On Harper Lee: Essays and Reflections.

On Harper Lee: Essays and Reflections. Ed. Alice Hall Petry. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2007. 224 pp. $21.95 (paper).

ACADEMICS HAVE NEVER REALLY KNOWN WHAT TO DO WITH A NOVEL THAT is both critically acclaimed and wildly popular. The Ivory Tower mentality keeps us from admitting that a book can be accessible and still be good. So we usually do one of two things: if the novel has a main character who is young--such as in Catcher in the Rye or A Separate Peace--the book can be easily relegated to Young Adult Fiction and largely ignored. If the book is easily read, it can be sent to the high schools to teach--as in the case of The Great Gatsby and Brave New World Initial articles are written, Cliffs Notes are shoved on the shelf, papers are sold on the Internet, and the book gets taught the same way over and over for years.

Until someone has something new to say, something that sheds new light and interest on an old classic. Harper Lee's novel To Kill a Mockingbird was in danger of this fate of being critically ignored. The fact that it was a perennial favorite, an Oscar-winning film, and a seemingly simple bildungsroman all worked against the novel getting its proper due in academic circles. Fortunately, Alice Hall Petry has compiled a book of essays on the novel that sheds a variety of new lights on the story, opening up fresh ways to read the novel and original perspectives from which to teach it.

Consider, for example, John Carlos Rowe's essay "Racism, Fetishism, and the Gift Economy in To Kill A Mockingbird." By focusing on the setting of the novel--that is, the Great Depression in the South--Rowe describes the barter economy that developed, the need for sharing food, and the importance of gift giving in the story. (Even Scout's ham costume in the final scene is a reminder of the commodified culture of Maycomb.) In another essay, "Valorizing the Commonplace: Harper Lee's Response to Jane Austen," Jean Frantz Blackall looks at Lee's attempt, much like Austen's, to "leave some record of the kind of life that existed in a very small world." Jacqueline Tavernier-Courbin's "Humor and Humanity in To Kill a Mockingbird " explores the often-overlooked wit in a mainly grim tale and offers the revelation that Lee's use of the mockingbird might have been ironic--that in fact, mockingbirds are aggressive, known as the "bullies among birds." Instead of seeing the mockingbird as a symbol of tolerance for those peaceful pariahs such as Tom Robinson and Boo Radley, Tavernier-Courbin suggests the belligerent bird might be a symbol of hypocrisy--"pretending to be what it is not"--therefore aligning the symbol more closely with the "intolerance and racism" in the novel, showing Lee to be "the satirist revealing the ugly underbelly of the south through humor."

In most compilations of essays, there is some inconsistency in the quality of writing and the originality of ideas. This is not the case in Petry's fine collection, however. Each essay offers a clear and innovative approach to the novel. In one especially compelling essay, "Structuring the Narrator's Rebellion in To Kill a Mockingbird," Laura Fine takes a look at a controversial comment made in 1999 that the book is a "proto-lesbian novel." Fine examines and stretches this idea, analyzing Scout's tomboyishness not merely as lesbian but more accurately, I believe, as an attempt to find her place in a world in which she doesn't easily fit. The novel is full of such characters--Boo, Maudie, Mayella, Calpurnia, Atticus, Dolphus Raymond--characters at odds with the accepted social system of schools, courts, churches, and racial and economic segregation. Fine notes that "Lee fills her novel with examples of acceptable breaking of boundaries, codes or laws," granting Scout, as she matures, permission to develop a personal moral code that may or may not align with the community in which she lives.

Kathryn Lee Seidel's excellent "Growing Up Southern: Resisting the Code for Southerners in To Kill a Mockingbird" "sets up a counterpoint of the southern code of honor," presenting Scout as the character who moves from the embodiment of the Old South--violent, racist, elitist--to the maturity of a fresh perspective of compassion, compromise, and respect. Her growth, as Seidel so aptly puts it, is "a journey from prejudice to tolerance, from ignorance to wisdom, from violence to self-control, from bigotry to empathy, from a code of honor to a code of law."

The exceptional essays and innovative insight continue throughout Perry's book. When you read this set of essays--as anyone who has read or taught this novel (and according to Perry, that includes virtually everyone)--you will need a pen in hand to underline all the significant and inventive ways of looking at this book. Such new perspectives on the novel are exciting. Every few years I teach a course in Young Adult Literature, and I include Harper Lee's book every time, but sometimes the discussion feels stale, as if I've said everything I can say about the book and it's time to put it to rest. But Petry's book makes me want to pull out my well-worn copy of the novel and teach it again. My college undergraduates will be surprised--as I was over and over as I read Perry's collection. They--perhaps like me--have been in a rut, and have come to believe there is only one way to view a well-known classic. But the next time they walk though my classroom door, they are in for a surprise: my yellowed notes will be gone and a whole new set of ideas will be ready to share.

BARBARA BENNETT

North Carolina State University