To Kill A Mockingbird
To Kill a Mockingbird Coursework – English
To Kill a Mockingbird is set in Maycomb County, an imaginary district in southern Alabama. The time is the early 1930’s, the years of the Great Depression when poverty and unemployment were widespread in the United States. For parts of the Deep South like Maycomb County, the Depression meant only that the bad times that had been going on for decades got a little bit worse. These rural areas had long been poor and undeveloped. Black people worked for low wages in the fields. White farmers were more likely to own land, but they were cash poor. It was common for children to go to school barefoot, and to suffer from ringworm and other diseases. Although automobiles had been around for some years, most farm families still depended on horses for transportation and to plow their fields.
Prejudice is a foggy window which we all look out of. It impairs not only sight, but also our thoughts and actions. When we look through the window, not everyone can see past the fog. Sometimes we see people and think they are our enemies when really they are just a little bit different then us, even if they a different race or even a different sex. These prejudice views are not uncommon, even though most of the time they are wrong. To Kill a Mockingbird presents many conflicting pictures of prejudice; the situations also show that prejudice can be overcome.
An example of viewing things differently is when Aunt Alexandra forbids Scout to play with Walter Cunningham, a poor boy whom Scout attends school with. This is because Aunt Alexandra sees Walter and his family as poor and beneath the Finches, in her words,"...they're good folks. But they're not our kind of folks." Scout on the other hand doesn't care about how much money Walter has but about his potential to be a friend. She doesn't let irrelevant things like money cloud her judgment of people.
The most typical of all prejudice views is that of...
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