RedComrade
14th November 2003, 00:42
As required by the state of Indiana our 9th grade class recently read Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird , here is a book review I've submitted to my teacher. Hopefully it may be of some interest those of you who have read this interesting book:
To Kill A Mockingbird
One step forward for social progess, two steps back
By: RedComrade
When examining the text of To Kill A Mockingbird on the level of social commentary all seems healthy enough at first. Given its time and context as a product of the Southern experience it may even appear progressive. But amidst all of its prose about racial harmony and the fallacies of discrimination it lays the framework for ideas that would do more harm to the broader movement for Social Emancipation than any group of drunken racists ever would. Amidst all of its seeming pleasantry and the benevolence of the white bourgeois emancipating societies downtrodden it sells the movement the noose by which it willingly hangs itself.
Throughout the book Harper Lee is careful to construct a structure of morality that runs perfectly parallel to Maycomb’s social ladder. Here is where she comes up on the wrong side of the progressive coin. With meticulous subtlety Lee makes sure that all of the oppressed Africans saviors are from the very class that in our own society oppresses them. By presenting the sheriff and the lawyer, the books two representatives of our legal system, as saviors of the Africans Lee dupes the movement into looking to it’s greatest persecutors for salvation. While Lee should have been presenting the Africans saviors from amidst their own community or from their fellow oppressed, the workers, she cleverly tricks them.
She is in fact acting as a tool of the bourgeois in the age old mission of divide and conquer. Her strategy differs in only one insignificant detail, instead of targeting white workers with the typical scare stories she cunningly dupes the Africans by reversing the equation. Both ways serve the same immediate purpose: to weaken the working class with mutual suspicions that prevent them from realizing the true source of their mutual oppression. Forty-three years after it’s first publishing its time those of us dedicated to Social-Emancipation tell To Kill A Mockingbird truthfully the way it should have been told. Instead of poor white workers wielding the noose it’s high time we expose the executioners for who they really are: the bourgeois, the lawyers and the sheriffs, the judges and the newspaper owners.
To Kill A Mockingbird
One step forward for social progess, two steps back
By: RedComrade
When examining the text of To Kill A Mockingbird on the level of social commentary all seems healthy enough at first. Given its time and context as a product of the Southern experience it may even appear progressive. But amidst all of its prose about racial harmony and the fallacies of discrimination it lays the framework for ideas that would do more harm to the broader movement for Social Emancipation than any group of drunken racists ever would. Amidst all of its seeming pleasantry and the benevolence of the white bourgeois emancipating societies downtrodden it sells the movement the noose by which it willingly hangs itself.
Throughout the book Harper Lee is careful to construct a structure of morality that runs perfectly parallel to Maycomb’s social ladder. Here is where she comes up on the wrong side of the progressive coin. With meticulous subtlety Lee makes sure that all of the oppressed Africans saviors are from the very class that in our own society oppresses them. By presenting the sheriff and the lawyer, the books two representatives of our legal system, as saviors of the Africans Lee dupes the movement into looking to it’s greatest persecutors for salvation. While Lee should have been presenting the Africans saviors from amidst their own community or from their fellow oppressed, the workers, she cleverly tricks them.
She is in fact acting as a tool of the bourgeois in the age old mission of divide and conquer. Her strategy differs in only one insignificant detail, instead of targeting white workers with the typical scare stories she cunningly dupes the Africans by reversing the equation. Both ways serve the same immediate purpose: to weaken the working class with mutual suspicions that prevent them from realizing the true source of their mutual oppression. Forty-three years after it’s first publishing its time those of us dedicated to Social-Emancipation tell To Kill A Mockingbird truthfully the way it should have been told. Instead of poor white workers wielding the noose it’s high time we expose the executioners for who they really are: the bourgeois, the lawyers and the sheriffs, the judges and the newspaper owners.