Month: March 2015

The Radley place is displayed as supernatural and Gothic to put a feeling of mystery around Boo Bradley and the household. ‘Picket drunkenly guarded the front yard’ this description of how overrun the house is also gives an impression of supernatural forces guarding the house. Using words such as ‘darkened’ and phrase ‘once-white’ the writing strengthens its Gothic feeling.

From the passage around page 68:

Harper Lee creates sympathy for Boo Radley and uses him to show the beginning of adolescence in jem. Boo Radley (or as is suspected) uses the hole in a tree to communicate with the outside world. As he has been kept in for so long the whole of Maycomb has a bit of a vendetta against him and use him as a scapegoat even for when the weather is bad! As it has been so long for him to meet anyone else it feels cruel when the tree is filled up and he can no longer. Jem has started to become of an age where events don’t just pass by, but he actually feels emotional about it. We can see this because after he is coming back with Scout he stays outside and cries for a little.

In 1929 the wall street crash caused a great depression across the whole world. In america the stocks crashed and as everyone was selling them they became worth less and less. As it hit america, they started to demand repayment from Germany as they had loned money from the Dawes and the Young plan. This spread the depression further around the world. It links to ‘to kill a mockingbird’ because the book is set after the event. We know the farmers around had been hit the hardest out of everyone- as Atticus stated. Also the Ewell’s instead of paying in money instead with what they had (in Woodstock).

From a Swahili course on water poems at SOAS.

Ten lines on water and knowledge:

Roughness of carpet against silk slip skin on thigh,

Trembling, soft resemblance of the lifeless reflection from creek and sky,

A doubt of awakening strikes the connection deep through my wellbeing,

Deep under the skipping stones off the surface of the lake mirage, so freeing,

The year’s drought in Whale’s Valley leaves dried bones dispersed,

The drip drop is soaked up eagerly by soils thirst.

Knowledge begins to stream down into hands of the needy,

A ripple through man’s population as a seed, he-

Suffocates under rip tide and crashing waterfall,

Connection is lost and found again- a barricaded, solid, brick wall.

The Courthouse in ‘To kill a mockingbird’ is symbolically described by Harper Lee to display the peoples desperate attempts to hang onto ‘Every physical scrap of the past’. This is in terms of the old ideas and beliefs of the old traditions but also laws to do with the discrimination of black people. The representation of law is obvious with the setting of the courthouse, it is built upon not only from ‘Greek revival columns’ but these views clash with the nineteenth century ones presented mostly from the South of America as the colonial start of the slave trade. Implementing the quote of hanging on to every scrap of the past we can see that Harper Lee is trying to show that although the new laws against the possession of slaves many or most of the people around were only made to do this and there views have not changed from the old tradition. These are rusty unreliable ideas compared to even the idealogical justice system put in place by the ancient Greeks that did not favour the people of white ethnicity.