Places In To Kill a Mockingbird Essay

To Kill a Mockingbird is set in Maycomb County, an imaginary district in southern Alabama. The time is the early 1930s, the years of the Great Depression when poverty and unemployment were widespread in the United States. For parts of the deep South like Maycomb County, the Depression meant only that the bad times that had been going on for decades got a little bit worse. These rural areas had long been poor and undeveloped. Scout, through whose eyes the story is narrated, presents Depression-era Maycomb as†an old tired town†, describing the slow pace of life (â€Å"There was no hurry, for there was nowhere to go, nothing to buy and no money to buy it with, nothing to see outside the boundaries of Maycomb County†). As the problem of segregation is in the center of the novel it stands to reason if one takes into account that the action takes place in the South, namely in Alabama where segregation battles were especially fierce. In a way the novel is a coming-of-age story about southern culture as it took its steps toward emerging from its racist past. We can also trace the change of describing the setting. During the first half of Mockingbird Harper Lee constructs a sweet and affectionate portrait of growing up in the vanished world of small town Alabama..   Lee, however, proceeds to undermine her portrayal of small town gentility during the second half of the book.   Lee dismantles the sweet faà §ade to reveal a rotten, rural underside filled with social lies, prejudice, and ignorance. In my opinion, Scout, one of the main characters in the novel, is a dynamic one. At the beginning of the novel, Scout is an innocent, good-hearted five-year-old child who has no experience with the evils of the world. As the novel progresses, Scout has her first contact with evil in the form of racial prejudice, and the basic development of her character is governed by the question of whether she will emerge from that contact with her conscience and optimism intact or whether she will be bruised, hurt, or destroyed like Boo Radley and Tom Robinson. Thanks to Atticus’s wisdom, Scout learns that though humanity has a great capacity for evil, it also has a great capacity for good, and that the evil can often be mitigated if one approaches others with an outlook of sympathy and understanding. Scout’s development into a person capable of assuming that outlook marks the culmination of the novel and indicates that, whatever evil she encounters, she will retain her conscience without becoming cynical or jaded. Though she is still a child at the end of the book, Scout’s perspective on life develops from that of an innocent child into that of a near grown-up. Six-year-old Jean Louise â€Å"Scout† is a joyful, vigorous and defiant girl. Her appearance and manners are boyish. She works hard not to â€Å"act like a girl† by wearing overalls instead of dresses and beating up other children who antagonize her. Extremely smart and bright for her age, Scout loves to read. For example, Scout manages to keep out of fights until Christmas day, when her least favorite cousin calls Atticus a â€Å"nigger-lover,† and she responds by punching him. Or Though Scout is young and impressionable, she becomes a spokesperson for her entire class, interacting with the adult teacher comfortably; this shows that though a child, she is more grown-up than some of her peers. Scout spends her days playing outside with her older brother, Jem, and her best friend, Dill. Spunky and head strong, Scout often finds herself in trouble with her father, her housekeeper, Calpurnia, her neighbors, her aunt Alexandra, and her teachers.   Despite the rules of etiquette governing life in her small town, Scout voices her opinions and recognizes hypocrisy and injustice in her elders. As the novel progresses, the children’s changing attitude toward Boo Radley is an important measurement of her development from innocence toward a grown-up moral perspective. At the beginning of the book, he is merely a source of childhood superstition. In saving Jem and Scout from Bob Ewell, Boo proves the ultimate symbol of good.