moreover, when the safety of their offspring comes under

threat, parent birds show no qualms about attacking much larger birds.

In To Kill a Mockingbird there is a visible gap between what parents decide for

their children and the letter of the law. This gap opens when we learn that Mr. Radley

successfully overrides the local authorities by asking that he be given custody of Boo

following an episode of street gang delinquency. The gap between parental authority

and law enforcement regulations widens a few episodes later when Atticus tells Jean

Louise that sometimes it is better to bend the law than to follow it exactly, even in the

case of Bob Ewell. Jean Louise protests, and rather intelligently, against this

adulteration even in the face of Atticus' attempt to justify excusing a misdemeanor and

capital felony on the grounds that enforcing the law against a guilty alcoholic poacher

will deprive the transgressor's children of food, whether illegal venison or welfare

victuals (37). Both Bob Ewell and Boo Radley are fugitives from justice, ghostly

outlaws condoned by society. Boo is kept confined to the family mansion, emerging as

a haunted figure at night. Scout reports, "Nobody knew what form of intimidation Mr.

Radley employed to keep Boo out of sight, but Jem figured that Mr. Radley kept him

chained to the bed most of the time. Atticus said no, it wasn't that sort of thing, that

there were other ways of making people into ghosts" (17-18). Unwittingly, Atticus

partially transforms Scout into the ghost of a student in striking a bargain with her.
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Using a "last-will-and-testament diction," Atticus swears his daughter to secrecy,

because, he says, "I'm afraid our activities would be received with considerable

disapprobation by the more learned authorities" (38). The advice that Atticus confers to

his daughter contributes to the momentum of the plot, which culminates in trial and

retribution. Their compromise is a moral action made to accommodate Scout's teacher

and comply with classroom standards, and thus, has direct bearing on the critical issue

raised by Eliot. Atticus wants Scout to honor both tradition and individual talent.

In The Anxiety of Influence, Harold Bloom turns medieval fear of ghosts into a

coherent critical prolongation of the battle between ancients and moderns, precursors

and successors. He states that "Poetic influence need not make poets less original; as

often it makes them more original, though not therefore necessarily better" (7). A

useful terminological scheme is invented by Bloom, for whom poetic influence is

synonymous with poetic misprision. Wittingly, Bloom opens the door to Aristotle and

hosts of progenitor theoreticians when he resurrects the Oedipus legend in brilliant

illustration of his own subject, "battle between strong equals, father and son as mighty

opposites, Laius and Oedipus at the crossroads" (118). Bloom sounds like Yeats

describing Phase 15 in epochs and personalities ("a supernatural incarnation" of

"complete objectivity" where "mind was completely absorbed by being") when he

describes Shakespeare as an exception to the principle of creativity as poetic misprision

(A Vision, 183).

In Shakespeare's seamless work, Bloom sees nothing less than "the absolute

absorption of the precursor." Priority may designate chronological ordering, hence

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legal precedence, or it may refer to order of importance, or both concepts. Just as in my

prioritized act, I chose Marcellus in The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, for the

epigraph to this essay, so Bloom puts Shakespeare under a privileged rubric, as an

exception whose work invokes the primal assumption of a phenomenology of creativity.

In echoing Yeats, Bloom elevates criticism itself to the high ground of poetry, as

Aristotle viewed it, as imaginative literature. Bloom asserts that "All criticism is prose

poetry" and "Criticism is the art of knowing the hidden roads that go from poem to

poem." Viewing all of the foregoing, Bloom rightly refers to originality as "the creative

mind's desperate insistence upon priority" (95, 96). Viewing Bloom together with Eliot,

the critical act necessarily calls for comparison in close combination with perception

and analysis of the selected works.

In order to demonstrate Harper Lee's originality in terms of Bloom's anxiety

theory, Lee's precursors need to be weighed against differences, evidence of

misreadings of precursors in To Kill a Mockingbird. And now the title of Lee's novel

makes it have added significance as a watershed work forging postmodern tradition, a

living atomic unit of nuclear poetics masquerading as fiction. Granted, Bloom's theory

appears to work the best when applied to romanticism. Lee's novel is exemplary both of

post-romantic ideology and of postmodern tradition in Eliot's sense. Harper Lee's

closest eligible precursor novel is Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

Though arguably in the tradition of Southwest humorist narratives and American

realism, Twain's novel, as its title indicates, has a provenance in the romance genre.

