In To Kill a Mockingbird, the author Harper Lee, uses different themes to bring a deeper level to each of the characters. Each person helps contributes to the themes through their personality traits. Harper Lee uses the themes of maturity, racism, and loss of innocence in her novel To Kill a Mockingbird. Many characters including Tom Robinson and Boo Radley, have lost their innocence to things that were out of their control. Stories and rumors are a main connection between the two characters because it is what keeps them from living the life they want too.
Society and other people’s mistakes have dictated their how they have to life their life in fear of messing up and something worse being done. For the near entirety of his life, Boo Radley has stayed locked up inside his house because of other people. They have made up rumors and stories that no one knows the truth of. Not being able to make his own decisions at such a young age, Boo was told that he had to stay inside by his father, Nathan Radley, to keep him safe of the gossip going around about him, “The doors of the Radley house were closed on weekdays as well as Sundays, and Mr. Radley’s boy was not seen again for fifteen years” (13).
A lot of the stories have been brought upon by Miss Stephanie who claimed one night when she woke up she saw him peeking in her window. From then the stories and rumors got more detailed and monster like: Inside the hose lived a malevolent phantom. People said he existed, but Jem and I had never seen him. People said he went out at night when the moon was down, and peeped in windows. … Any stealthy small crimes committed in Maycomb were his work.
Once the town was terrorized by a series of morbid nocturnal events: people’s chickens and household pets were found mutilated; although the culprit was Crazy Addie, who eventually drowned himself in Barker’s Edd, people still looked at the Radley Place, unwilling to discard their initial suspicions. (10) These stories fascinated Jem, Scout, and Dill to bring Boo out of hiding and find out who he really was. They wanted to know if the rumors were true and wanted to see who Boo Radley really was.
Tom Robinson not only lost his innocence, but also his freedom when he was found convicted of a crime he did not commit. Mayella Ewell, a young girl with a not so good home life, made up a story of Tom raping her when she was vulnerable, to cover up her father’s mistakes, but also her own. Atticus was set to defend the black man and did everything he could to reclaim his innocence: “Atticus has used every tool available to free men to save Tom Robinson, but in the secret courts of men’s hearts Atticus had no other case.
Tom was a dead man the minute Mayella Ewell opened her mouth and screamed” (244). Atticus and the crowd knew that there was no way to win this case because Tom was a black man and in the 1930s when a colored man was convicted of rape to a white woman, there was no hope to be found not guilty. Atticus tried empathy with Mayella by telling the jury: “She is the victim of cruel poverty and ignorance, but I cannot pity her: she is white. She knew full well the enormity of her offense, but because her desires were stronger than the code she was breaking, she persisted on breaking it” (273).
Atticus told the jury that Tom was innocent, but so was Mayella because she did not commit a crime, but broke one of society’s unofficial accepted laws that frowned upon different races together. Maturity is a common theme throughout the novel, To Kill a Mockingbird. Scout and Jem mature as they grow older and see another side to the world they are living in. Not only do Scout and Jem gain maturity, but they also see it in their father and how powerful it can be too people. Jem Finch, Atticus’s eldest son, matures greatly all through the novel.
In the beginning, he was 9 years, and very impressionable to all of the situations going on around him. As he wants to grow up smart like his father, he realizes that he cannot act like a child anymore and starts taking things into his own hands. All this time as he was worried about the small things, for example, sneaking around the Radley House, coming up with different plans to reel Boo out of hiding or thinking about all the things he thinks that his father cannot do because Jem thinks of him as old and not cool.
Readers start to see Jem mature as he grasps onto the question why things happen for a certain reason: “If there’s just one kind of folks, why can’t they get along with each other? If they’re all alike, why do they go out of their was to despise each other? Scout, I think I’m beginning to understand something. I think I’m beginning to understand why Boo Radley’s stayed shut up in the house all this time… it’s because he wants to stay inside” (304). Jem always thought the best of his small town. He thought they had the best people, there were no problems, and everyone got along with each other.
Coming of age, Jem finds out how wrong he is when he sees all of the racism and discrimination going on around him: “It’s like bein’ a caterpillar in a cocoon, that’s what is it,’ he said. ‘Like somethin’ asleep wrapped up in a warm place. I always thought Maycomb folks were the best folks in the world, least that’s what they seemed like” (288). As Jem grows up, he is influenced by people around him and thr problems he has to face as a perceptive, young adult. Scout Finch, Jem’s younger sister and Atticus’s daughter, also matures with every major and minor event in her life.
