Mockingbird Passing: Closeted Traditions and Sexual Curiosities in Harper Lee’s Novel (review)

Mockingbird Passing marks a provocative addition to the literary study of one of America’s most beloved novels. Since its publication in 1960, To Kill a Mockingbird has sold more than 30 million copies worldwide, has been translated into over forty languages, and is widely taught in schools across the United States. Its characters—the idealistic Atticus Finch, the children Scout, Jem, and Dill, and the mysterious Boo Radley—are practically household names. Noted for its compelling treatment of racial injustice and coming of age in the Depression-era South, Harper Lee’s novel also addresses themes of class differences, gender roles, loss of innocence, courage, and compassion. Despite its enduring popularity, or perhaps because of it, To Kill a Mockingbird has not received the same degree of critical attention that other important American novels have been given. Blackford helps to remedy this neglect by examining Lee’s novel within a variety of contexts, including both mainstream and alternative literary canons of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Blackford grounds her analysis in the symbolism of the Gray Ghost, the title character of the book that Atticus Finch reads to Scout at the end of To Kill a Mockingbird. The author connects the Gray Ghost, an elusive, marginalized figure that suggests “phantoms lurking in the margins,” with the notion of “passing” (7). As Mockingbird Passing defines the term, passing refers to establishing an identity that conceals the inner self so that one can function in a closed social order, such as that represented by Lee’s fictional town of Maycomb, Alabama. Blackford shows that passing has important implications for the characters in To Kill A Mockingbird, especially Scout. At the same time, she applies the idea of passing more broadly—as a direct reference to the myriad and competing canons in which Lee’s novel passes.

In the six chapters that follow the introduction, Blackford demonstrates how To Kill a Mockingbird borrows from nineteenth-century literary forms and posits these forms alongside twentieth-century modernist techniques, which results in aesthetic and philosophical tensions within the novel. Specifically, she argues that American romanticism, melodrama, and southern gothic and deadpan humor lie at the heart of the novel. Lee’s work also shares important connections with modernist novels of unstable consciousness, women’s regional writings, and queer literatures. Blackford contends that To Kill a Mockingbird’s diverse literary antecedents give it a complexity that leads readers into paradoxical responses. This may help to explain the work’s broad and lasting appeal; as the author notes, To Kill a Mockingbird “manages to hold within its pages not two years of events but over 150 years of American literary history” (5).

In the chapters devoted to nineteenth-century influences on To Kill a Mockingbird, Blackford explains how the novel and the character of Atticus Finch are embodiments of principles outlined in “The American Scholar” and related essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson. She traces Atticus’s transformation from man thinking to man reading to action and duty, emphasizing how “action and manhood are inextricably bound together” within his character (66). According to Blackford, Atticus serves as a test case for the ideologies of masculinity and action. His children presume him to be inactive, yet his rejection of violence and his perspective on courage and self-trust make Atticus a memorable and much-loved character. In Blackford’s estimation, however, To Kill a Mockingbird ultimately shows the limits of his Emersonian world-view and raises important questions about masculinity, violence, gender construction, and homosexuality. The Gray Ghost of Atticus’s reading hints at the nonwhite, female, and gay presences in the novel that he “has yet to theorize” and suggests the alternative canons that inform To Kill a Mockingbird (86).

Blackford turns to the nineteenth-century novel in her examination of black and female characters in To Kill a Mockingbird. She establishes important thematic connections with Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, identifying Pearl and...