This heritage is best exemplified in English novels of romance and adventure by Sir
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Walter Scott (1771-1832), European epic romances, such as The Song of the Nibelungs

(c. 1200), Aucassin and Nicolete (c. 1200), and The Adventures of Don Quixote (1605-

1615), by Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616)), and classical Japanese epics, such as The

Tale of the Heike and 47 Ronins. Just as Mark Twain swerves away from his

precursors, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Cooper, Victor Hugo, Charles Dickens, and Bret

Harte, so, too, Harper Lee avoids the slightest hint of mimicry. Occasionally, Twain's

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn intentionally elicits its readers' recognition of

heraldic devices and precursory imagery so as to create comic effects through satire,

buffoonery, and ironic wit. Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird pursues a much different

course; nevertheless, the similarity between the two novels is not only based

narratologically in their naive narrators, Huck Finn and Jean Louise. Mark Twain's

novel is a subtle precursor to Harper Lee's novel, specifically with reference to Bloom's

masterful doctrine on the anxiety of influence (13).

According to Bloom's principle, which is comprised of six revisionary ratios,

"clinamen" denotes poetic misreading or misprision (14). The clinamen concept

encapsulates and is axiomatic, while tessera, kenosis, daemonization, askesis, and

apophrades appear as detailed corollaries. A near miss encounter of a work with its

precursor has to be palpable. This means that I will have to show that Lee's novel

somewhat completes Mark Twain's novel. "Tessera" refers to this redirection of

meaning by a successor work. "Kenosis" is an iconoclastic, decisive repudiation of a

precursor idea, as when St. Paul refers to Jesus' acceptance of "reduction from divine to

human status" (15).

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Lee's novel exemplifies Bloom's principle of "daemonization," for it makes a

symbolic gesture of absorbing the precursory work's evoked meaning in "a range of

being just beyond that precursor" (15). Acts of aggression by natural forces are

sublimated in Lee's novel, which means that all of the potential subplots are curtailed.

Only in this sense do we find askesis relevant. In most other senses, askesis as

purgation and solipsism is absent. Bloom's poets of the American sublime who

exemplify askesis are solipsists, because their "eye declines to be purged," and they

appropriate nature in solipsist self-aggrandizement (132-33). As an alternative to

askesis, Lee's novel accepts the anxiety of influence, embracing a spirit of adventure

redolent of Mark Twain and of the humorists of the Old American Southwest.

Instead of succumbing to askesis, Lee resorts to a romantic maneuver. While

giving every indication of conformity to the tradition of American classical and

vernacular literary tradition, Lee's novel displays reconciliation in its title. Using an

appropriate translation into the American vernacular, the title of the novel makes a

psychic leap that constitutes a bold act of poetic misprision. The title To Kill a

Mockingbird invokes the moral presence of the albatross, killed gratuitously by an

ephebian sailor, in Samuel Taylor Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. For the

moral in Lee's novel, which exists outside of its own precincts, we are forced to look

elsewhere. Expanding our search to include the domain of critical theory relevant to

literary history, we encounter the electrifying fusion of a revisionary relationship

between Mark Twain and Harper Lee.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn begins with a Notice: "Persons attempting

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to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral

in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot” (vii). Although

the deadpan humor of a naive narrator separates the comic world of The Adventures of

Huckleberry Finn from the moral symbolism in the The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,

both works are universally accepted as exemplary fables of conscience. Again,

speaking relatively, in To Kill a Mockingbird, Jean Louise is Harper Lee's Becky

Thatcher, except that instead of getting lost in a cave, she is wrapped up in the brown

cloth and chicken wire of her Halloween ham costume. All three narrators report

shootings that are symbolical. When we apply Bloom's theory of poetic influence, we

see that in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Tom Sawyer's adventure of setting a

freed slave free has symbolical overtones, for it is a comic precursor to the tragic

shooting of Tom Robinson in To Kill a Mockingbird. Jean Louise assures Atticus, "Jem

wasn't scared. Asked him and he said he wasn't. Besides, nothin's real scary except in

books" (195). Jem Finch gains courage from reading The Gray Ghost; so, too, Tom

Sawyer ennobles Jim by casting him into the role of nobleman, as a heroic peasant in

The Man in the Iron Mask, by Alexandre Dumas, or a pilgrim on a long voyage in The

Mayflower. Tom entertains the notion of cutting off Jim's manacled foot, which affords

Jim the role of admirable strait-laced straight man. As Jem's heroism vindicates Tom

Robinson, so Jim's symbolic goodness supports Tom Sawyer, as when Tom tells the

truth about Injun Joe in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.

