In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Queer Children and Representative Men:Harper Lee, Racial Liberalism, and the Dilemma of To Kill a Mockingbird
  • Gregory Jay (bio)

The “American Dilemma” … is the ever-raging conflict between, on the one hand, the valuations preserved on the general plane which we shall call the “American Creed,” where the American thinks, talks, and acts under the influence of high national and Christian precepts, and, on the other hand, the valuations on specific planes of individual and group living, where personal and local interests; economic, social, and sexual jealousies; considerations of community prestige and conformity; group prejudice against particular persons or types of people; and all sorts of miscellaneous wants, impulses, and habits dominate his outlook.

Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy

Queer lives and queer feelings scribbled over but still just visible—you can half make them out in the dark.

Heather Love, “Introduction: Modernism at Night”

Both for its cultural influence and abiding popularity, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) continues to rank among the most important US novels of the twentieth century. No text since Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) commands the exalted place in the history of liberal race fiction held by Lee’s novel, and no discussion [End Page 487] of that literary history could plausibly avoid it.1 Mockingbird, however, presents an odd case, since after its publication, the author claimed that it was never primarily intended as a work of racial protest fiction. Indeed, the book’s most famous, oft-quoted lines are a generic, even platitudinous dictum about empathy, delivered early in the novel by Atticus Finch to his rebellious daughter Scout: “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view. … Until you climb into his skin and walk around in it” (39). Lee’s mega bestseller and its high-wattage 1962 film adaptation, with Gregory Peck earning an Oscar as the liberal icon Atticus, rely upon and are limited by this sentimental epistemology. In Atticus, we will see how the Southern liberalism that Lillian Smith, among others, critiqued gets rehabilitated to eventually become a model of the American Creed for whites during the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Yet his paternalism must share the front porch with the nascent feminism and counter-normative sexual politics disturbing the surface of Scout/Jean Louise’s narrative. This raising up of Atticus as the standard bearer of a nationalized US racial liberalism explains much about the book’s function in popular culture and schools, and why it would be a mistake to categorize it as only a story about the South. Peck plays Atticus almost without a Southern accent, his standard English only ornamented occasionally by a colloquialism. That eloquent performance reinforces his character’s claim to the status of representative American man, an idealized embodiment of white male normativity updated for modern liberalism but still rooted firmly in the tradition of the founding fathers and of Transcendentalism’s allegiance to higher laws.

The consensus interpretation of the novel, generally confirmed by how it has been taught in schools, focuses on the moral lesson of empathy as the cardinal virtue and urgent program of racial liberalism. Recently, this consensus has been interrupted by critical analyses of “sexual otherness” in the novel and its many sly ways of subverting gender normativity.2 Such critiques, added to those that object to the book’s white-savior plot, African-American stereotypes, and nostalgic portrayal of the segregated South suggest we should reconsider why Lee’s novel commands the influence it continues to exert. To that end, my essay explores the origins and development of Lee’s racial liberalism and places it in dialogue with the novel’s counter-normative voicings of sex/gender identity. The novel’s “destabilization of heterosexuality” leads to a crisis for the strategy of empathy, since that strategy depends on an imagined sharing of normative identity that doesn’t survive the novel’s exposure of hidden lives and queer desires (Richards 115). The ensuing confusion about how to determine the novel’s central focus challenges the long-held priority given to race in its interpretation. More generally, this [End Page...

pdf

Share