From going to school to watching Atticus fight Tom Robinson’s trial, she is learning to see another side of things. The major turning point to Scout’s maturity is when Atticus tells her: “”First of all,” he said, ‘if you can learn a simple trick, Scout, you’ll get along a lot better with all kinds of folks. You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view-”Sir? ”until you climb into his skin and walk around in it” (39). Scout uses this saying with everyone she comes across which shows her coming of age.
As she sits with Jem at Tom’s trial, she cannot help but notice something about Mayella: “As Tom Robinson gave his testimony, it came to me that Mayella Ewell must have been the loneliest person in the world. She was even lonelier than Boo Radley, who has not been out of his house in twenty-five years” (256). By Scout saying this, it shows just how much she has really grown up and learned to look at things from a point of view that just is not her own. Racism is a key theme in To Kill a Mockingbird because it brings a level of separation, but it also brings people together.
Calpurnia and society are major elements in racism because they show different ways of expressing it. Society has unwritten laws that keep the whites and colored separate which is the main component to Tom Robinson’s trial. Tom’s trial began when Mayella Ewell tried to convict him of raping her trying to cover her father’s actions by blaming the black man. During the trial, Atticus is able to pull together the facts of who truly committed the crime, but not the honest statement from Mayella.
He could only ask why they blamed Tom Robinson, “What did your father see in the window, the crime of rape or the best defense to do it? (251). The Ewell’s knew that Tom Robinson would be an easy target seeing as he was a strong, black man and if a black man and young white woman are involved in what is said to be a crime, the colored will always get burned because that was just how it was in the 1930s in Alabama. One white man, Dolphus Raymond, who has tried to break society’s understood rules married a black woman, is discriminated for his actions and now pretends to be someone he is not just to stop all of the stories and rumors.
He influences Jem and Scout on just how bad the racism can be in the South: “Cry about the hell people give other people – without even thinking. Cry about the hell white people give colored folks, without even stopping to think that they’re people too” (269). Mr. Dolphus Raymond wants Scout and Jem to know how separated things are, but how colored people are no different from the white folks. Racism has led to the Finch’s cook, Calpurnia, to lead a double life, one with black people and one with white people.
Scout and Jem thought Calpurnia was no different because she talked like them and was very smart and had a very good education. Little did they know that there was a whole other side to Calpurnia that they never got to see until they go with her to her community church. Even there at church, one of Calpurnia’s friends comes up to her and asks what a couple of white children are doing there and tells her that they don’t belong. The children notice how different Cal talks from the way she talks to them or even just at their house.
When the confront her on it she tells them, “Suppose you and Scout talked coloredfolks’ talk at home it’d be out of place, wouldn’t it? Now what if | talked white-folks’ talk at church, and with my neighbors? They’d think I was puttin’ on airs to beat Moses” (167). Jem and Scout still don’t see why there is such a big deal made out of it when it is just about the way she talks. Calpurnia goes into even further detail about why it is so important for her to act different around them: “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” (167). Calpurnia’s talk of racism shows Jem and Scout another side they do not get to see and brings them together by introducing them to the way the colored people do things. Harper Lee uses the themes of loss of innocence, maturity, and racism in her novel To Kill a Mockingbird.
Characters such as Tom Robinson and Boo Radley experience loss of innocence to stories and rumors made up about them. The scandals made up about Boo has kept him locked up in his house for years, afraid to face the outside world and what they have to say about him. Mayella’s lie cost a nice man his innocence and his life trying to keep her family together. The theme of maturity is brought upon many characters illustrated by Jem and Scout Finch. Jem starts to see the world a little differently by not only looking at it, but by understanding it.
Jem’s sister Scout, matures by listening to Atticus’s advice and seeing things from other people’s point of view. The last theme, racism, is a key to the novel because it shows the differences in people and how those differences can bring people together. Society’s unrecorded policies are what is breaking the town up with discrimination. The Finch’s cook, Calpurnia, is also bringing Jem and Scout into another world to show them the differences, but also making them understand it. In To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee uses many themes to connect different stories into one novel.