Just as Jean Louise knows how to read and write beyond the level of her

classmates, so Tom Sawyer knows the world of experience from his storehouse of
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reading. Tom is able to keep Jim's spirits up until Uncle Silas can be properly notified

that he has wrongfully locked up a man for no good reason. However, if Tom is

"callous," as Charles Neider avers, he is so because he actually lacks a "conventional

conscience" (16). When Tom first meets Huckleberry Finn on the road, he makes his

friend avow reality: "Honest injun, now, you ain't a ghost?" (Huckleberry Finn, 260).

Tom feels compelled to re-enact manumission as a tragic ritual.

Aristotle defines tragedy as an action that has serious implications; moreover,

tragedy has magnitude. Twain's aesthetic patterning reflects the tragic circumstances

surrounding the birth of a nation. As Injun Joe's spiritual rebirth depends on the truth

telling of Tom Sawyer, so Jim's spiritual rebirth depends on the moral courage of Miss

Watson, Huck Finn, Tom Sawyer, Uncle Silas, the widow Douglas, and of Jim himself.

After the warpath was reduced to obsolescence by counsels of peace, this revolutionary

cycle was precursor to successive movements: agrarian culture, military and industrial

expansion, and space age high technology. Viewed in this context, To Kill a

Mockingbird exemplifies Bloom's sixth revisionary ratio, apophrades or the return of

the dead. Harper Lee's characterization of Tom Robinson has an elegaic hue that is

tragic, archetypal, and symbolic.

Mark Twain invokes a similarity between Tom Sawyer and Jim, just as Harper Lee

suggests a similarity between Jem Finch and Tom Robinson. Twain is Homeric, while

Lee is Sophoclean. Twain concludes his work with a felicitous outcome in which the

forces of good emerge victorious after a struggle of epic proportions waged in a heroic

fantasy that gradually eclipses reality. Tom Sawyer is shot while he impersonates pious
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Sid Sawyer, leaving Jim to return to his wife and family in excellent health. In some

ways, Tom Sawyer's role in the novel is to reprise the agglomeration of ideas and issues

associated with the American Civil War. Sid Sawyer and Uncle Silas typify the

uncodified mores and morals of the American Deep South. Tom Sawyer and Jim

represent revolutionary forces of the industrialized American North. For twentieth-

century readers, there is nothing unusual about the nineteenth-century families that are

portrayed in that the narrator, Huckleberry Finn, is orphaned in the course of the novel.

Linkage of Mark Twain with Harper Lee is tangible in the resemblance between Pap

Finn and Bob Ewell, both of whom are fathers rendered unfit by gross ignorance,

bigotry, and alcoholism. Lee swerves away from Twain in an appreciable way. Twain’s

boy orphan reappears as a girl orphan, Bob Ewell’s daughter. In Twain's Homeric

novel, Pap Finn's depraved irresponsibility results in justice being served in a Biblical

sense: "The wages of sin is death" (Romans 6:23). In Lee’s Sophoclean novel, Bob

Ewell’s equally mysterious and macabre demise is symptomatic of a network of moral

and ethical corruption. Twain’s national epic provides a bird’s eye panoramic view of a

nation rent into two factions on the issue of slavery and abolition. Lee’s novel hones in

upon a typical community in meticulous scrutiny of a moral plague of excessive

relativity.

In To Kill a Mockingbird, irate father Bob Ewell is depicted as a tragically flawed

figure, almost as a victim of cultural ignorance and of society’s own failures of courage.

He appears to be afflicted with the same revenge fever as Injun Joe. As with Injun Joe,

who is an enterprising robber with a Renaissance Spaniard's code of honor and revenge,
 20

Bob Ewell takes his self-hatred out on a scapegoat. Injun Joe is convicted for stabbing

young Dr. Robinson during a paroxysm of vengeance, and sentenced to hanging. Yet,

upon Injun Joe’s accidental death by starvation in McDougal's cave, the townspeople

are in the midst of petitioning to the governor for a pardon. Similarly, Bob Ewell wins

a court case against Tom Robinson, but his low self-esteem leads to acts of treachery

that cause his own downfall, and a victorious trial by jury is reflective of complicity

with Bob Ewell, not justice for Tom Robinson.

