Miss Lee Considers the Novel to Be a Simple Love Story. Contemporary Authors
I Yearn for the Law. Julia Kristeva
The question of whether a woman's voice can assume authority as the voice of a woman turns on all the issues of women's speech we've examined so far: the way women's voices are positioned within narratives that require their submission to patriarchal roles, how female characters are made to use language that silences them, how the cinematic conventions of visual and audio representation convert woman to spectacle, precluding her status as subject, and the placement of women on the weak end of sound/image hierarchies. The authorial voice is rarely heard as a woman's voice in classical cinema, but when it is, it can illustrate some key points about the differences between women's and men's voices in film. While the male disembodied narrator has historically been positioned as the authoritative "enunciator" of his cinematic text, the ability to assume a position of bodiless invulnerability (the voice of God) is tested when the disembodied narrator is a woman. The value of sacrificing the body in order to embrace this illusion of mastery is also subjected to serious questioning.
To Kill a Mockingbird is a major work in American popular culture both as a novel and as a film, although it has not been seriously addressed in either film or literary studies.[1] In this essay I would like to propose a reading of To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) that challenges traditional accounts of the film as a liberal statement on race relations and focus instead on the film's construction
Contemporary Authors: First Revision, vols. 13–16, ed. Clare D. Kinsman (Detroit: Gale Research Company, 1975), p. 481; Julia Kristeva, "Stabat Mater," in The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), p. 175.
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of a female authorial presence. First, by looking at the construction of the author, Harper Lee, in the press around the time of the novel's publication and the film's release two years later, I propose to examine the various ways Lee's image could be appropriated to bolster readings of the film as a story "authored" by a woman. "Authorship" in this case encompasses the
common literary definition ("the occupation or career of writing books")[2] as well as a cinematically constructed "authorial presence" made vivid by the film's incorporation of a voice-over narrator speaking in the first person. How do the film's narrative and narrator develop the relationship of novelist Lee with the main character, Scout? How is Scout's
relationship to language confounded with desire; what does this desire enable and what does it foreclose? What are the implications of giving the woman-author a cinematic presence
through the use of voice-over? And, more important, what is it about not only the story but her telling of it —the fact that it is presented as being "authored" by a woman—that
ultimately makes the film compatible with patriarchal ideology? And, lastly, is there any way a feminist rereading of the film can open it up and allow us—if briefly—to hear the female voice?
The film's credits pose the first of a series of disjunctions that will figure throughout the film. A little girl hums on the sound track as we see a series of objects that will assume significance in the course of the film. We see only her hands as she makes her first attempts at creation, drawing pictures around the objects of her life. The splits between sound and image, language and voice, character and authorial consciousness that will be central throughout the film are immediately reformulated with the introduction of a woman narrator, herself a figure in crisis as a disembodied voice exiled from the image. Over the film's opening shots, a woman's voice introduces us to Maycomb, "a tired old town," and to herself: "That summer I was six years old."[3] The camera sweeps down langorously as a child in overalls swings into the frame on a rope.
The woman we hear, whom we shall never see, is the adult the child will become.[4] It has been argued that when there is a temporal disjunction between the offscreen self of the narrator and the figure we see, it is caused by trauma.[5] The narrative of To Kill a
Mockingbird relates the trauma that divorced the voice from the image, the adult woman from the physical, unselfconscious child. Through her voice, the narrator assumes the place of author as literally (and only) a speaking female subject. As we shall see, what she
authorizes—the sacrifice demanded of the female who would speak—is the writing out of her own body.
To Kill a Mockingbird concerns two children, Scout (Mary Badham), a six-year-old tomboy, and her ten-year-old brother Jem (Philip Alford). They live with their widowed father, Atticus Finch (Gregory Peck), in the small town of Maycomb, Alabama, in the early 1930s. While exploring their world over the course of two summers, Scout and Jem seek to discover the secret of the mysterious Boo Radley, a recluse living in a dilapidated house down the
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street, and witness their father's controversial defense of a black man accused of rape.
When the film was released, it was the liberal civil rights stance of the rape trial that was seen as the "point" of the film and of the book before it. Critics hailed or dismissed the film
according to their perception of its presentation of the racial issue. John Russell Taylor's review in Sight and Sound labeled the film an "Oscar trap with a bait of high-toned liberal sentiment."[6] No small part of the film's appeal as "respectable," "progressive" entertainment was its status as an adaptation of an award-winning best-seller. The novel, published in 1960, won the Pulitzer Prize and within a year had sold 500,000 copies and been translated into ten languages.[7] Harper Lee was transformed into an instant celebrity, interviewed in Life, Newsweek , and the Christian Science Monitor .[8] The formation of Lee's public image was strongly influenced by the perception of the novel as a thinly veiled autobiography. As the consciousness of the "author" inflected contemporary readings of both the novel and the film (and as the concept of author-as-woman will be central to my reading), a short biography of Harper Lee is in order.
Harper Lee, a patrilineal descendant of Robert E. Lee, modeled the character of Atticus Finch on her father, Amasa Lee. Finch was her mother's maiden name. A biography of the author states that, "Her decision to attend law school is attributed to the strong influence of her lawyer-father."[9] However, for reasons unstated, Lee left law school at the University of Alabama shortly before she was to complete her degree and turned to writing fiction. Although she left the law, her turning to literature only brought her home. In an interview, Lee exults in contradicting Thomas Wolfe: "I can go home again."[10] "Home" is her father. She wrote To Kill a Mockingbird in "her father's law office."[11] A photograph states their symbiotic relationship visually: an aged Amasa Lee sits in a rocker on a front porch, facing left. Harper Lee reclines on a chaise opposite, facing him. Like a pair of inward-facing bookends, they form two sides of a single figure. We must see her through him.