Summer Reading Essay: Topic Five The Great Depression’s claws elicits the worst or the best in people within the sleepy town of Maycomb, Alabama in Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird. The book takes place in a small town in the South during the Great Depression. The novel’s main event is the trial of a black man, Tom Robinson, who is accused of brutally beating and raping a young, white woman, Mayella Ewell. Lee mainly writes to the small-minded people of Maycomb. In To Kill A Mockingbird, Harper Lee highlights the country setting of Maycomb to establish values within the novel. The setting of the book lends itself to providing many racially-driven biases and stereotypes. The first implicit bias a reader notices is the automatic trust many of the white characters place within Mayella’s version of events. Most of them do not realize that they play into supporting the systematic oppression of one …show more content…
Being in the South, one can assume there will be a set of of characters who speak like a stereotypical redneck. Those characters are typically the ones whose families have been hit hard by the Depression since they are already poor, even before the Depression begins. An example of how they speak is: ‘“I told’ja I hollered’n’kicked’fought一”’(250). This set of characters, such as the Ewells, speak with a informal and casual type of diction. In juxtaposition, Scout has a eloquent vocabulary, even from a young age. The most likely cause of that is that her father, Atticus, is a highly educated man. He uses an extremely tactful, crisp and cultured diction that isolates him from many of the characters, especially the main group of clients he works with. Lastly, the diction of the black characters closely resembles that of the Ewells. These characters have an uneducated dialect, partly because of the poor access to education and social standing in their setting. conclusion