“They’ve done it before and they did it tonight and they’ll do it again and when they do it, it seems that only children weep.”. The act of aging lies not in the number of years to your name but in the variety of your experience and how your perspective is affected by it. At birth, we are without the prejudices that our societies are plagued by. We are born with a blank slate and a fresh pair of eyes. It is only once we have been immersed in the gradually crafted norms of the world for long enough that they begin to thread their way into our subconscious and influence our perception. By setting her acclaimed 1960’s novel, ​To Kill A Mockingbird ​in the fictional town of Maycomb County, within the very real Deep South of America in the 1930’s, Harper Lee was able to illustrate humanity’s inexplicable tendency for prejudice and sheds light on the contrast between the way in which children and adults react.

With the Great Depression and the immense blow it brought to the people of America in the 1930’s, society and its carefully arranged sectors of class were shaken. People’s prejudices were encouraged in the crash of the country’s economy and moral. The setting of Maycomb County was no exception. Maycomb was a town riddled with codes and rules: “No Crawford Minds His Own Business, Every Third Merriweather Is Morbid, The Truth Is Not in the Delafield’s, All the Bufords Walk Like That, were simply guides to daily living: never take a check from a Delafield without a discreet call to the bank; Miss Maudie Atkinson’s shoulder stoops because she was a Buford; if Mrs. Grace Merriweather sips gin out of Lydia E. Pinkham bottles it’s nothing unusual—her mother did the same.” Generations of reputations had been passed down family to family without question. Were these codes fact or simply so because it had been said that way for so many years? These rules parallel their prejudices and the way they were founded on nothing other than historical interpretations that were carried through time and enforced as if relevant still. The class prejudice of Maycomb drew barriers between its inhabitants who relied on them for the functionality of their society. Scout, being just seven years old, cannot understand the rules by which the town abides. Why Walter Cunningham was not allowed to come over to play was unfounded, “But I want to play with Walter, Aunty, why can’t I?” “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…” Aunt Alexandra, representing the typical prejudices of the setting is adamant in her disapproval of families so seemingly different in class interacting. Scout sees the absurdity in her bias as she understands Walter to be a “real nice boy”, despite being the son of a farmer who lost everything with the Great Depression. Scout is open-eyed and open-minded, not yet manipulated to believe a certain way; she is too young to be affected by preconception and is in turn, capable of accepting the notion that people are people, no matter their background. Jem, however, as he ages from a child into an adolescent comes to the conclusion that “There’s four kinds of folks in the world. There’s the ordinary kind, like us and the neighbors, there’s the kind like the Cunninghams out in the woods, the kind like the Ewells down at the dump, and the Negroes.”. As he ages, he begins to see the normality of class based prejudice because of the clear physical separation of Maycomb, while Scout, still a child, believes “…there’s just one kind of folks. Folks.”. Harper Lee’s use of Maycomb reveals the view with which young eyes perceive prejudice and the potential this insites for acceptance. This encourages her readers to realise the baselessness of their potential prejudices, to be aware of the open-minded view of children.

Never have the scales been balanced when it comes it equality of sexes. Historical codes worshipped for too long meant that in the 1930’s, the expected female role- which was particularly evident within the confines of Maycomb County- was that of a porcelain doll; glittering beautifully with a smile, a reputation and no real substance. ​To Kill A Mockingbird’​s setting presents the intense sexism faced by even the youngest of children in all of their innocence. Our narrator, despite being seven years old, is subjected to the prejudices of the society around her, Scout resents the idea of being like a ‘girl’, she is told that “girls always imagined things, that was why other people hated them so” and is threatened with the seemingly dreadful prospect of becoming one. As the idealistic picture of a woman in the 1930’s, her Aunt Alexandra was “fanatical on the subject of my attire. I could not possibly hope to be a lady if I wore breeches. When I said I could do nothing in a dress, she said I wasn’t supposed to be doing things that required pants.” Alexandra, in her age is completely influenced by the social norms of the setting and believes that the goal of womanhood was to play “with small stoves, tea sets, and wearing the Add-A-Pearl necklace she gave me when I was born, furthermore, I should be a ray of sunshine in my father’s lonely life.” To her, the idea that for a woman to be educated, strong and to have a voice was not only unorthodox but laughable. Scout questions this, she confronts the prejudice she is thrust into because she sees it with eyes that have not yet been corrupted by the longstanding expectations of society in the way the adults around her had been. She feels the “…starched walls of a pink penitentiary closing in on me” when wearing a dress that forces her to embrace the “polite fiction” of Southern womanhood. She sees it for what it is, not truthful but a fiction abided by in order to live smoothly within the expectations of the times. Her childish voice reveals the reality of the situation, the contrast between her rebellion and Alexandra’s conformity shows how easily humans are manipulated by social norms, no matter how grotesque. Harper Lee uses the setting and the lives lived in it to remind readers of the effect of this consistent human proclivity. Prejudice comes in many costumes and by presenting it to us in this way, Lee communicates not only the nature of sexism and the continued reality of it, but highlights the way young eyes understand the world around them, unbiased towards codes of behavior that dictate others. Maycomb County and the nature of its society reinforce the contrast in the way a child’s mind understands prejudice and is a reminder to readers of the capacity we have to act according to our morals instead of potentially warped cultural expectations.

