Moral Resonance and the Anxiety of Influence in

Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird

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

T
HE ETHICAL AND MORAL RESONANCE of an imaginative
literary work ultimately 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 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

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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
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

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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.
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

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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 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

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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 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

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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 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).

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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, 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 (Yeats,
Plays 319). In the sequel, Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus, Oedipus
discovers that he has 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” (Yeats, Plays 331). 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

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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 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 W. B.

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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, country lawyer
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 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

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Pathfinder: "I, having neither daughter, nor sister, nor mother, nor kith nor
kin, nor any thing but the Delawares to love" (2:196). 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" (Cooper,
The Pathfinder 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 Hale
Finch, a Christ figure, and Alexandra Finch, a Virgin Mary figure. Jean
Louise Finch 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" (Lee,
To Kill a Mockingbird 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" (Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird 93). Comparable to Cooper's
Natty Bumppo, respectfully called Hawkeye by Chingachgook, and also to
Hemingway's Al, the tank man, in "Night Before Battle," 2 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

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Finch 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"
(Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird 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 The Tragedy of Hamlet: Prince of Denmark, 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 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

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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 (Lee, To Kill a
Mockingbird 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" (Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
17-18). Unwittingly, Atticus partially transforms Scout into the ghost of a
student in striking a bargain with her. 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" (Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird 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.

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In The Anxiety of Influence, distinguished scholar and critic 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" (Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence 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 legal precedence, or it may refer to order of importance, or
both concepts. Just as in my prioritized act, I chose Marcellus 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

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creative mind's desperate insistence upon priority" (The Anxiety of

Influence 95, 96). When we put 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 principle, 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 Walter Scott (1771-1832),
European epic romances, such as Song of the Nibelungs (c. 1200), Aucassin
and Nicolette (c. 1200), and Don Quixote (1605-1615), by Miguel de
Cervantes (1547-1616)), and classical Japanese epics, such as Tales of the
Heike and Tales of the 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

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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. 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).
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

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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 Twain and Lee.
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn begins with a Notice: "Persons
attempting 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” (The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, vii).
Although the deadpan humor of a naive narrator separates the comic world
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

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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" (Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
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 Twain’s 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 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?" (The Adventures of 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

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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 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

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 Nancy Ann Watanabe Moral Resonance in To Kill a Mockingbird

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 Lee’s 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, 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

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 Nancy Ann Watanabe Moral Resonance in To Kill a Mockingbird

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

novel is obviously anticipatory of Lee's novel. In Twain’s 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 Lee’s 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" (Twain, The Adventures of 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 petition" (Twain, The Adventures of 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 in Paris, once defined
the nuanced expression, the ephemeral side of things, as the flower which is
absent from all bouquets.3 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" (Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird 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

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 Nancy Ann Watanabe Moral Resonance in To Kill a Mockingbird

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" (Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird 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" (Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird 223-24).
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

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 Nancy Ann Watanabe Moral Resonance in To Kill a Mockingbird

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" (Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird 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 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

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 Nancy Ann Watanabe Moral Resonance in To Kill a Mockingbird

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 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?" (Lee, To Kill a
Mockingbird 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" (Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird 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

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 Nancy Ann Watanabe Moral Resonance in To Kill a Mockingbird

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 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,

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 Nancy Ann Watanabe Moral Resonance in To Kill a Mockingbird

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 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

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 Nancy Ann Watanabe Moral Resonance in To Kill a Mockingbird

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 weakness or vulnerability, 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 (Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird 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, Patrōklos. While 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 Harry Morgan in Mark
Twain's 1889 novel A 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 attorney Atticus Finch 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

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 Nancy Ann Watanabe Moral Resonance in To Kill a Mockingbird

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" (Eliot, What Is a Classic? 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 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

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 Nancy Ann Watanabe Moral Resonance in To Kill a Mockingbird

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
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

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 Nancy Ann Watanabe Moral Resonance in To Kill a Mockingbird

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" (Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
279). Jean Louise's action of falling asleep closes the book with a piquant
digression back to the courtroom. Moments before the guilty verdict, the
packed courtroom is alive with anticipation, except for "Judge Taylor sound
asleep" (Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird 222). When Jean Louise has fallen
asleep, and we have finished reading Lee's novel, we are the jury.
Notes
1
I trace the dovetailing of language with the theme of moral decay
involving a disease of the soul and body in Beloved Image in chapters on
George Stevens’s I Remember Mama, John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men,
and Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo.
2
I discuss military shrewdness in “Picasso and Hemingway: Surreal
Specters Haunting Guernica and Four Stories of the Spanish Civil War”
(forthcoming).

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 Nancy Ann Watanabe Moral Resonance in To Kill a Mockingbird

3
The virginal princess says “Je dis une fleur! Et, hors de l’oubli où ma
voix relègue aucun contour, en tant que quelque chose d’autre que les
calices sus, musicalement se lève, idée même et suave, l’absente de tous
bouquets” (Mallarmé, Œuvres complètes 368); ‘I say a flower! And, out of
the forgetfulness where my voice banishes any contour, inasmuch as it is
something other than known calyses, musically arises, an idea itself and
fragrant, the one absent from all bouquets’ (Mallarmé, edited and translated
by Anthony Hartley, 174-75).
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 Nancy Ann Watanabe Moral Resonance in To Kill a Mockingbird

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