There are phrases you hear so often that they begin to lose their meaning.

The words
become part of a series, like "bite the dust" or "have a blast." The title of Harper Lee's
1960 classic To Kill a Mockingbird is like that for me, despite its profound impact on the
way I think about the world.

The first time I read To Kill a Mockingbird was as a student in the 8th grade. Memories are
tricky, but as I recall we never talked about the title, or much else, in the book. The most
memorable assignment my teacher gave us was to watch the 1962 film version on one of the
local television stations. I suppose my teacher believed that watching someone else's vision
of the book was safer than having us talk about the issues of race, class, discrimination, and
justice it might raise during the heyday of desegregation battles in neighboring Boston.

Despite my teacher's neglect, To Kill a Mockingbird stuck with me. At first I noticed it in
small ways: Walking home from friends’ houses in the gloaming I'd pass a yard filled with
junk or overgrown grass, and I'd just know that Boo Radley lived there. I had to speed up.

As I got older and learned more, different scenes stuck. Scout confronting the lynch mob.
Scout and Atticus on the porch talking about the upcoming trial. Jem’s outrage after the
verdict. As a reader, I came to appreciate the dual narrative of Tom Robinson and Boo
Radley, and how it lent itself to reflections on both the universal and the particular ways
we think about race and the “other.” One thing, however, continued to elude me: the
book’s title. 

I've read that To Kill a Mockingbird wasn't Harper Lee's first choice. Originally she called
the book Atticus. I'm happy she didn't stick with that one. I always found the kids in the
book far more interesting. SparkNotes, an online study site, explains, "The title of To Kill a
Mockingbird has very little literal connection to the plot, but it carries a great deal of
symbolic weight in the book. In this story of innocents destroyed by evil, the 'mockingbird'
comes to represent the idea of innocence. Thus, to kill a mockingbird is to destroy
innocence."

The longest quotation about the book's title appears in Chapter 10, when Scout explains:

"'Remember it's a sin to kill a mockingbird.' That was the only time I ever heard Atticus say it
was a sin to do something, and I asked Miss Maudie about it.
'Your father's right,' she said. 'Mockingbirds don't do one thing but make music for us to
enjoy…but sing their hearts out for us. That's why it's a sin to kill a mockingbird."

So, who is the symbolic mockingbird? Later in the book, Scout explains to Atticus that
hurting their reclusive neighbor Boo Radley would be "sort of like shootin' a
mockingbird." Mockingbirds are not the only birds in the book. Finch, the last name of
Scout, Jem, and Atticus, is a small bird. Like mockingbirds, they are also songbirds.

Is Tom Robinson, the black man accused of sexually assaulting a white woman, a bird as
well? While Tom is innocent, I do not think of him as having the same innocence as the
children or Boo. As a black man in depression-era Alabama, I'm sure Tom could teach me
quite a bit. Sadly, we don't learn that much about his life beyond the trial. Critics have said
Lee did not give the book's black characters enough agency or backstory. I hope Tom
wasn't meant to be the mockingbird Miss Maudie describes to Scout because, consciously
or subconsciously, her words evoke old black mistral stereotypes depicting African
Americans as happy-go-lucky and singing a song without a care in the world. The Tom I
imagine isn't a stereotype. He lives a full life. I wonder what he might tell us that our
narrator, young Scout, does not know.

When I think of To Kill a Mockingbird, the bird that comes to mind is not a mockingbird at
all. It is the proverbial canary in the coal mine (another one of those phrases we don't think
about very much). The treatment of Tom and Boo as they face the spoken and unspoken
dictates of Maycomb gives life to the stock image of the canary. These two canaries expose
the fragility of democracy when prejudice, myth, and misinformation go unchecked.

In the years since its publication, the title "To Kill a Mockingbird" has developed a
meaning that goes beyond its internal logic. For many readers, the book and its characters
live with them as intimates. The story offers a reflection point for the moral dilemmas we
face in our own lives. As if to prove the point, a colleague recently brought me a bumper
sticker that makes me smile every time I think about it. It asks, "What would Scout do?"