With the tidal wave of repercussions that ensued after years of brutal prejudice, racism was not banished from America in 1863, when the emancipation proclamation officially decreed all enslaved African Americans freed. The United States of America was divided still by the “manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination”, within the South in particular. The racism of Maycomb County and its inhabitants deliberately reinforces the idea that the innocence of youth reacts differently to prejudice than adults. In a town where “…once you have a drop of Negro blood, that makes you all black” the people were the puppets while prejudice and ignorance pulled the strings. Maycomb’s racism is dredged to the surface when “…a quiet, respectable, humble Negro who had the unmitigated temerity to ‘feel sorry’ for a white woman” and was subsequently accused of her rape. Their racism hangs over the town like a fog, blinding its people from seeing the truth behind their long-standing beliefs. When Tom Robinson’s trial finally commences, Atticus- Tom’s defense- threads together pieces of undeniable evidence, proving Tom’s innocence. He is convicted despite this

because, in Maycomb, “a white man’s word against a black man’s, the white man always wins.”.11 year-old, Jem Finch is convinced, midway through the trial, of the outcome. Jem insists that there was no possible reality in which anyone could sentence Tom to death “… don’t fret, we’ve won it’…’Don’t see how any jury could convict on what we heard-‘…‘Now don’t you be so confident, Mr Jem, I ain’t ever seen any jury decide in favor of a colored man over a white man…’”. He is corrected by a man who, in his greater experience knows that no matter how unjust it is, racism will dictate the jury’s actions. “How could they do it, how could they?” “I don’t know, but they did it. They’ve done it before and they did it tonight and they’ll do it again and when they do it, it seems that only children weep.”. In the town’s prejudice and the way Jem reacts to it, Lee reveals the reality of how inhumane it truly is and highlights the way only the children see this. Dill, Jem’s friend, exits the courtroom in tears at the seemingly criminal way Tom is treated because of his color. He cries as it hurts him to see the power prejudice has over people, because he understands that every human is human, that every person deserves a voice that is not undermined by undue prejudices. He cries “because you’re children and you can understand it’…’Let him get a little older and he won’t get sick and cry. Maybe things’ll strike him as being—not quite right, say, but he won’t cry, not when he gets a few years on him.” Because when he “gets a few years on him” he will be accustomed to the way racism deviates a society. While the jury managed to convict a clearly innocent man because of his skin color, Jem and Dill are appalled by the racism Tom faced because, in their youth, they have a sense of the world that is not yet morphed by the inhumane ideas and “time-honored codes” that manipulated the men in the jury box. Lee, with her use of Maycomb and the idea of children’s perception of prejudice, reminds her audience that it is not imperative to abide by the unjust rules of society, that one’s individual morals are of more value than what one is “supposed” to do or be.

The wide-eyed awareness of children encompasses the innocence that is vital in correcting the prejudices that humanity is so apt to. Harper Lee wrote with insight and courage in ​To Kill A Mockingbird ​within the climax of the civil rights movement. She wrote about a setting not so different from the one she was in and for years has sparked vital reflection. Maycomb County, Alabama in the 1930’s is deliberate in reinforcing the theme of prejudice and the way children understand it, reminding readers of the extent to which nonsensical, preconceived ideas can devastate. By exploring how freely we view as children, and allowing them to realize the potential rationality in innocence, she illustrates to her readers the possibility of confronting the expectations that determine our actions. In doing this, Lee’s resonating words allow readers to reflect on their own potential to act based on what is right rather than what is popular, as “you never really know a man until you stand in his shoes and walk around in them.” Whether in the deep south of the United States or any other place at any other time, the human phenomenon of prejudice is apparent; Harper Lee enlightens readers of the dangers of allowing their morals, with age, to be influenced by their social expectations and how exploring the perspective of youth promotes honesty in the way we view the world. By illustrating this, readers are encouraged to realize that “‘why, Atticus, he was real nice’…’most people are, Scout, when you finally see them.’”