Influenced by Over a Century of American Literature

Holly Blackford’s epigraph, a passage from T. S. Eliot’s 1920 “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” asserts a principle of both aesthetic and historical criticism: a new work of literature must be judged within the context of the canon its author aspires to enter, set “for contrast and comparison, among the dead.” Its admission then revises, to some degree, our interpretation of predecessor works: “The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered” (n. pag.; emphasis in original). With remarkable stinginess, Eliot fails to illustrate his argument with specific examples; he proceeds instead to minimize the role of the author’s personality in the creation of the work, and to steer readers away from the pursuit of curious details in the author’s personal life. But Blackford generously illustrates Eliot’s abstract argument. Her study of To Kill a Mockingbird is Janus-faced: What evidence exists in Lee’s novel that her predecessors influenced her, and how does attention to that influence alert us to features perhaps previously hidden in both her work and theirs? From the nineteenth century, Emerson, Whitman, Stowe, Twain, James, and Chopin are all shown to have influenced Harper Lee; twentieth-century authors examined include Wharton, Capote, and McCullers. Rather than make sweeping generalizations about thematic concerns, Black-ford identifies similarities in narrative strategies, plot complications, and character motivations. Mockingbird Passing demonstrates that To Kill a Mockingbird “manages to hold within its pages not two years of events [1933–35] but over 150 years of American literary history” (5).

Blackford’s full title must be sorted out. When Ann Rinaldi’s novel Wolf by the Ears detailed the identity confusion anticipated by Harriet Hemings, the daughter of Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson, if she were to leave Monticello and “pass” as a white woman, the implications seemed straightforward: she would abandon her past as a white man’s property who shared in slave culture and was excluded from white culture. Presumably, in her new life away from Monticello her former identity would be disguised, and internal conflicts regarding her allegiance—to either her past or her present self—inevitable. Rinaldi affirms, though, that Harriet’s skin color, her physical appearance, will allow her to pass. When applied to the characters in To Kill a Mockingbird, the term’s meaning, by necessity, enlarges beyond the implications of racial passing: “it is the acquisition of any social role through which one feels that the complexity of the self is not fulfilled” (40). Scout, Dill, Boo, and Calpurnia are the chief examples illustrating the challenges to passing from one culture or one social role to another. When questioned by Jem and Scout after their attendance at her First Purchase Church service, Cal justifies her efforts to pass from membership in her African American church, where her language patterns shift to suit her audience, to her role as the Finch family maternal presence. She speaks to the children with admirable self-insight but does not complain of being unfulfilled. Scout, Dill, and Boo neither achieve such self-insight nor overtly express unease that their true selves remain unfulfilled. Blackford, a suspicious reader, examines why their complex true identities divert into conventional courses or are stifled.

The subtitle’s “closeted” reference applies most prominently to the depiction of these three characters. Many readers of Blackford’s study may be taken aback by her claim that Lee’s novel “can be interpreted politically or personally—in the sexual journeys of Scout and Dill” (79). To some extent, Whitman’s 1859 poem “A Child’s Reminiscence” (revised as his 1871 “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking”), which features a boy artist’s sensitive response to an Alabama mockingbird singing about its deceased mate, “seems,” Blackford states, to have influenced Lee. If we identify Lee’s mockingbird with Tom Robinson, unjustly sentenced and then killed on the...