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CHApter 3 MOCKINGBIRD And modernIst metHod: cHiLd conscioUsness, or HoW scoUT kneW stowe’s novel is characterized by an omniscient victorian narrator overtly in control of the story’s presentation. Like a stage director, she invites us to revisit certain characters, tells us she will leave certain others to their activities for awhile, and pleads directly for our sympathies in a passionate second address, in the fashion of susanna rowson’s Charlotte Temple. The narrator cuts from one scene to another and directly addresses the reader about why and what point the reader is to take away from the tragic stories the narrator is relating. over time, as robyn Warhol discusses, the narrator’s tendency to “break the frame” of fiction was considered crass and disruptive to a text’s realism, especially if breaking the frame for didactic purposes. Louisa May alcott’s self-conscious frame-breaking in Little Women is tolerated because the story is autobiographical and thus the narrator is usually perceived as an adult Jo, gently mocking herself and her sisters. in contrast, Hawthorne’s selfscrutinyasanartistandnarratortakestheformof “Thecustom-House”sketch in front of The Scarlet Letter, separated from the fiction itself and advancing thoughts about technique rather than social purpose. With Henry James, the fashion for showing over telling was solidified, although the convention of second-person address never fully died out in children’s literature. With modernism, human consciousness became a subject in its own right. Mockingbird not only puts consciousness in its artistic center, but also sketches an impressionist portrait of a child’s mind. “What happens to the artist’s consciousness,” dave writes of Mockingbird, “is more important than the actual happening itself” (51). scout engages in the “long habit of spectatorship” that readers will recognize as the influence of Henry James’s Maisie. further, the consciousness of the child becomes an artistic mask behind which stands a comic artist whom readers of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn should recognize. With James and Twain came an entirely new form of narration. even as the narrator speaking directly to the reader went out of fashion, a new 132 Mockingbird and Modernist Method experimentation with point of view arose with the incarnation of child consciousness in the american novel. The view from a child would be limited and unique, naive and ironic as needed, and, without overt didacticism or disruption to a text’s aesthetic space, it would teach readers a wide variety of things. child focalization would show readers not only what we know, but how we come to know what we know. it would be an exercise in the uncovering of human cognition. child consciousness had the advantage of showing response to and conditioning of environment, thereby exploring the possibilities and limits of social change, given that change must take root in the young human mind. in short, the representation of child consciousness in american literature would put forth a view of epistemology. Mockingbird is effectively co-narrated by an older scout, looking back on the events and her younger self, and a younger scout, filtering the events through her consciousness, sometimes objectively and sometimes with a misplaced or skewed emphasis. The two different scouts come to the foreground at different times and thus Lee tightly controls our experience of various scenes. The two scouts have a relationship; the older scout offers self-mockery on the younger scout, which gives us permission to laugh at the young scout’s feelings and concerns. The character (as opposed to the thoughts) of the young scout is revealed more in interactions with others, particularly in action and dialogue, adding a third layer to the mix—how others actually view scout and how discourse situations define her. Lee carefully controls which scouts are in the foreground in different scenes, depending on whether she wants us to be distanced from the event or immediately engaged by it (see Wyile). some of the early reviewers felt that vacillation in point of view was a technical flaw in the novel. in his biography of Lee, charles shields reviews the criticism launched at Lee for switching between narrator and focalizer: “W. J. stuckey, in The Pulitzer Prize Novels: A Critical Backward Look, attributed Lee’s ‘rhetorical trick’ to a failure to solve ‘the technical problems raised by her story and whenever she gets into difficulties with one point of view, she switches to the other’” (qtd. in shields 128). shields agrees that Lee might have “floundered” since she wrote the original...

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