In the final confrontation between Bob Ewell and Jem Finch we find a symbolic

aporia. In the last episode, Lee's depiction of Sheriff Tate is a stroke of genius, because,

from the way in which he handles the killing of Bob Ewell, he reinforces the novel's

tragic exposure of Maycomb's misprision of administrative justice and law enforcement.

Significantly, the literary device of foreshadowing suggests interaction between pagan

fate and Christian destiny in both classic American novels, so that Twain's novel is

obviously anticipatory of Lee's novel. In The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Chapter IX,

"Tragedy in the Graveyard" is a precursory episode which foreshadows Bob Ewell's

attack on Jean Louise and Jem in Chapter 28 of To Kill a Mockingbird; however, the

roles of avenger and victim are in reverse order. In Twain's novel, the killing is simply

described: "the half-breed saw his chance and drove the knife to the hilt in the young

an's breast. He reeled and fell partly upon Potter, flooding him with his blood" (Tom

Sawyer 89). Somewhat cynically, the narrator later observes, "Injun Joe was believed to

have killed five citizens of the village, but what of that? If he had been Satan himself

there would have been plenty of weaklings ready to scribble their names to a pardon
 21

petition" (Tom Sawyer 285).

In contrast to Twain's moralizing narrator, Lee employs indirection, ambiguity,

and evocation, in short, Symbolist techniques. French poet Stéphane Mallarmé, leader

of the Symboliste cenacle, once defined the nuanced expression, the ephemeral side of

things, as the flower which is absent from all bouquets.1 The fact that John Hale Finch

turns Jean Louise on his knee and spanks her is not told in so many words. Jean Louise

speaks allusively, obliquely: "I turned to flee but Uncle Jack was quicker. I found

myself suddenly looking at a tiny ant struggling with a bread crumb in the grass" (93).

Jean Louise does not come right out and tell us that she was punished. In addition to

verbal circumlocution, Harper Lee uses symbolic action. When Jem grows increasingly

angry toward Mrs. Dubose for disrespectful, self-righteous, zealous remarks against his

father, instead of exploding at the elderly woman, he swerves into her garden. Jean

Louise explains, "He did not begin to calm down until he had cut the tops off every

camellia bush Mrs. Dubose owned, until the ground was littered with green buds and

leaves. He bent my baton against his knee, snapped it in two and threw it down. By

that time I was shrieking. Jem yanked my hair, said he didn't care, he'd do it again if he

got a chance, and if I didn't shut up he'd pull every hair out of my head. I didn't shut up

and he kicked me. I lost my balance and fell on my face" (111-12). Jem's ambition in

life is to be a football player. Jem’s robustness, rather than detracting from intellectual

matters, serves only to make Jem more passionately loyal to Atticus' defense of Tom

Robinson: "I peeked at Jem: his hands were white from gripping the balcony rail, and

his shoulders jerked as if each 'guilty' was a separate stab between them" (223-24).
 22

Finally, Jem fights to the death with Bob Ewell, the young man venting his outrage for

the injustice done to Tom Robinson by defending his helpless sister against a drunken,

monstrous attacker bent on exacting revenge. In avenging Tom Robinson's wrongful

death, Jem also avenges the precursor death, that of Dr. Robinson.

The plot of the novel hinges on Atticus' courtroom defense of Tom Robinson.

Subtly related to the plot is another revitalized Mark Twain theme. The rites of

manhood are articulated in a modern idiom, filtered through a secondary screen of

consciousness. As Edgar H. Schuster notes, "One of the motifs--largely understated due

to the novel's point of view--concerns Jem's physiological and psychological growth"

(342). Lee's novel matches innocence against experience, suggesting that sometimes

adulthood is hampered. A full-grown adult may fall prey to a corrupted advanced stage

of childhood with its immaturity and concomitant inability to undertake large projects

or to deal effectively with complications. For instance, Jean Louise comes out second

best in discussing the genealogical relativity of a jury member with Atticus and Jem,

while Alexandra listens without making a comment. Atticus defines double first

cousins as resulting after "Two sisters married two brothers." Not knowing that

incestuous marriage between siblings is a criminal act against nature as determined by

Mendel’s laws and adjudicated by statutory laws, Jean Louise incorrectly concludes, "If

I married Jem and Dill had a sister whom he married our children would be double first

cousins" (236). Despite Jean Louise's apparent inability to figure it out correctly, as

Atticus expects her to, the scene conveys serious implications of some magnitude.

