Gender Construction in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird

Abstract

Published in 1960, just before the peak of the American Civil Rights Movement and the Women’s Movements, Harper Lee’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel To Kill a Mockingbird endeavors to bring about an attitudinal change among the readers, by exploding the traditional stereotypes of gender. Subverting hierarchies, Lee (1926-2016) creates a new strata of society based on the human worth of people. She suggests that individuals must be allowed to develop their own sense of self, without regard to rigid definitions of gender and social roles. She advocates empathy and stresses the need for humaneness in group co-operation.

In this article, Lee’s novel is examined, against the insights provided by social psychologists like Myers; bildungsroman critics like Jerome Hamilton Buckley, Marianne Hirsch, Pin-chia Feng; and human right advocates in the field of literature like Joseph R. Slaughter.

Lee's novel portrays the childhood experiences of Jean Louise Finch (Scout), during the Great Depression years in a racist society. Located in Maycomb, a fictional town in Southern Alabama in the 1930s, the novel deals with the experience of growing up as a female in the South, with its very narrow definitions of gender roles and acceptable behavior. Looking beyond the binary hierarchies, Lee presents the gender issue from both etic (cultural outsider) and emic (cultural insider) perspectives, to use the terms from anthropology.