Otherness is a really important aspect in this book. As we hear about Tom Robinson and
Boo Radley, we understand that they aren't like the rest of the characters. They have a
sense of difference that no one else possesses and it is really crucial to the story line of the
book because, although they are different, they are the two characters who weren't afraid
of themselves. 
ONE OF THE CENTRAL THEMES IN HARPER LEE'S TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD is
the quest to understand the relationships among people and groups of people. This paper
examines the search for identity and the obstacles to it through the framework of the
Panopticon and the Other that Michel Foucault sets forth in Discipline and Punish: The
Birth of the Prison. In To Kill a Mockingbird: Threatening Boundaries, Claudia Durst
Johnson explores the "Other" in Lee's novel: the work "invites the conclusion that we
reach some sense of self-identity by our encounters with other forces, that is, with forces
alien to our commonplace lives. As a result of these encounters, we break the cultural and
psychological barriers that imprison us and come to embrace a larger world" (72). The
children, still learning the rules of society and their own places in it, find their alien forces
in social outcasts and people of other classes. The sense of the Other is apparent in the
social development of Scout and Jem, in class, face, and gender prejudices and even in the
children's fascination with Arthur "Boo" Radley. Z. D. Gurevitch argues that the
awareness of others and their differences from us awakens our realization of our own
uniqueness (1180). To Kill a Mockingbird is a coming-of-age novel in which Jem and Scout
Finch begin to understand themselves. To gain this self-awareness, however, Scout and Jem
must first understand the community around them and the Others within it. But Lee's
novel might be read not only as a coming-of-age tale but also as an illustration of
Foucault's Panopticon as a model for today's society. Such a reading ultimately challenges
the concept that the Panopticon is an infallible design of repression from which no one can
escape, at least not without severe repercussions.

The Other is that with which one contrasts oneself. Children like Scout and Jem develop
their own personalities and find their places in society by copying the behavior of people in
similar social positions, by learning social norms associated with particular socioeconomic
classes, and by learning to identify the Other. Scout and Jem learn the behavior society
expects of them through the behavior both of those who are of their own class--such as Miss
Maudie, Atticus, Uncle Jack, and even Aunt Alexandra--and of those Others, like Tom
Robinson, the Cunninghams, Calpurnia, "Boo" Radley, and the Ewells. The interplay
among various Others establishes for the children the rules of acceptable behavior and
interaction with Others and demonstrates the consequences of not adhering to the
guidelines of their own group (or "section" in the Panopticon).
In Discipline and Punish, Foucault elaborates Jeremy Bentham's concept of the
Panopticon, applying this design to all aspects of social life. Bentham designed a circular
prison comprised of two main structures: a central watchtower encircled by a building
"divided into cells, each of which extends the whole width of the building; they have two
windows, one on the inside, corresponding to the windows of the tower; the other, on the
outside, allows light to cross the cell from one end to the other" (Foucault 200). The
prisoners would thus be separated from each other and prevented from communicating
among themselves; their movements would be always entirely exposed to the guards (200-
01), however. Foucault notes that this design "assures the automatic functioning of power"
by arranging for the visibility of the vestiges of power (the inmates can see the watchtower
even if not the watchman) and the unverifiability of that power: the inmates are never
certain whether they are being watched, only that they maybe watched (201). Foucault
envisions an extension of the Panopticon into the daily lives of ordinary people (205) by
which "the vigilance of intersecting gazes" replaces the guard in her watchtower (217).
Panopticism, according to Foucault, can be imposed on the basic workings of society to
create "a society penetrated through and through with disciplinary mechanisms" (208).
While Maycomb is not as totalitarian as Foucault's society under the Panopticon, the rural
Alabama town is nevertheless marked by strict class and race boundaries, and social
position mandates proper behavior. The "disciplinary mechanisms" penetrating
Maycomb's society include both the devices of physical torture--lynch mobs and stacked
juries for blacks particularly--and of social ostracism for both black and white. Johnson
calls the novel "a tale about a variety of boundaries--those of race, region, time, class, sex,
tradition, and code" (31).

Through the Panopticon, the Other is identified and separated from the self, and social
mores and the perception of constant judgment reinforce stratifications in society. By
applying the Panopticon to the whole of society, one might understand each of the cells
within the Panopticon to contain a single social group. This arrangement would prevent
social groups from mingling with or understanding each other. Such divisions would be
maintained by social mores; by the prisoners themselves, who would not encourage
intermingling for fear of changing the status quo or of being observed in socially
unacceptable behavior; and by the perception that one is always being watched by the
other members of one's group and by the other groups. In such an application, the
watchtower of Bentham's design would be merely an illusion. In reality, the functioning of
the Panopticon within society does not require the presence of an observer, only the
perception of that presence. As Foucault writes, "A real subjection is born mechanically
from a fictitious relation" (202).