Instead of correcting Jean Louise's blunder, Atticus, Alexandra, and Jem maintain an
 23

enigmatic silence. At the beginning of the novel, Atticus is vexed by embarrassment

over having blood kinship with a reputed prolific, polygamous patriarch. The confusion

in the mind of unschooled, young Jean Louise is understandable in view of the

somewhat unusual living arrangements between Atticus and his sister, Alexandra. The

innocence of Jean Louise’s verbally expressed misapprehension is implicitly contrasted

with incestuous liaisons instigated by Simon Finch. By the end of the novel, the central

theme of relativity has attained enhanced values as a polyvalent and perplexing

symbolical motif. As Boo Radley is the most enigmatic figure in the novel, so, too,

relativity is a doubled-edged and unifying symbolic motif throughout the novel.

The contrastive relationship of father and son contributes to an aura of moral and

ethical uncertainty at the conclusion of the novel. Reasoning powers exercised by

Atticus Finch, in consideration of difficult social, ethical, and legal issues, contrast

sharply to the boyish behavior of Jem Finch. For example, the ten-year-old Jem listens

to a story about a flagpole sitter, then he decides to spend all night perched aloft the

backyard tree house. Jem's actions call to mind the title of the novel, for Jem merely

imitates what he hears although his response enlists both mind and imagination.

Moreover, Jem's slowly seething, eruptive sense of moral indignation has a matching

counterpart in the languid flight pattern and temperamental disposition of mockingbirds'

cousins, scissor-tails. Almost impulsively, the scissor-tail takes flight, revealing the

pinwheel action of its tri-colored black, white, and gray markings displayed by wings

beating out a slow, rhythmical path in the sky. A fearless bird, the scissor-tail is not

startled into taking flight; rather, it outsmarts its enemies by deliberately executing a
 24

wing-over maneuver. Mockingbirds and scissor-tails are not game birds; nor are they

protected by game laws. As Jean Louise Finch observes to Atticus Finch, arresting

someone for killing Bob Ewell would "be sort of like shootin' a mockingbird, wouldn't

it?" (291). Jem's powerful emotional energy is unleashed fourfold, motivated by

familial loyalties not only to his young sister, Scout, but especially to his father, Atticus,

for his courageous but unsuccessful defending of . Earlier, Atticus told the sheriff that

"Of course it was clear-cut self-defense" (286). Self-protectively, Jem lashes out

against the wrongful victor in three previous battles with a force strong enough to kill

Bob Ewell. Jem is not motivated by an Old Testament rationale of an eye for an eye, a

tooth for a tooth. Rather, Jem has become thoroughly convicted of the devastatingly

lethal harm that Ewell has inflicted, and continues to inflict, upon Jem and his loved

ones. Jem Finch emerges as the novel's most symbolic figure. On a fundamental level,

Jem Finch is Harper Lee's Tom Sawyer, with Charles Baker Harris, an orphan called

Dill, as a distant cousin to Huckleberry Finn. Lee's reworking of an Oedipal relativity

motif transforms a bright, adventuresome American boy into a symbolic hero figure,

foreordained to fulfill a tragic role. Although poetic justice is served when Boo Radley

is credited with doing away with Bob Ewell, Atticus and Jean Louise strongly believe

that Jem killed Bob Ewell in self-defense.

