To Kill A Mockingbird: Class Prejudice

Many novels of the past hold powerful themes that could be influential. The memorable novels Alice In Wonderland by Lewis Carroll and Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë share some of the themes one would see in the novel To Kill A Mockingbird. The novel To Kill A Mockingbird shows the different prejudices in the 1930’s by apprising small stories that are leading up to the main plot and is about a six year old girl named Scout Finch who matured in many different ways throughout the story. Scout grew up in the bigoted town of Maycomb, Alabama with very discriminatory and prejudiced people yet, she believed that all of the people in Maycomb were kind-hearted and could do no wrong, except the Ewell’s. She had not realized the discrimination in her hometown …show more content…
Walter Cunningham was a kind boy who was the same age as Scout but was underprivileged and not very wealthy. Walter and Scout became friends so, Scout invited him to dinner a few times before Aunt Alexandra tells Scout not to invite him anymore. Aunt Alexandra exclaims “‘I’ll tell you why, because he is trash, that’s why you can't play with him. I’ll not have you around him picking up his habits and learning Lord knows what. You're enough of a problem to your father as it is’” (225). Aunt Alexandra believed that if Scout was around Walter she would become what Walter is, which in Aunt Alexandra’s eyes, is trash. She was showing the class prejudice even against children by degrading Walter just because his family was a part of the lower class. Also a part of the lower class, the Ewell’s were the most contemptuous family in Maycomb. They believed that since they were a part of the lower class that they could treat people with disrespect. An example of the disrespectfulness would be on Scout’s first day of first grade and Burris fulminated their teacher, Miss Caroline. Burris shouted at his teacher “‘Report and be damned to ye! Ain’t no snot-nosed slut of a schoolteacher ever born c’n make me do nothin’’” (28)! Since Burris had grown up in a lower class family with people always looking down on them, he believed that he could treat the upper class with antipathy and …show more content…
When Calpurnia takes Jem and Scout to her church, a churchgoer named Lula ridicules Calpurnia for bringing white children to an African American church. Lula scolded Calpurnia. “‘You ain’t got no business bringin’ white chillun here...they got their church, we got our’n. It is our church, ain’t it, Miss Cal’” (119)? Lula displayed the racial prejudice by criticizing Calpurnia and the kids. She believed that the African American churches were not obtainable to the white citizens and that they should only attend their own church. By believing this, Lula feels that the blacks and the whites should be separated because of their race. Lastly, racial prejudice was shown when a man named Tom Robinson was convicted of a crime he did not commit exclusively because of his race. Mayella Ewell had accused Tom of raping her and beating her with very little evidence and an indefinite testimony. However, the intolerant jury convicted Tom of this crime because he was an African American. Atticus defended Tom in the court case and stated “‘The witnesses for the state, have presented themselves to you gentlemen…in the cynical confidence that their testimony would not be doubted, confident that you gentlemen would go along with them on the assumption…that all Negro men are not to be trusted…’” (204). Atticus came up with a plethora of approaches that would debunk the evidence against Tom, yet none of