The girl who despised being called a “girl”: Scout Finch and the issue of gender in To Kill a Mockingbird

Abstract

Told through the eyes of the rebellious and witty Jean Louis Finch (nicknames Scout), To Kill a Mockingbird develops the coming-of-age journey of this six-year-old girl who lives in the fictional town of Maycomb (Alabama) with her elder brother Jem and their father Atticus, an honorable attorney who struggles to prove the innocence of a black man unfairly accused of raping of a young white woman (Mayella Ewell), while at the same time confronting racial prejudices and taking care of his children with the help of Calpurnia, the black housekeeper. Most scholars have centered their attention on the novel’s racial, legal and ethical themes. However, Scout’s defiance of the conventional gender stereotypes within the prejudicial Maycomb’s society deserves further in-depth examination. Robert Mulligan’s 1962 film adaptation can help in this. This project will consist of a comparative analysis between the main female characters of Harper Lee’s novel To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) and Robert Mulligan’s film adaptation (1962), focusing on Scout Finch, Calpurnia, and Mayella Ewell and on the social and racial aspects that separate the three of them. The aims of this research will be, firstly, to shed light on the potential difficulties that arise when adapting literary works to film, and secondly, to understand what being a woman in a man’s world entailed, according to Lee, in the context of Southern patriarchal society in the USA during the years of the Great Depression (1930s). Gender inequality should not be studied as exclusively dependent on sex. My work will include a critical overview of those factors such as race and social status that may interact with gender as a ground for discrimination