State Of Maturity In To Kill A Mockingbird By Harper Lee

Just as people grow in the real world, characters in a bildungsroman do the same. A bildungsroman is a book where a character goes from a state of relative immaturity to a state of maturity. Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird is a bildungsroman about two kids named Jem and Scout who lived during the Great Depression. They have a father named Atticus Finch who is a lawyer; he was appointed to defend a black man who is falsely accused of rape. As the novel progresses, the increasing maturity of Scout is pinpointed by the experiences she endures. In the bildungsroman To Kill a Mockingbird, Scout goes from a state of relative immaturity to a state of maturity. Scout learns to not lash out at people and learns what it really means to be a lady. In

If she were not so ignorant, she would have thought better of this obscene description that Jem provided her with. Later on in the chapter, Jem dared to touch Boo’s house. He runs up to the door, slaps it, and runs back to where Dill and Scout are standing. They all turned to look at the house: “But as we stared back down the street we thought we saw an inside shutter move. Flick. A tiny, almost invisible movement, and the house was still.” (Lee 16) In Scout’s mind, she thinks this a scary, mysterious event that she shouldn’t have seen. Playing this shutter movement off as scary makes Scout blind to the perspective of Boo because if she had thought about it, he was just looking to see who hit his house. Along with believing the movement in the house was scary, it is also rude to slam on someone’s house. Scout and the other kids believe this is okay because they do not think of Boo as a person with feelings and emotions, but a malevolent phantom that dines on raw squirrels. As the story continues, Scout begins to humanize Boo. Scout asks Dill “‘Why [he reckons] Boo Radley’s never run off?”’(Lee 163) Scout starts to think about Boo’s situation and his