From their own experiences with Calpurnia and from the way their neighbors treat black
servants and respond to Bob Ewell's accusation of Tom Robinson the Finch children learn
that black people are of a different and lower class from themselves--that they are Other.
From Atticus, who tells her that the Ewells "were people, but, they lived like animals" (37)
and from her first grade teacher, who expresses "sheer horror" at finding lice on Burris
Ewell (32), Scout learns that the Ewells are dirty and trashy and are therefore also to be
looked down upon. Aunt Alexandra tells Scout that she is not to be friends with Walter
Cunningham because "they're not our kind of folks" (236). Similarly, she urges Scout and
Jem to remember that they "are not from run-of-themill people, that [they] are the product
of several generations' gentlebreeding" (143). To understand what makes the other people
different from themselves, Jem and Scout try to work out a definition for the
"background" that the Others around them lack. In defining this background the children
are attempting to figure out what about their own ancestors is distinctive from the
ancestors of their neighbors. The children try to define themselves through an
understanding of that which they are not, the ways in which they and their family are
different.

Jem divides his neighbors into four categories to better understand and explain their
behavior and his own. Jem's and Scout's categorization of themselves helps the reader
apply the basis of the Panopticon to the social workings of the children's hometown. Jem
and Scout find themselves in a "wing" of the Panopticon with Atticus, Aunt Alexandra,
Miss Maudie, Mrs. Dubose, and their other close neighbors. This wing is further divided
into subsections by age and gender. Tom Robinson, Calpurnia, Reverend Sykes, Lula, and
the rest of the black community compose a second wing, similarly subdivided. A third wing
consists of people of the Cunninghams' class, honest and hard-working, but poor and
possibly ignorant country folk. The final wing in Jem's division of Maycomb's society is
populated by the Ewells--poor white trash. Jem's account of the groups of Maycomb's
society does not provide for Boo Radley or Mr. Dolphus Raymond. Both men are outcasts
in their society, and both rebel in small ways against their society. Boo and Mr. Dolphus
Raymond have both struggled against and left the cells into which they were born only to
find themselves in a new cell: that of the outcast; the Other. The two men demonstrate the
nature of the Panopticon's reaction against those who reject it--there seems to be no escape
from the prison of society. Because he sees the Panopticon, Boo avoids society; in this way
he allows society and the Panopticon to influence his behavior. Dolphus Raymond
understands that he has committed a grave social sin in leaving his natural place in the
Panopticon, and to mitigate his sin, he feigns drunkenness, "to give 'em a reason," because
he knows that the people of Maycomb "could never, never understand that I live like I do
because that's the way I want to live" (213). Raymond can evade the control of society in
one area of his life, bur to do so he must conform to the altered expectations of the society.
Because Raymond knows that Maycomb could not accept the love of a black woman as his
preference, to achieve this end without arousing hostility he affects an inability to rationally
rank and pursue preferences. Thus Raymond, like Boo Radley, allows society and the
Panopticon some limited control over his behavior.

In this arrangement the members of a group are held in their own wing and subsection by
the perception that they are being watched and judged by others and by the fear of
becoming an outsider. Members of one group who reach out to members of another group
will be pushed out of the system altogether or dealt with harshly within the system. Not
only Boo and Dolphus Raymond bur also Atticus, Scout, Calpurnia, and Tom Robinson
demonstrate this.

The community tolerates Atticus's compassionate treatment of the Cunninghams because

the social mores between their two classes are not so prohibitive for men conducting
business. When Scout wants to be friends with Walter Cunningham and invite him to
dinner, however, Aunt Alexandra immediately interferes. Aunt Alexandra does not protest
her brother's professional kindness toward the Cunninghams, but she does not allow her
niece's relationship with Walter Cunningham to develop beyond politeness. Scout's attempt
to befriend Walter Cunningham is only one of several small ways in which she tries to
resist her place in the Panopticon; her attempts to defy the sub-division of "lady" also elicit
frequent rebukes and chastisements from Aunt Alexandra, Calpurnia, and Mrs. Dubose.
Atticus reaches out to the black community by actually defending Tom Robinson; for this
he must accept the censure of his neighbors, allowing his children to be ridiculed and
harassed by their peers and by adults. Mrs. Dubose taunts the children by telling them
their father is "no better than the niggers and trash he works for" (110). Miss Stephanie
Crawford delights in telling Scout and Jem when Bob Ewell spits in Atticus's face (230).
Yet, while his neighbors might disapprove of Atticus's willingness to represent Tom
Robinson, few of them are openly hostile towards the Finch family. They realize that while
Atticus wants to provide Tom with fair representation, he will not violate the cultural
norms against discussing relevant issues of incest and a white woman's sexual desires. Had
Atticus questioned Mayella's story more thoroughly in his defense of Tom, he might have
faced more repercussions than the public outcry he did experience. Johnson notes Notre
Dame law professor Thomas Shaffer's contention that

Atticus's devotion to the truth and gentleness got in the way of

his defense of Tom Robinson. Had he been less of a gentleman, his

cross-examination of Mayella Ewell may well have been more

effective in revealing, for example, the father-daughter incest.