Hermeneutically interpreted retrospectively in light of Lee's novel, Sophocles'

Oedipus, who unintentionally killed his father, King Laius, fulfills a role, beyond myth,

as an archetypal figure. When Jem mortally attacks Bob Ewell, he is a figural

representation of an archetypal Oedipal son. Unintentionally, Jem subverts the life's

 25

blood dedication of his father to the law. Boo Radley's stature is enhanced. Instead of

an unsung hero in a questionable coup de grace masterminded by a manipulative

sheriff, Boo Radley emerges as a Christ figure whose presence is needed for Jem to

return home to his father. Atticus is an archetypal father figure whose association is

with God in the New Testament. After Tom Ewell, the parody of a father, is dead,

Atticus is rendered powerless to exercise the letter and spirit of the law. As an attorney,

Atticus is dead. Sheriff Tate's supposition of Boo's obvious hand in Ewell's death

disengages Atticus Finch's power to act. Yet, Lee's novel stops short of the formulaic

Nietzschean "God is dead" by evoking resonate meaning in which Pre-Christian pagan

perception has an antithesis in Christian insight. Boo's disfigurements are associated

less with physical and mental handicaps, more with the wickedness and evils of the

world. When Boo carries battle-scarred Jem in his arms, he is an emblem of Christ

bearing the heavy weight of the cross. In the ancient world, criminals and felons were

routinely crucified. Even if we want to accept Sheriff Hector Tate's reading of the

situation, Boo Radley is associated with the concept of guilt. The fallacy in Hector

Tate's reasoning can be traced to the rhetorical fault of begging the question. Sheriff

Tate's logic is flawed, because the assumption of guilt in the slaying of Tom Ewell is

based on an unfair equation of guilt with an individual's being physically and mentally

handicapped. Hector Tate assumes that Boo Radley killed Tom Ewell, because Boo

Radley is a retarded man. Lee's novel is of enduring value because of the universally

symbolical implications in this final image of universal man. Complex

interrelationships among global familial and community members converge in the

 26

implied face-off between Jem as agnostic soldier and Boo as Christ savior.

Joyce Milton observes Jean Louise's reassessment of Boo: "Boo Radley, the

mysterious and scary neighborhood recluse has become in her eyes plain Mr. Arthur

Radley, a timid and nervous middle-aged man." Astutely, Milton comments, "It is

difficult to imagine that this is the same person who stabbed Bob Ewell earlier in the

evening" (74). With Sheriff Heck Tate's accusation of Boo Radley the novel takes on a

satirical sharp edge. As Dorothy Jewell Altman notes, "the characters who are

innocent--Tom Robinson and Boo Radley--are judged guilty by a prejudiced society"

(182). If he is assessed carefully in this light, Boo Radley has the same function as

does King Hamlet's ghost in Shakespeare's tragic drama. In Lee's modern novel, the

willingness of certain town leaders to blame the crime on a neighborhood ghost is

scapegoatism, not justice. Tate represents the views of a slouch who prefers to vote

against a hazy, rather unpopular, ghostly figure than to work toward a better society.

Lee's novel revolves around the moral fallacy of politicizing justice, a tragic

action that results in moral complacency and injustice. Atticus attempts to correct

Sheriff Hector "Heck" Tate, but the men are caught in a stalemate by their common

Achilles' heel, a bond of friendship. Despite the efforts of the sheriff and the defendant's

lawyer, the trial of Tom Robinson burgeoned into a mockery of justice. Even the juror

who kept the verdict from total arbitrariness based his decision to find the defendant

innocent on something akin to feudal fealty, not reasoned sifting of evidence (235). In

Homer's The Iliad, the Achaean Greek warrior Achilles kills Hector, a mighty Trojan,

mainly because he has vowed to avenge the death of his friend, Patroklos. While
 27

Atticus comprehends the obstacles to be overcome before justice truly prevails, Sheriff

Tate is almost an allegorical symbol, an atavistic throwback to the old pagan order.

Lawyer Atticus Finch, a learned, patriarchal man of his times is stranded, much like

Mark Twain's Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. Atticus tries to explain the

proper procedure to Hector Tate following the death of Robert E. Lee Ewell. As Atticus

indicates, if justice were rightly administered, a police investigation and legal hearing

would take place, with the matter duly recorded in the ledgers kept at the town hall. In

the end Jem Finch is relegated to a purgatorial limbo, along with Boo Radley and Tom

Robinson, who does not live to receive the benefits of the judicial appeals process. As

Harper Lee was no doubt aware, novelistic precedent had been set for putting a child on

the witness stand. Tom Sawyer was allowed to testify in a procedure that clarified Injun

Joe's role in the slaying of Dr. Robinson, thus setting free Muff Potter, a grave robber

and drunkard, but an innocent man nevertheless.

