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

Ostensibly a single-book study, Holly Blackford's Mockingbird Passing engages the intellectual, social, political, and literary heritage of Harper Lee's novel, illuminating meaning in the texts that inform To Kill a Mockingbird (1960). Blackford enters a growing and active discussion of Lee's novel within queer studies, but its value is certainly not limited to that field or to understanding this important novel. Blackford's analysis offers useful insight into many different nineteenth- and twentieth-century texts and their cultural contexts and will be of interest to scholars of American studies, narrative theory, childhood and girlhood, masculinity and gender, identity and passing, and whiteness studies.

Blackford begins her study at the end of the novel, with Atticus Finch reading The Gray Ghost, a gothic melodrama passed from the closeted "curiosity" Dill to Jem, a young imitation of his gentleman father, and finally to Atticus. Reading the book aloud to his sleepy daughter Scout opens him to the fluid, emotional, irrational, and often frightening, worldview of the children, full of gray areas for which his philosophy cannot account. Atticus, Blackford argues, represents Ralph Waldo Emerson's man thinking, one who studies nature and books, one who is active and has faith in the many in the one; the characters in Mockingbird comment on the transparency and oneness of Atticus, who is the same in private and public. But the "alternative canons" that Blackford highlights in this study of intertextuality in Lee's novel demonstrate that it is only a privileged few who may be so consistent (86). Those more identified with their bodies—including women, African Americans, and homosexuals—must learn to speak different languages and wear different identities for different audiences.

These acts of passing are the subject of Blackford's analysis, and she suggests, the primary subject of To Kill a Mockingbird, a book that has gained almost unanimous acceptance in public school curricula by itself passing as something much simpler than it is: racial melodrama. Blackford analyzes, as other critics have, how Mockingbird revises Harriet Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), providing an accessible and predictable script that relies on clear moral stances and the passionate sympathy of readers for the victims of tragic injustice. Adding another layer to this reading, Blackford draws connections to Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter (1850) to emphasize a pattern of "feral daughters"—Pearl, Topsy, and Scout—who must develop the skills of passing as a way of contending with their fathers' legacies within the larger environments in which they were born (89).

Two central chapters, as valuable to scholars of Mark Twain and Henry James as they are to those studying Mockingbird, trace the beginnings of developmental psychology from Charles Darwin through Sigmund Freud and then show how a growing understanding of childhood as a point of inquiry influences the narration of Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) and James's What Maisie Knew (1897). Blackford identifies frequent shifts in the narrative voice of Mockingbird, from Huck's deadpan comedy (when Scout describes her comfortable everyday life) to Maisie's stream-of-consciousness impressions (when Scout is overwhelmed by troubling aspects of the adult world). The child's story is punctuated by intrusions from the adult consciousness of an older Scout that takes an almost scholarly approach to recording, framing, and interpreting what young Scout cannot understand. As she develops these chapters on the multivocal narrator, able to shift language from high to low, serious to comic, mature to childlike, analytical to impressionistic, Blackford effectively supports her premise that Lee's novel is engaged in passing. Lee's command of social and intellectual discourses of the nineteenth century through the 1930s and into the 1950s allows her to shift language and narrative perspectives constantly to evoke the desired response of the reader and to appeal to a broad range of audiences, including children and adults.

In her final two chapters...