Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird by Michael J. Meyer

Author:Michael J. Meyer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scarecrow Press
Published: 2009-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

chapter 9

Spooks, Masks, Haints, and

Things That Go Bump in the

Night: Fear and Halloween Imagery in To Kill

a Mockingbird

Michael J. Meyer

In the first paragraph of his March 1933 inaugural address to Congress, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the thirty-second president of the United States, was frank and bold in his assertion that the only thing Americans had to fear was fear itself.1 Assessing the common difficulties faced by citizens in the deep throes of the Great Depression, FDR sought to reassure his fellow countrymen and -women that failure was not imminent and that the key to a return to success—both financial and emotional—was to rely on interdependence: being a good neighbor who respects one’s self and because she does so, respects the rights of others; a neighbor who respects his obligation and respects the sanctity of his agreement in and with a world of neighbors.

Some twenty-seven years later, Harper Lee published To Kill a Mockingbird, a book now celebrating its fifty-year anniversary. Whether ironically or intentionally, Lee set the story in 1933, the same year that Roosevelt delivered the speech—a time that despite Roosevelt’s protestations to the contrary, was rife with various fears, not the least of which were the economic conditions that brought the failure of banks and businesses and that also foreshadowed the foreclosures of homes and loss of property. At this time, individuals also worried about having enough to eat, about finding a job, and about supporting a family. It was a distressing era throughout the United States but even more so for minorities, who found these concerns compounded by racial prejudice—by unfounded fears that black people were somehow individuals who, as their skin color suggested, were allied with the forces of evil. Overseas this dark force was already evident in the racialization of Germany under the rule of Adolf Hitler, whose rise to power prefigured the fall of the Weimar Republic and the rise of the Third Reich. These Nazi goals of genetic and racial purification, of course, fostered hatred and discrimination especially against Jews, blacks, Catholics, and homosexuals while promoting a “pure” Aryan race.2 Given these parallels to real-life events that existed within the novel’s time frame, it should be no surprise that Lee decided to incorporate the very real racial tensions that had flourished in her native South since the arrival of African slaves in the 1600s, not to mention the conflict that existed even earlier with Native Americans. It was a tension that she realized was escalating in her present-day world and had culminated in the modern civil rights movement in the late 1950s and early ’60s. Set in Maycomb, Alabama—a town that parallels Lee’s own hometown of Monroeville, Alabama—Lee’s novel clearly addresses many types of fear that flourished on the American scene both in the distant past and the more recent present. Unfortunately, the novel still reflects the concerns of current American citizens who continue to be terrified not only by such things as the supernatural but also by individuals who are labeled as “Others,”

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