Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird (22 page)

Although Mayella departs entirely from the novel after the courtroom scene, one of the most vivid images in the book, one that Scout returns to as she attempts to imagine what it is to be Mayella, is that of the red geraniums that Mayella (presumably) has potted in slop jars around the house. Hovet and Hovet read the geraniums as Lee's efforts to destabilize the white trash scenario. The flowers are a bit more than that, however. If we believe that Mayella is merely the product of her environment, that nothing can break through the degradation and poverty that have beaten her down in life, then how do we account for the geraniums?

Flowers in Southern literature have served multiple symbolic functions related to race, class, and gender. In her 1946 story “The Geranium,” Flannery O'Connor represents the protagonist's desire for community and connection as a geranium that sits in the tenement apartment window across from him. The geranium only assumes this significance because the narrator has been uprooted from his rural Southern origins and transplanted to the city.
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In
To Kill a Mockingbird
, the yard in which the geraniums sit is surrounded by a fence constructed of “bits of tree limbs, broomsticks and tool shafts, all tipped with rusty hammer-heads, snaggle-toothed rake heads, shovels, axes, and grubbing hoes” and littered with the broken accoutrements of the lives of the middle-class town folk—“the remains of a Model T Ford (on blocks), a discarded dentist's chair, an ancient box, . . . old shoes, worn-out table radios, picture frames” (194). The fence, capped with rusted implements of the farming life and land from which poor Southern whites had been uprooted as the result of structural economic changes, could possibly represent Mayella's acute awareness of the significance of that lost connection and rootedness in rural community.

In other words, Mayella has class consciousness. Planting the geraniums in the context of that yard is a gesture of defiance, not pretension to the middle-class respectability of the town. The geraniums, “cared for as tenderly as if they belonged to Miss Maudie Atkinson” (194), “bewilder” the town folk because they gainsay the stigmatype of white, working-class Southern women as mere laboring bodies. Mayella's planting and nurturing of the geraniums are acts of self-representation, ones that express her refusal to allow the bounds of that fence, of white, working-class Southerners as surplus to the economy of the South, to determine how she will be represented. They may also be expressions of her notion of herself as a person who has access to the sensuous, as opposed to a body that merely labors.

In “In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens,” Alice Walker figures the garden of her mother, who like many rural Southern black women in the early decades of the twentieth century served as “the mule of the world,” as nurturing of the cre
ative spirit, symbolic of the muted impulse for self-expression. Walker's work in this seminal essay in African American women's studies is to locate a genealogy that could account for African American women who would be artists despite cultural norms to the contrary. Mayella's circumstances in rural Alabama during the 1930s resonate with the experience of Walker's mother in terms of class, so those geraniums may perhaps also be read as the desire for creative expression on the part of Mayella.

Ultimately, if there is a narrative here of white working-class women's identity
,
it is one communicated by indirection, inference, silence, and symbol. Although Mayella fits into one far too familiar story of the complicity of white women in racial violence, those small elements that communicate something beyond that story are tantalizing, and highlight the different access to white privilege that working-class people and women have. The slightness of Mayella's representation, her complicity in the death of Tom Robinson, and her inability to claim an authentic voice within the novel represent significant teaching challenges, however.

4. Reading Whiteness as Marginal

Given that the novel has often been taught in the context of the history of lynching or as a coming-of-age story of the middle-class female narrator, teaching the novel with some attention to white working-class Southern identity is fraught with potential problems. Focusing on Mayella's marginal status might, for instance, serve as a first move in the historical forgetting that has become a key component of the backlash against the broadening of the canon to include marginal voices and histories such as Tom Robinson's.
To Kill a Mockingbird
is not truly a novel about Tom Robinson's life and death. It is characteristic of the novel that his trial and death are already somewhat obscured by the guilt and outrage of both Atticus and Scout, the two characters with whom the readers are most likely to sympathize. It is possible that an insistence on recovering Mayella's voice might only serve to marginalize Tom's story even further.

Then, too, there is the question of point of view and reader identification in the novel. Lee's use of first person to explore Scout's confrontations with the legal and cultural codes surrounding race, class, and gender make it much more likely that the reader will uncritically identify with Scout's perspective on the residents of Old Sarum. Although there are moments when Scout reveals her sympathy with Mayella—identifying her as perhaps the most lonely person in the world, a young woman who tried to keep herself clean, the person who nurtured those slop jars of geraniums—Scout ultimately reduces Mayella to a “thick-bodied girl accustomed to strenuous labor” (
TKAM
203). While Scout frequently identifies with outsider or grotesque figures in the novel, there is no such identification with Mayella, who seems to be part author of a terrible miscarriage of justice. That overlay of Scout's perspective would mean that a significant task of preparing the students to read the novel with attention to what Mayella represents would be to prepare students to talk about the construction of whiteness and of white working-class women's identity in the South in particular.

Nevertheless, it is only through access to such background that students can potentially gain a greater sense of what accounts for the presence of a Mayella in the world inhabited by both Scout and Tom Robinson. As fraught with racial tension and violence are the worlds of Maycomb in 1935 and the South in 1960, they are also worlds in which boundaries of race and class have already been explicitly broken, even if the results of these fractures are tragic. Many students will be reading the novel in classrooms or at least via curriculums that are explicitly multicultural in nature. The racial, gender, and class dynamics of the novel offer an opportunity to have discussions about white paternalism and white privilege that might better equip students to navigate their communities in a more conscious way, particularly in racially homogenous classrooms.

