“Walter hasn’t got a quarter at home to bring you,
and you can’t use any stove wood.”
Scout’s motives were good but the way she explained the plight insulted and abashed Walter Cunningham, which is why he did not appreciate Scout’s efforts to get him out of trouble. When she claimed that Miss Caroline was “shamin’ him,” she did not realise that she herself was actually “shamin’ him” as well. The problem was finally resolved when Jem broke up their fight in the playground and invited Walter around to their house for dinner as a way of saying sorry. When they arrived at the house, and Walter met Atticus, Jem and Scout’s father, Scout was very surprised that “Walter and Atticus talked together like two adults”. She did not understand why her father was treating this poor boy with the respect he usually reserved for adults. She thinks this way because she is prejudice towards poor people and thinks that the more money you have better you are as a person. She shows this clearly when she gets into an argument with her black maid Calpurnia and shouts:
“He ain’t company Cal, he’s just a Cunningham.”
Scout later learns that this is not the right way to think about people because they should not be judged by their wealth but rather by what there are like on the inside. After the argument, Calpurnia dismisses Scout from the table and shouts at her:
“Yo’ folks might be better’n the Cunninghams but it don’t
count for nothing the way you’re disgracin’ ‘em”.
This displays Calpurnia’s understandings of Scout’s faults and Scout realises, even though she is still frustrated, that it is unfair to judge people on their social status.
Scout has not yet learnt how to keep her bad feelings about other people to herself and this is a disadvantage to anybody when they get older. Atticus wants his children to learn how to control themselves and to show patience towards other people. The incident between Jem and Mrs Dubose was a good teaching point. After Jem lost his temper and “cut the tops off every camellia bush” in Mrs Dubose’s garden, his punishment was to go and read to Mrs Dubose every day for a month. Scout also accompanied him. Throughout the punishment Mrs Dubose showed a lot of aggression and anger, insulting Atticus and even Scout to her face, saying things like:
“So, you brought that dirty little sister of yours.”
Following the first day, Scout and Jem are very unhappy but after a while start to ignore Mrs Dubose’s comments and realise that an insult is not a big deal and Jem even “cultivated an expression” that he would show Mrs Dubose whenever she came up with one of her “blood-curdling inventions”. Scout learns how to keep her patience, and not always to react confrontationally, showing that she can manage to control her temper and change the way she thinks about things. She never really understood why Mrs Dubose was so rude and had a face that was “the colour of a dirty pillow case” but, after getting to know her better, Scout discovers that Mrs Dubose is a morphine addict. Mrs Dubose would take the drug, under the supervision of a doctor, so that she would die painlessly. However, when she decided that she wanted to “die free”, she decided to beat her addiction. Scout then realised that Mrs Dubose was always grumpy because she is in pain and that being prejudice towards a poor lady was a big mistake because she did not recognise the situation Mrs Dubose was in.
Racism also plays a very big part in To Kill a Mockingbird. At the time that Harper Lee wrote the book, the Civil Rights Movement was taking place in America, and black people were trying to gain equality in the so called “United” States of America. This historical event influenced Harper Lee and resulted in her mentioning the racial segregation that was apparent in Maycomb County. Maycomb is set in the Deep South if the United States, where there is racial tension as a result of the Civil War, in which the southern states of America wanted to keep slavery, but the northern States wanted to abolish it. Even though the north won, and slavery was abolished, black and white people still lived separate lives, and rarely intermingled with each other. The racial prejudice in Maycomb could have the most lethal effect on certain citizens. Before the scene in which Calpurnia takes Jem and Scout to her church, Scout is not fully aware it is not only black people who are being discriminated against, but there are some black people who are prejudiced against white people too. When they enter the church, everyone welcomes but then they meet Lula, a black woman who believes that white people have “got their church”, and Scout and Jem have “no business” in hers. Lula feels as if she is being challenged by the presence of “white folk” because they do not belong in her church and she wants them out.. she fails to realise, however, that it is not her church but the community’s and that they all worship “the same God”. Scout and Jem already know this though, and finally realise and understand that prejudice and discrimination is not just carried out by white people. They learn that black people also make mistakes and treat people unfairly. Scout is gradually learning to look at things from more than one point of view and is starting to get a better perspective of the discrimination going on in her hometown of Maycomb.
Tom Robinson’s trial is the centre point of the novel; it is what the whole story builds up to. Just before the verdict is presented, Scout realises how hopeless the case is due to prejudice.
“I saw something only a lawyer’s child could be expected
to see, could be expected to watch out for, and it was like
watching Atticus walk out into the street, raise a rifle to his soulder
and pull the trigger, but watching all the time knowing the gun was empty.”
Scout finally understands from all the things she has learned over the two years, what her father meant when he told her that he would not have been able to hold his head up if he did not take the Tom Robinson case. She learns that even though he knew he could not win the trial, he had to put his principles before his desire to win and take the case. Had he not done so, Atticus would not have been able to feel good about himself because he would be going against everything he believed in concerning equal rights.
After the verdict is read out, Scout sees how unjust society can be simply because it allows its mind to be infected by the pollution of racism. Scout understands this because she is not prejudice against black people, largely because of her father’s influence. She learns that happy endings are not always the case: the trial opens Scout’s eyes and allows her to see the world as it really is.
One of the final things that Scout learns in the novel is that things are not always as they seem. Boo Radley was known as a “malevolent phantom”. He was believed to be six and a half feet tall and was known to eat squirrels and cats. Scout, being naïve and gullible, believed all of the town gossip. She only learned at the end of the novel that Boo was not a bad person, simply a social outcast. This became clear to her when she realised that it was Boo who saved her and Jem on the way back from the schoolhouse. Had Boo Radley not been there, Mr Ewell might have killed both Jem and Scout. It then dawned on her that the only reason all the rumours about Boo were so malicious was because he was different and, because they could not explain him, they feared him. This is similar to the situation Scout found herself in with Dolphus Raymond. He was a white man who married a black woman and fathered mixed race children. This was deemed unacceptable behaviour by Maycomb standards and therefore Dolphus pretended to be a drunk. In that way the people of Maycomb had an excuse for him marrying a black woman. Scout only realises why he pretends to be drunk when she finds out that he just sips Coca-Cola all day. She then starts to feel some sympathy for the people who are victims of racial and social prejudice.
After learning about Boo Radley and Dolphus Raymond, Scout learns not to believe everything she hears.
All of these factors have, in their own way, influenced the development of Scout’s ethics and have shown how they affect her, along with how she reacts to them.