Among the eloquent remarks in an address delivered before the Virgil Society on

the sixteenth of October 1944, Eliot defined "the perfect classic" as "one in which the

whole genius of a people will be latent, if not all revealed" (27). Jem Finch is a perfect

tragic hero, because by the failure of the legal system in Maycomb, a Kierkegaardian

knight of infinite faith remains suspended in abstract symbolism. In a democratic

society in which the leaders are somnolent Judge Taylors and unenlightened Sheriff

Heck Tates, the Jem Finches run the risk of being transformed by society into martyrs.

And their fathers, the Atticus Finches, cannot save them. As the serious discussion

between father and son indicates in Chapter 23 of the novel, when justice itself is at
 28

issue, good and evil are inextricably tangled. Similarly, the complicated web of

relativity, whether racial or familial, is difficult to appreciate unless the identities of the

individuals are known, as Jean Louise learns from Atticus in Chapter 16 of the novel.

Identity and identification are keys to the democratic way of life. Yet, as with the

truncated title of To Kill a Mockingbird, these keys remain locked away in the hamlet of

Maycomb. Persuaded by his fellow inmates that an appeal or a pardon is not

forthcoming, Tom Robinson, knowing that he is innocent of the charges brought against

him, dies a soldier's death. He is shot while attempting to return to his wife and

children, who had not been permitted any visitation rights at all. In Tom Robinson's

mind, perhaps in Tom Sawyer's mind, it is better to sacrifice one's life in the service of

God and country than to sink into moral complacency over anything less than

perfection. The innocence of Tom Robinson is indicated obliquely, and this innocence

is as important to Atticus Finch as Abraham's innocence when God commanded that

Isaac be taken on a long journey and offered up as a sacrifice. In return for Abraham's

obedience and faith, Isaac was saved, and God allowed a lamb to be sacrificed in Isaac's

place (Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, 1-132).

A tragic connection is made in the novel between Tom Robinson and Jem Finch.

First, in physical terms, both Tom Robinson and Jem Finch have a deformed limb. The

novel constitutes a tremendous digression that is a detailed account of how Jem

received his injury. The first sentence in the novel is "When he was nearly thirteen, my

brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow." A thematic tie appears in Chapter

19, the first incident of which is recounted by Jean Louise as follows: "Thomas
 29

Robinson reached around, ran his fingers under his left arm and lifted it. He guided his

arm to the Bible and his rubber-like left hand sought contact with the black binding. As

he raised his right hand, the useless one slipped off the Bible and hit the clerk's table."

After Jem protectively fends off Bob Ewell's vicious knife assault, Jean Louise sees

Jem, exhausted by the protracted fight, carried off by a coughing, wheezing man who

turns out to be Boo Radley. She observes that "Jem's arm was dangling crazily in front

of him." In a symbolic sense, Tom Robinson is spiritually reborn when Jem has to take

drastic action. Conversely, Jem Finch is not allowed to rise to full moral stature.

Instead, as with his alter ego Tom Robinson, Jem Finch is an ethical drifter in a

purgatorial limbo. Neither Jem nor Tom is afforded an opportunity to be judged to the

extent provided by law as practiced by Atticus Finch. Similarly, Dill and Boo are

victims of moral turpitude in enforcement of Mendel's laws of heredity, which are

acknowledged by Alexandra, Atticus, and Doctor John Hale Finch.

As in the case of Coleridge and Mallarmé, Harper Lee engages a host of symbols,

so that moral meaning lies beneath the surface. Lee's novel concludes on a comic note

with Jean Louise playing a mockingbird role. Lee has the child prodigy fall asleep, a

simple enough means by which to end the novel. However, the homey scene

reverberates back to the beginning of the novel, for when Jem awakens in the morning,

he knows that he has been marked for life: "There was an ugly mark along one side of

his face. His left arm lay out from his body; his elbow was bent slightly, but in the

wrong direction. Jem was frowning" (279). Jean Louise's action of falling asleep closes

the book with a piquant digression back to the courtroom. Moments before the guilty
 30

verdict, the packed courtroom is alive with anticipation, except for "Judge Taylor sound

asleep" (222). When Jean Louise has fallen asleep, and we have finished reading Lee's

novel, we are the jury.2

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32