Had he been less devoted to the truth, Atticus might have left

unsaid or unexplored truths that were guaranteed to enrage the jury

against Robinson, such as the sexual nature of Mayella's

advances. (26)

Atticus's "devotion to the truth and his gentleness," therefore, according to Shaffer,
prevent him from fighting harder to save the life of the innocent Tom Robinson. But this
perspective on Atticus's reasons for not challenging Mayella's story or revealing her
incestuous relationship with her father ignores the intense prejudices of the time and place
of the novel.

The people of 1930s Maycomb, like those of Scottsboro, Alabama, where occurred the case
on which many readers have suggested Lee based her novel, would not have tolerated a
challenge to the reputation of a white woman accusing a black man of rape. (1) The
attorney in the second Scottsboro trial (both a New Yorker and a Jew) was clearly an
Other to the Alabama people, but although Atticus was one of their own, the white society
of Maycomb was nonetheless angered by his defense of Tom. Had Atticus defied the basic
tenet of white Southern society that demanded the maintenance at all costs of the myth of
the purity of Southern womanhood his fellow townspeople would doubtless have turned
entirely against him and his client. Thus, it is not so much Atticus's "devotion to the truth
and gentleness" that inhibits his defense of Tom as it is his understanding of his own
society. Later, when he learns that Boo Radley is responsible for the death of Bob Ewell,
Atticus is able to set his ethical code aside to spare Boo the publicity that would come with
being at the center of an inquiry into the killing. When he sees that a higher good will be
served by his actions, Atticus is willing to set aside his ethical code and his love of the truth.
Thus it is not for ethical reasons that Atticus does not call Mayella's reputation and sexual
desires into question during Tom Robinson's trial, bur because he fears that to do so would
challenge the cherished misconception of Southern white womanhood and enrage the all-
white jury. Atticus knows that angering the jury could cause Tom more harm than good.

As Atticus can set aside his ethical code to spare Boo bur cannot ignore the code to free
Tom Robinson, so Calpurnia can circumvent certain rules governing interactions between
the races for the sake of the white children she has raised but cannot bypass these rules for
any lesser cause. Lula, a member of Calpurnia's church, sharply criticizes Calpurnia for
ignoring caste boundaries by bringing white children to her black church and by referring
to them as her "comp'ny" (129). But in bringing to her church the two children to whom
she is all but a mother, Calpurnia defies the boundaries of her section within the
Panopticon even as she refuses to violate other norms such as language: on their visit to the
black church Scout and Jem notice that Calpurnia "was talking like the rest of them"
(129). When they ask Calpurnia why she speaks differently at church than she does with
them she explains that if she spoke at church and at home the way she speaks at the
Finches' her neighbors "would think I was puttin' on airs to beat Moses" (136). Calpurnia
knows that her neighbors would resent and reject a black woman who spoke "white-folks'
talk" (136). She knows exactly which social norms of her class she can cross and which she
must respect.

In contrast to the breaches of social ethics discussed thus far, Tom Robinson's challenge to
the Panopticon is ultimately dangerous. Tom, convicted of rape, locked in the (de facto)
segregated Maycomb jail, and killed by prison guards for his attempt to escape, is the only
character who manages to overcome entirely the boundaries and restrictions of the
Panopticon. Tom's claim that he felt sorry for Mayella elicited the contempt and rage of the
white prosecutor and jurors and his assertion that Mayella instigated the intercourse
between the two challenged the most cherished beliefs of the white population of Maycomb.
In feeling pity for Mayella Ewell, a white woman (though the daughter of an abusive and
alcoholic father), Tom abandons the social mores that dictate that by virtue of her race
Mayella should never be an object of pity by a black man. By these rules, Mayella's race
should have made Tom see her social position as superior to his own. By admitting that he
does not, Tom challenges the idea of racial superiority that the prosecutor and jurors hold
dear.

