Telling Children's Stories: Narrative Theory and Children's Literature

9. Uncle Tom Melodrama with a Modern Point of View: Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird

165 9 { Uncle Tom Melodrama with a Modern Point of View Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird holly blackford It’s not necessary to tell all you know. It’s not ladylike—in the second place, folks don’t like to have somebody around knowin’ more than they do. It aggravates ’em. You’re not gonna change any of them by talkin’ right, they’ve got to want to learn themselves, and when they don’t want to learn there’s nothing you can do but keep your mouth shut or talk their language. —calpurnia, in To Kill a Mockingbird Because of Harper Lee’s carefully controlled narrative strategy, young readers feel a great sense of pleasure and accomplishment when reading To Kill a Mockingbird. My recent interview project involving sixty-eight readers of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and To Kill a Mockingbird reveals that teens speak of being able to laugh at Scout’s childishness and at their own past selves through her, yet they enjoy the feelings of suspense generated by her unusual combination of objectivity and local color. They proudly speak of how they have to figure out matters for themselves , “feeling through Scout,” as one fifteen-year-old African American reader describes it. The scenes of the lynch mob, Cal- 166 } Uncle Tom Melodrama purnia’s church, and the trial are universally acknowledged by readers as scenes in which Scout does not understand the significance of events, and thus “through her not understanding, it kind of helps you understand” (fifteen-year-old Lisa), because “you have to figure things out for yourself.” Lisa compares Scout’s style to someone who might be able to describe an apple without knowing the word for it, thus using “an outsider’s perspective” on its shape, color, and texture, “whereas an insider would look at it just like an apple.” Why is To Kill a Mockingbird so accessible, and why do young readers feel such a sense of mastery when they “figure out” the trial and relate its theme of exclusion to the presumed otherness of Boo Radley? The answer is the novel’s unique blend of two literary traditions: popular melodrama, which defines the trial, and sophisticated modern narration, which controls the reader’s experience before and after the trial. Published just over a century prior to Lee’s 1960 To Kill a Mockingbird , Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin is an important intertext to Lee’s novel of social reform. Stowe’s tropes inform Lee’s use of racial melodrama. Like Uncle Tom’s Cabin, To Kill a Mockingbird features the crucifixion of a virtuous and innocent African American character named Tom. In melodramatic fashion Lee depicts this persecution as the fall of the black family and home, calls upon us to restore Christian ethics and combat the sin of white law, equates evil with lower-class characters who refuse domestic order and live beyond the boundaries of civilization, and yet admits that these lowly characters are merely scapegoats for what the law encodes. As Linda Williams writes in Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O. J. Simpson, Stowe’s protest novel almost immediately became a touchstone for Victorian melodrama on the stage, and it certainly became a framework by which all subsequent racial melodrama on stage, screen, and television would be understood. However, while Stowe tells her story with a masterful and judgmental omniscient narrator, Lee deploys the multivoiced narration of Scout, invoking a different literary tradition: that of the modern, alienated narrator, a type of narrator born of Holly Blackford { 167 authors who were reacting against the secure and stable narrative conventions of the Victorian novel. The younger Scout’s consciousness focalizes the story, but she neither perceives the melodrama in a conventional manner nor allows us to rest satisfied with the heroic deeds of her father, who, like Stowe’s narrator , in effect crusades for justice and pleads for universal rights directly with the reader. In trial fiction, Carol Clover argues, the reader becomes a juror. The character Scout becomes our naive eyewitness to the melodramatic persecution of the innocent and even disabled Tom Robinson. But the intrusive presence of an older narrating Scout in scenes before and after the trial tightly controls our experience of the story, tempering our relationship with young Scout and providing a southern critique of melodrama. The...