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To Kill A Mockingbird Escapism Essay

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Escapism is defined as employing a series of distraction or ignorance strategies as a coping mechanism to avoid an unpleasant reality. To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee illustrates the story of Scout’s role as a citizen of Maycomb County, and how her life seems to unravel as important and traumatic events occur. This essay explores how Scout perceives the world, and how her environment and family have greatly influenced her views, for better or for worse. In To Kill A Mockingbird, Scout does not yet understand how to develop a view of the world. She has been taught by Atticus to be blinded by the opaque rose colored glasses that have been taped in front of her eyes. But by reading “Good Bones” by Maggie Smith, Scout will learn that her father isn’t someone to …show more content…

Secondly, Scouts should learn the importance of developing their own independent views on her surroundings and herself. She should also learn the importance of keeping her optimistic view balanced with reality, a tactic many characters in the book tend to struggle with. While escapism can sometimes serve as a form of reverie and aid mental health, the cases depicted in the book demonstrate the opposite effect. Throughout the entirety of To Kill A Mockingbird, Harper Lee, while perhaps unintentionally, shows the effects of toxic positivity and the escapism of reality through unhealthy coping mechanisms for the trauma experienced. Scouts do not understand how the world works. Her worldview is extremely limited, with a naivety and blindness to the world around her. With Atticus Finch’s sheltering of her and Jem, she knows no life other than one based on the points of view of a narrow group of her family and a few friends, who use euphemisms to blunt the sharpness of the world around her. In the poem Good Bones, Smith writes, “I am trying to sell them to the world,” (Smith

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Unlike Jem, she is not nearly as impervious to prevalent biases present in her community. They constantly interfere with her thoughts on her peers and it shows. When Walter Cunningham, a classmate of Scout’s from a less wealthy (and less privileged, one might argue) family joins them for dinner, she gives no thought to Walter’s value and deduces it as close to none, insisting that “He ain’t company, Cal, he’s just a Cunningham” (Lee 33), no doubt as a result of uneducated surrounding authority figures, such as the undeniably ignorant Miss Caroline. Furthermore, Scout quickly succumbed to the primitive fables behind Boo Radley. Her point of view, which is of the likes that “Boo Radley drove the scissors into his parent’s leg” (Lee 13), has been distorted by rumors of the Radley family borne of nothing more than childish boredom and the lack of palpable

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