How Does Lee Use Light In To Kill A Mockingbird

There is a reason that happiness and safety is coupled with light, but Harper Lee mirrors dark with menace and sin. Urging her audience to anticipate a relationship between these varying shades of illumination and her purposeful use of “crowds,” Lee parallels mood-setting chiaroscuro with coincidentally ominous “crowds” in chapter 15 of To Kill a Mockingbird. Lee, with utter finesse, commands the characters (and audience’s) genuine bewilderment. Although many people initially think of crowds as “a large number of people gathered together,” Rodger Brown, the author of “Mass Phenomena,” convinced the population that crowds branch out into two categories: mobs (active), and audiences (passive). This classification may explain Lee’s intentional

After the initial encounter with the harmless audience, Scout, Jem and Dill deemed it permissible to trudge into the middle of a crowd of drunken men, otherwise known as the “Old Sarum Bunch.” Though in this encounter, the children did not enforce the mood of worry by “turning off the lights” (as Jem did with the audience); this time it came with the crowd. Lee described the men as “shadows” and Scout claimed that she “pushed my way through dark smelly bodies.” Rodger Brown described mobs as four categories (expressive, acquisitive, escape, aggressive) which ultimately branched into different directions- terrorizations and riots, specifically. In this scenario, the Old Sarum Bunch was a group of men who intended to torment (terrorize) Atticus’s Negro defendant, Tom Robinson. By using descriptive expression such as dark and shadows, which relate to an ominous mood, the reader and the characters were able to feel a sensation of trouble surrounding the mob; coincidentally, when Scout entered the only light in the area (which, mind you, Atticus brought with him), she was able to deter any crimes from happening, therefore creating a area of security and satisfaction. Without her use of light and dark, Harper Lee’s intended theme and mood would have never been as thoroughly conveyed as it was necessary in order to understand the type of crowd that the characters were dealing