It is important to notice that later on in the novel we begin to sympathise more with Aunt Alexandra. She loves her brother and remains loyal to him in spite of her prejudice gainst his opinions. When he returns home from his defeat in the trial she greets him with the words: “I’m sorry, brother.” We notice that she does have some redeeming features, such as blaming herself for the attack on Jem and Scout, and the dignity and self-control she shows when she returns to the tea party after learning about Tom’s death. In this last instance Scout even follows her example.
We can compare this to the behaviour of Randolph. Randolph is an upper-class citizen who has been brought up being tutored in private school and having all of his needs catered for. We learn that Randolph is a selfish person when he forbade his mother from remarrying to Sam. He is more concerned with his own position in the world and how people see him, than his mother’s happiness. Sophy longs to marry Sam but cannot because her son has made her swear that she will not marry Sam without his consent. It is ironic that the son of a vicar, who should be generous and “christian”, should not let his mother be happy. He is too proud and too interested in appearances. He is ashamed of his mother’s working class language, which is why he corrects her speech, because he fears that it will reflect badly on him.
The book was written in the ……. And so women were not given as much equality to men as they have in “To Kill a Mockingird”. Sophy is not the head of the house when the vicar dies, her son Randolph is. Sophy is of a working class so this would not give her much respect from other people, and the fact that she is a woman would not give her as much respect if she were a man. If she was a working class man she would be head of the house, not her son. In The Son’s Veto we see a symathetic view of Sophy and the reader feels as though she is fighting a battle which she has no hope of winning, the battle of her happiness against her son’s appearance. She led a dreary life after the vicar had died. She had no friends and she knew that she would have to keep up the façade of living as a “lady” in the house he had arranged for her. Even after his death she still obeyed the wishes of her husband. She allows Randolph to be the head of the house after his father’s death, this will be because she is of a higher class than she is, even though he is her son, he has his fathers upper class blood in him, where as Sophy has working class blood and has been brought up that way.
Mrs Dubose appears very briefly in the novel, just after Atticus has been teaching the children not to harm mockingbirds. Scout and Jem hate her because she hurls insults at them and has a vicious way of speaking. Even thought Atticus told Jem to ignore her and behave in a gentlemanly way towards her, when she has a go at insulting Atticus for defending Tom Robinson, it becomes too much for Jem to bear. He gets very angry at her and his punishment is to read to her for a month. When Mrs Dubose dies we learn that she has been a morphine addict, determined to beat her addiction before she died, and Jem reading to her hs helped her to give up some of the morphine. Atticus says that she was the “bravest person I ever knew.”
She was determined to give up a drug which lessened her pain, and Atticus tells the children that this is an example of real courage, far more than a man with a gun in his hand. The real purpose of Mrs Dubose in the novel is to teach the children the true meaning of courage.
I think that Sophy needed courage. With being brought up in a poor family she would have been looked down on and she would have been made to think that she wasn’t as good as other people, which is not true. If she had more courage and respect for herself she would have married Sam because it was what she wanted to do, no matter what people thought and if Randolph had more courage he might have tried to explain to his friends that his mother’s happiness is more important than the tiny narrow minded views that his “friends” would have of him.