Tom treats Mayella with both kindness and respect bur his sympathy for her enables her to
coerce him into a compromising situation while the color of her skin allows her to make
him a scapegoat for her own sexual transgressions. Tom's pity and the racial hierarchy of
the 1930s South enable Mayella to scapegoat Tom with impunity. Mayella cannot safely
admit the nature, or even existence, of her attraction to Tom. And the society in which the
two live will not acknowledge the possibility of a black man's pity for the plight of a poor,
lonely, abused white woman any more than it will acknowledge the possibility that a white
woman might actually seek out a black man to satisfy her sexual or emotional needs.
Acquitting Tom would undermine the myth of the purity of Southern white womanhood
and the idea that the (light) color of a person's skin makes her an object of envy in the eyes
of another person.

Because by admitting the pity he felt for Mayella Tom has presented such a strong
challenge to their position in society, the white jury feels compelled to convict Tom even
though the evidence does not support his guilt. To preserve a social structure that places
whites in a position where they are, if not on top, at least not on the bottom of society, the
jury composed solely of white males must convict Tom--not because he is guilty of rape but
because he is guilty of breaking free of the Panopticon and others may follow his example if
he is not harshly punished.

Atticus, Scout, Calpurnia, and Tom Robinson all challenge the status quo and the rules
that divide classes, and consequently they all face the criticism of their peers and friends.
Lula, Aunt Alexandra, Mrs. Dubose, Miss Stephanie Crawford, the ladies' Missionary
Society, and the mob that attempts to lynch Tom Robinson represent the social watchdogs
who reinforce those restrictions by identifying and censuring those who violate the social
system that, for all its abuses, is valuable to them. Mrs. Dubose may merely be a cross old
woman, Miss Crawford may only be a busybody, and Lula is justifiably outraged at the
prejudice and discrimination her face faces at the hands of its white oppressors, but all of
these women are strict enforcers of the Panopticon in which they live. Mrs. Dubose is
appalled that an upper class white man like Atticus would be willing to defend a black man
on a rape charge even if that black man is innocent. Miss Crawford delights in spreading
gossip of any violation of the social mores. Lula is outraged at the idea of the black
church's sanctity being invaded and jeopardized by white children, and Aunt Alexandra is
inflexible in her insistence that Scout and Jem act according to their class and social
position. The ladies of the Missionary Society meeting at the Finch home claim to believe
that Eleanor Roosevelt has "lost her mind--just plain lost her mind coming down to
Birmingham and tryin' to sit with 'em" (247) and, in his own home, they disparage
Atticus's decision to defend a black man against trumped-up charges; they call him "good,
but misguided" (245). The lynch mob tries to kill Tom to send a message to other black
men (or women) who might try to change the social order that sets whites above and out of
reach of blacks. These defenders of the Panopticon all recognize the social structure in
which they live and they all do their part, whether intentionally or not, to perpetuate that
structure.

Although Aunt Alexandra's beliefs differ from those of her brother, she is bound by family
ties, which convention tells her are supreme. While many of the same mores, or Panopticon
divisions, that confine the other ladies of the Missionary Society also confine Aunt
Alexandra, her respect for her brother Atticus also binds her. This respect for Atticus
allows her to share a bond with Miss Maudie during the Missionary Society social hour
even though the two women are ordinarily separated by their different beliefs on issues of
propriety. The "look of pure gratitude" that her aunt gives Miss Maudie to thank her for
standing up to the ladies of the Society when they criticize Atticus for defending Tom and
thereby encouraging the town's black population to resist white domination confuses Scout
(246). Aunt Alexandra respects her brother and Miss Maudie and she recognizes their
goodness, but she cannot understand them or her niece and nephew.

The sense of the Other is apparent and relevant also in the children's fascination with Boo
Radley. Boo--because he is so different from the children and their neighbors and because
nothing they know of can explain his behavior--is fascinating to Jem and Scout. Z. D.
Gurevitch explains that the Other "serves to demarcate, by his or her very strangeness, the
boundaries of the familiar and (in that sense) of the real" (1180). The children want
desperately to understand Boo and his reasons for staying inside long past his father's
death. Through Boo and the contrast between his behavior and their own, the children
learn to define themselves in contrast to his Otherness. Although Boo does leave his home
occasionally, he does so only with the utmost secrecy. The children see Boo's isolation and,
in the wake of Tom Robinson's trial and sentencing, begin to understand why Boo remains
isolated from society. Jem realizes that Boo does not want to be associated with people and
their misunderstandings, their social norms and rules, and their prejudices (240). At the
trial's end Jem contemplates Boo's rejection of society and decides that such rejection is not
for him. Jem understands Boo's behavior, but be also realizes that Boo is the Other to
himself and his community. Through Boo and Dolphus Raymond, the children learn that
there is an alternative to their particular cells in the Panopticon, but that alternative comes
at the price of social ostracization and is not available to everyone.

