Mockingbird, Watchman, and the Adolescent

In 2012, bowker Market Research released the results of a two-year study on reading trends in the young adult literature (YAL) market (McLean and Kulo).¹ While the number of teen readers of YAL continues to rise, the study did not anticipate the growing number of adult readers (ages eighteen to fifty-four) of YAL. In fact, around seventy-three percent of YAL readers belong to the adult reader category,² buying YAL for personal enjoyment about seventy-eight to ninety-four percent of the time (McLean and Kulo, slides 36, 37).³ YAL can be defined as literature about, written for, written by, or marketed to adolescent readers.⁴ Similarly, YAL often incorporates literature of adolescence, or literature that may feature an adolescent protagonist although the work was not originally written as YAL.⁵ Often, literature for adolescents is marketed to adolescents within libraries or the secondary education classroom, regardless of the author's original intent or the character's age. For example, in March of 2017, The Balance assured readers that "the Young Adult market is thriving" while simultaneously listing Harper Lee's 1960 novel To Kill a Mockingbird as an exemplar of YAL, though historically it is considered southern or American literature. Leslie Fiedler claims that literature about adolescence is fundamental to American literature more broadly. In fact, Fiedler insists that American literature is marked by male protagonists' "retreat to nature and childhood which makes our literature (and life!) so charmingly and infuriatingly 'boyish'" (xxi).⁶ Ironically, Lee's 2015 novel Go Set a Watchman prompted critics to turn to questions of adolescence and childhood in To Kill a Mockingbird.⁷ Until recently, most criticism of Mockingbird involved readings of Lee's work that focus on race and race theory; gender and sexuality; historical authenticity and ideologies; pedagogical implications of the novel; or legal analyses of Atticus Finch, all to the exclusion of childhood or adolescent studies.⁸

The coalescence of literature of adolescence with YAL is a noteworthy literary development for two reasons: (1) the high adult readership of YAL suggests that adolescence is no longer an easily identifiable category of age, and (2) the blended classification of YAL with literature of adolescence suggests that Mockingbird no longer qualifies as merely southern literature. Instead, Mockingbird helps position adolescence and childhood as the connecting bridge between southern literature and YAL genres. Additionally, reading southern canonical texts, like Mockingbird, in terms of YAL or adolescence(ts) provides a new point of orientation for southern literary studies more broadly.⁹ Petrone et al. propose using a "Youth Lens" (YL) to interrogate constructions of adolescence(ts) in YAL particularly and in literature generally. The YL is "the idea that adolescence is a construct, that adolescence does not represent a universal experience for all youth, that conceptions of adolescence have material consequences, and that adolescence often functions metaphorically in ideological ways" (508).¹⁰ Using the YL equips readers to witness the ramifications and "material consequences" of assuming an adult-normative perspective about adolescence(ts) in works of YAL or southern literature (509).¹¹

Additionally, traditional discourse has overlooked how the figure of the child "works to establish race as a central shaping element of ostensibly raceless Western ideals" in US rhetoric (Levander 3). The child stabilizes racial hierarchy, defines belonging, and merges the notion of the self with the culture so that the nation appropriates the idea of the child to regulate racialized conceptions of the self and community (4-5). Racism becomes naturalized through the represented child, who "links slavery to black bodies and liberty to white ones in order to found the nation and then reinforce its organizing racial ideals as it eradicates slavery" (33). In discourse theory, James Paul Gee dubs this naturalized representation of ideas, concepts, or images as a "figured world," or internalized cultural model that is deployed to navigate, experience, and order social situations and give meaning to those social interactions (95). For Gee, "figured worlds" help deconstruct, naturalize, and order social situations in ways that work for or against internalized cultural models. Katherine Henninger contends that Mockingbird...