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Breaking Social Norms In To Kill A Mockingbird

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Breaking Social Norms In To Kill A Mockingbird In To Kill A Mockingbird, written by Harper Lee, Lee depicts the main character Scout Finch as the primary feminist who defies social norms despite several influences in Maycomb County. Scout displays her feminist qualities throughout several occurrences in the novel. She continues to stay true to herself and fights for how she desires to act, while occasionally experimenting with her femininity. Ultimately, Scout overcomes the social norms placed upon women when she punches Francis in the face, picks a fight with Cecil Jacobs and chooses to spend most of her time playing with Jem and Dill. First and foremost, Scout escapes the restrictions imposed upon women by continuing to play with Jem and Dill instead of indulging herself in learning how to cook or drinking tea with other women. Although she will sometimes sit with Calpurnia in the kitchen and drink tea with her aunt …show more content…

At school, Scout nearly starts a fight with a classmate named Cecil Jacobs after he declares that her “daddy defends niggers” (Lee, 74). Scout being too young to fully understand this statement automatically denies it. Atticus, who has been asked to defend Tom Robinson, a black man accused of raping a white woman has received many controversial remarks on his take of the case. Although Scout does not initiate the fight with Cecil, her “fists [a]re clenched and [she is] ready to let [them] fly” (Lee, 74). This depicts another one of Scout’s un-ladylike reactions because the ladylike response would be to simply ignore the boy and to remain prim and proper. In spite of Scout’s inability to fully comprehend the significance of what Atticus is doing for Tom, she readies herself to defend Atticus, which ultimately portrays that she does not regard society’s expectations on how she should

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Would you rather do the right thing and be alienated by your community for being different or do what everyone tells you to do and regret it for the rest of your life. In Harper Lee's novel To Kill a Mockingbird, a story about coming of age and the loss of innocence, we dive into the mind of a young woman by the name of Scout Finch. Scout is different from the people of her small town of Maycomb, located in the state of Alabama in the two decades following the First World War. Scout is a oddity in the town, as well as the era in general, with a mind that chooses to see what others in the town choose to turn their eyes away from. In the story we follow the three main themes of naivety, hypocrisy and alienation.

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To Kill a Mockingbird Essay Harper Lee’s Book To Kill a Mockingbird has had a lot of controversies over the years. This is because of the many different themes it covers in the book. The novel is narrated by a little girl named Jean Louise Finch, also known as Scout. Scout is driven, mature, and wise for her age. There is a lot of changes that happen throughout the book for the community and also the children in the book because of what their father is doing.

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Many individuals within To Kill A Mockingbird are able to identify him as innocent of beating and raping Mayella Ewell based on the abundant supply of sufficient evidence in his favor. Yet the inhabitants of Maycomb cannot allow a colored man’s word to be held above that of a white man. Through Atticus’ choice to defend Tom Robinson, doing so to the best of his ability, the Finch family is even subjected to verbal brutality and the name of “nigger-lovers.” Atticus explains to Scout that it is “just one of those terms that don’t mean anything” (107) but simply something “slipped into usage with some people like ourselves, when they want a common, ugly term to label somebody” (107). Others feared being labeled as such which was one of the reasons Tom Robinson was a sacrificial lamb for themselves.

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