Alexandra's Comparability To A Sheet Of Glass In To Kill A Mockingbird

Aunt Alexandra’s Comparability to a Sheet of Glass

In To Kill A Mockingbird, author Harper Lee often poses the character, Aunt Alexandra, in a way that can be associated with the characteristics of a sheet of glass, due to her traditional mindset/lifestyle and her unwillingness to accept change. Aunt Alexandra lives an undoubted conventional life and has a plain thought process. She believes that everything in life should be a certain way and everyone should behave as such. When Alexandra first moves into the Finch home, she informs the children of each family’s place in Maycomb and briefly talks about the town’s social history. While simplifying her aunt’s historic spiel, Scout narrates, “There was indeed a caste system in Maycomb, but to my mind it worked this way: the older citizens, the present generation of people who had lived side by side for years and years, were utterly predictable to one another: they took for granted attitudes, character shadings, even gestures, as having been repeated in each

Scout’s understanding of Maycomb’s history reinforces the idea of Aunt Alexandra’s traditional life and her thought of everyone behaving a certain way. This quote explains how the people of Maycomb almost always follow a certain way of living that has been drawn out for them by earlier generations. It also states how predictable the citizens are to each other, hence Alexandra expecting a specific behaviour from people. To relate this idea back to the symbol, a sheet of glass is undeniably one of the most simple and traditional materials out there, just like the life of Aunt Alexandra. Glass sheets have also been used for the past five-thousand years which directly relates to the already-planned lifestyles in Maycomb, created by earlier generations. Since Aunt Alexandra has become so used to the lifestyle that she lives, she does not like and cannot accept change. She tries her best to stay clear of situations