Reading analysis of the construction of whiteness in works such as Toni Morrison's
Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination
(1992) and Ruth Frankenberg's
White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness
(1993), Matt Wray's
Not Quite White: White Trash and the Boundaries of Whiteness
(mentioned earlier), Annalee Newitz and Wray's “What Is White Trash?” anthologized in
Whiteness: A Critical Reader
; Claudia Durst Johnson's
“To Kill a Mockingbird”: Threatening Boundaries
, along with her contribution to the Greenhaven Understanding Literature series, would provide invaluable resources for teaching students to think about whiteness as a construction articulated by race, class, and gender. Understanding this idea might lead students to be more aware of issues of representing the Other, particularly in the case of Scout's and Atticus' decision to speak for characters such as Mayella, given the deep class divides between the Ewells and the Finches. Students would first have to recognize the non-monolithic nature of whiteness, so brief critical excerpts from the aforementioned works might be useful in this regard. In the company of thorough discussions of
Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas
; the Emmett Till and Scottsboro cases; and the civil rights movement, such discussion might predispose students to turn a more critical eye on the ideology espoused by Atticus.

Another useful contextualizing exercise might be to bring in examples of how white Southern working-class women are represented visually. Dorothy Allison's
Two or Three Things I Know for Sure
, mentioned earlier in this essay, might prove particularly useful in this regard since she provides glosses alongside the photographs of the female members of her family. There is also a rich historical archive of pictures of Appalachian women available from sites such as the Library of Congress (http://www.loc.gov/rr/print/catalog.html), but it would be important in using these sources to emphasize the degree to which cultural representation is in the hands of the photographers.
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Analyzing these images alongside images of working-class African American women might reveal some instructive parallels as well. Students might then be capable of identifying common stereotypes of working-class Southerners—black and white, women and men—that they have encountered in film and television, of which there are numerous examples, in order to get a better sense of the stigmatypes at work in the novel.

After students have read the novel, it would be useful to include several important passages among those generally examined when discussing the novel with an eye to thinking about how they situate white identity as well, such as Scout's discussions with Atticus and her teacher about the Cunninghams (
TKAM
22–24, 33–34), and the narrator's summary of the court testimony about the living conditions of the Ewells (
TKAM
193–195 and 208). One of the more telling moments in the novel is also to be found on page 218, in which Scout compares Mayella to a “mixed child.” The teacher or professor might ask
why
Scout might see Mayella as someone more akin to a person of mixed racial descent than to Scout herself, and how this passage relates to the earlier discussion of “white trash” identity in the excerpts from the critical pieces.

To Kill a Mockingbird
has at times been censored in schools on the basis of the subtle and not so subtle racism at work in the text, particularly the use of the word
nigger
and the representation of African Americans as cardboard cutouts, passive recipients of white violence. It is difficult to imagine Southern women's literature or working-class American literature without the ability to observe the degree to which they are in dialogue with
To Kill a Mockingbird
, however. Although some would argue that the historical moment of the novel and its unfortunate racism mean that the book is no longer relevant, I would argue that the novel can help to open up a discussion about the complexities of white identity, both in the South and in the United States as a whole.

Notes

1. See “Honoring the Truth” in
The Courage to Heal
by Laura Bass and Ellen Davis, for their discussion of the backlash against their work, and chapter 8 of Janice Haaken's
Pillar of Salt: Gender, Memory, and the Perils of Looking Back
(187–197), for a critical discussion of these issues.

2. Critic Sarah Gordon, in
Flannery O'Connor: The Obedient Imagination
, figures this flower as the hold the past has on Southern identity (75), especially in the context of this protagonist's uprootedness as he finds himself isolated and alienated in New York, living with his daughter.

3. See chapter 4 of Katherine Henninger's
Ordering the Façade: Photography and Southern Women's Writing
, for a discussion of the way photography reinforces power structures that privilege the male gaze.

Works Cited

Allison, Dorothy.
Two or Three Things I Know for Sure.
New York: Dutton, 1995. Print.

Bass, Laura, and Ellen Davis. “Honoring the Truth.” In
The Courage to Heal
. New York: Harper, 1994. (187–197)

Doyle, Robert P. “Books Challenged and Banned, 2008–09.” American Library Association. Web.

Frankenberg, Ruth.
White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness
. Minneapolis: U Minnesota P, 1993.

Gordon, Sarah.
Flannery O'Connor: The Obedient Imagination
. Athens: U Georgia P, 2000.

Haaken, Janice.
Pillar of Salt: Gender, Memory, and the Perils of Looking Back
. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers U P, 1998.

Henninger, Katherine.
Ordering the Façade: Photography and Southern Women's Writing
. Chapel Hill: U North Carolina P, 2007.

Hovet, Theodore, and Grace-Ann Hovet. “‘Fine Fancy Gentlemen' and ‘Yappy Folk': Contending Voices in
To Kill a Mockingbird
.”
Southern Quarterly
40.1 (2001): 67–78. Print.

Jay, Gregory with Sandra Elaine Jones. “Whiteness Studies and the Multicultural Classroom.”
MELUS
30.2 (Summer 2005): 99–121. Print.

Johnson, Claudia Durst.
To Kill a Mockingbird: Threatening Boundaries
. Twayne Masterwork series 139. New York: Twayne, 1994.

Morrison, Toni.
Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination
. Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard U P, 1992.

O'Connor, Flannery.
Collected Works:
Wise Blood / A Good Man Is Hard to Find / The Violent Bear It Away / Everything that Rises Must Converge / Essays & Letters
. New York: Library of America/Penguin Putnam, 1988: 107–113. Print.

Walker, Alice.
In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose.
Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 1983. Print.

Wray, Matt.
Not Quite White: White Trash and the Boundaries of Whiteness.
Durham: Duke U P, 2006. Print.