Social Standings In To Kill A Mockingbird

The novel ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ by Harper Lee, contains many hard hitting and confronting themes. One of these is social prejudice, throughout this novel Lee opens the reader’s eyes to how life was in the small town of ‘Maycomb’ in 1930, including the towns folk ideas and ideals about specific groups of people. How there is perceived ideas about families, giving them certain ‘social standings’. The fact that there is blind prejudice and sometimes hatred against Negroes and those who choose their company. As well as how children seem to have an innocence, before society’s pressure conforms them to their ideals.
Lee gives many examples of how ‘social standings’ affect people interactions in daily life. “why not Aunty? They’re good folks… Jean Lousie, there is no doubt in my mind they’re good folks. But they’re not our kind of folks” (247), even when people are liked by others, they are still seen unfit to be in their company unless “on business”. This is a topic

Negroes have their own church the ‘First Purchase African M.E.’, they have their own neighbourhood and only have jobs within white houses or cotton fields etc. Lee uses the grammar of their speech to show how they’re less educated. She also shows us through Scout, why even when they do know how to talk ‘properly’, they don’t around other Negroes. “why do you talk nigger-talk to the – to your folks, when you know it’s not right?... ‘Suppose you… talked coloured-folks talk at home- it’d be out of place… if I talk white-folks talk at church and with my neighbours?... folks don’t like somebody around knowin’ more than they do” (139). Calpurnia has been taught how to read and write with proper English dictation and then taught her own child, but Lee shows us that Calpurnia knows, that other Negroes need to want to learn and until they do, she shouldn’t ‘act better’ than them, just because of what she