Jem understands that, as Scout puts it, "there's just one kind of folks," bur he also
understands that people set themselves apart for reasons that he recognizes to be petty and
artificial (240). Jem does not want to be part of a society of people who, as he tells Scout,
"go out of their way to despise each other" (240) but he seems, from Scout's reference in
the novel's first pages to a recent conversation with the adult Jem (9), to remain in this
society, perhaps because he does not want to be as isolated as Boo or Dolphus Raymond.
Through Boo and their quest to understand him and why he stays shut up inside, the
children come to understand more of their own society, the society that created Boo by
ignoring the abuse to which his father subjected him.

Scout and Jem also see the farce Dolphus Raymond stages for the people of Maycomb and
the ways he is cut off from much of society. Scout is intrigued by the idea that Raymond
pretends to be drunk so that his decision to live in the black community instead of with
those of his own race and class will not offend or confuse the white people of Maycomb, but
she begins to comprehend that so long as the white community believes that he is an
alcoholic troubled by the memory of his lost (white) fiancee, it will tolerate his living with
the black family he loves. Scout observes further that the ability to separate one's self from
society in the ways that Raymond and Boo do is restricted to certain people. At Tom
Robinson's trial, Scout realizes that the option of changing one's status in society (or in the
Panopticon) is not available to poor whites like Mayella Ewell and blacks like Robinson.
Scout may also begin to understand--from what she sees of the way her neighbors and
family react to Boo and Raymond--that to change one's place in the Panopticon is to
appear less than sane and rational.

As Scout comes to understand that Mayella Ewell cannot cut herself off from society in the
ways that Boo and Raymond have, she (like Robinson) comes to pity Mayella. Scout
realizes how lonely Mayella's life is and that, unlike Raymond, Mayella does not have the
resources for the sort of social mobility that is open to wealthier whites. Scout observes of
Mayella, "She couldn't live like Mr. Dolphus Raymond, who preferred the company of
Negroes, because she didn't own a riverbank and she wasn't from a fine old family. Nobody
said, 'That's just their way' about the Ewells" (204). Despite her young age, Scout is able to
see that the boundaries of one's behavior are determined by one's class and resources.

The children long to understand Boo and the reasons for his seclusion because they
recognize in him and his story something exciting, mysterious, romantic, even strange; they
see in him the Other--that against which they are defined and that which they could
become. They long to understand what social forces created Boo, and in discerning those
forces the Finch children come to better understand their own society and to recognize in it
the forces and mores that pushed Boo into isolation. In the opening passages of the novel,
Scout relates a debate between herself and Jem over where this story began. According to
Scout, Jem believes the events of the novel began when Dill came in to their lives and
incited their curiosity about Boo. Scout counters that the story could just as easily have
begun when their ancestors chose to settle in Maycomb (9). Both are correct. Maycomb is
essential to the development of events in the story because of its position as a small and
isolated town in southern Alabama. Situated in the heart of the segregation-era South,
Maycomb is a prime location for the unfolding of the stories of Tom Robinson, Boo Radley,
and Dolphus Raymond. In rebelling against the society of Maycomb all three men, like the
children, are shaped by that society, its mores and prejudices. Jem is correct in his
assessment that Dill's fascination with Boo set the story in motion as it was through their
eventual understanding of him that the children reached a higher level of emotional
maturity and a deeper understanding of their society and their places in that society. In
Jem's view, Boo serves as the catalyst for understanding and challenging the Panopticon.
Through Boo, Scout and Jem are able to see flaws in society that run deeper than the
simple problems they face as children, social ills that allow a community to witness
passively and thus allow the abuse that Boo faced and that Mayella still faces, that allow a
society to, in effect, kill Tom Robinson or any other innocent man to protect their own
prejudices. Through Boo they also see the redeeming qualities of their society more clearly.
They see the compassion of the neighbors who treat Boo not as a novelty but as a man and
a neighbor. They witness both their father's brave defense of a man he knows will be
convicted and Mr. Underwood's willingness to put aside his own racial prejudices and
watch over Atticus the night that Atticus stands between Tom and a lynch mob in the
interest of fair play. Through Boo, Scout and Jem come to understand that all people are
essentially alike--as Scout explains to her brother: "Naw, Jem, I think there's just one kind
of folks. Folks" (240).