The novel To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee is a vast example of how life can replicate or reflect on literature. The Mimetic Theory is a literary theory in which theorists analyze and evaluate work as an imitation, reflection, or reflection of the world and human life. Mimetic Theory claims that literature can reveal the truth. When applying Mimetic Theory to the novel To Kill a Mockingbird, reveals how the novel shows people's prejudice and discrimination in real life. Many characters in the novel help prove this truth of discrimination as well as with society. The truths of the white communities' discrimination against the black community revealed in To Kill a Mockingbird prove to be knowledgeable to whichever time period that it was applied to.
People in today's society and the characters in the novel such as Mayella Ewell, Alexandria Finch, and many others help prove this discrimination. It’s definitely no secret that many individuals around the world are extremely biased against different ethnicities or groups of people. In To Kill a Mockingbird the white people in Maycomb are biased and discriminate against colored people. “She was white, and she tempted a Negro. She did something that in our society is unspeakable: she kissed a black man. Not an old Uncle, but a strong young Negro man. No code mattered to her before she broke it, but it came crashing down on her afterward.” (Lee 204) In this quote Atticus mocks society itself, saying that inbreeding with her Uncle was totally okay for people to do, but a woman, kissing a colored man her age is extremely outrageous. Tom Robinson argues that he has not broken a law, but his accuser Mayella Ewell has violated the code by making advances to a colored man: “She has committed no crime, she has merely broken a rigid and time-honored code of our society, a code so severe that whoever breaks it is hounded from our mindset as unfit to live with. She is the victim of cruel poverty and ignorance, but I cannot pity her: she is white.” (Lee 203) Mayella did not commit a crime, however, she broke an unspoken societal code by tempting a colored man. The point that Atticus argues in this quote is that Tom Robinson, a black man charged with raping a white woman, has to be judged by the terms of the law, but Atticus knows that because of his life in the Maycomb society, the jury will judge the defendant according to her skin color. In the 1930s, the unspoken code showed how separated our world was and how it affected people's lives. Back then it was appalling for white people to communicate or hang out with black people or people of different races. According to Nelson Mandela: “No one is born hating another person because of the color of their skin, or of their background, or their religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes naturally to the human heart and its opposite.” This quote shows that no one on earth is born disliking someone, they learn or are taught to dislike someone. People have a choice to choose whether or not to like a specific person or group of people or to like them and decide to not be prejudiced or biased.
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Whether you are applying Mimetic Theory to a novel written in the 1960s or a novel written in the twenty-first century, there will always be some type of discrimination. “Tom had been given due process of law to the day of his death; he had been tried openly and convicted by twelve good men and true; my father had fought for him all the way.” (Lee 241) Tom Robinson was clearly given a fair shot by the definition of the law, however, the trial was not as fair as it seemed to be. “Then Mr. Underwoods' meaning became clear: Atticus had used every tool available to free men to save Tom Robinson but in the secret courts of men's hearts Atticus had no case. Tom was a dead man the minute Mayella Ewell opened her mouth and screamed.” (Lee 241) The twelve men that served on the jury that convicted Tom Robinson of raping Mayella were obviously making their decision based on the color of his skin and were biased. All of the evidence that Atticus gave the court proved that Tom was innocent but no matter how strong the evidence was, Tom did not stand a chance at winning the case. The events that were happening back in the 1960s are still continuing to happen in today's society, innocent people are convicted and put behind bars or even killed for crimes that they didn’t commit.
In the 1960s, a man named Medgar Evers raised on a small farm in Decatur, Mississippi was assassinated on July 12th, 1963, the same exact night that President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Medgar was the field secretary for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in the early 1960s. He became one of the first leaders of the nonviolent African American civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. He was killed for his work. Evers was constantly speaking about needing to overcome hatred and promote the understanding and equality of white people and black people. This was not a message that everyone in Mississippi wanted to hear. Medgar and his family moved to the state capitol of Jackson, where he worked with black church leaders and other civil rights activists. By 1955, his name was on a nine-man death list drawn up by racist white people. A few weeks prior to his death, there was a bomb thrown into his family's home. The night that President John F. Kennedy denounced the white resistance to civil rights for blacks, pledging his support to federal action on integration, Medgar returned home just after midnight from a series of NAACP functions. As he got out of his car, he was shot in the back. His wife and children found him lying on the doorstep bleeding to death. He died fifty minutes later after arriving at the hospital. He was thirty-seven years old when he died. The governor of Mississippi and multiple all-white newspapers offered rewards for information about his murder. Byron de la Beckwith, a member of a white supremacist group became one of the suspects related to the murder. Beckwith’s fingerprint was found on a gun 150 feet away from where the shooting happened. He claimed that he was innocent but he was tried twice in Mississippi for Evers's murder, one time in 1964 and once more one year later. Regardless of the strong evidence against him, the all-white juries in both trials ended in deadlock decisions, and Byron Beckwith walked free. In 1991, about twenty-five years later after Medgar’s murder, Beckwith was arrested for the third time. In 1994, a jury of four whites and eight blacks convicted him of murdering Medgar Evers. Byron was sentenced to life imprisonment and died in prison in 2001.
Life and literature reflect on one another Harper Lee’s novel To Kill a Mockingbird is a primary example of that. It has been proven that literature can reveal truths about the society around you. The novel To Kill a Mockingbird reveals that everyone has some type of discrimination or bias against other people who are not of the same color or ethnic group as them. The characters throughout the novel show how discrimination increases more and more through social and no matter which time period or era it is, the prejudice that some individuals have will forever be universal. Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird can definitely give you more knowledge and information about how black people were treated back in the 1960s and can also teach you some things that are worth remembering.
Works Cited
- Davidson, Jen. “Literary Theory PC.” Google Slides, Google, 12 Oct. 2020, docs.google.com/presentation/d/1wjCG6jYpk3LLH2BNCR1FOtmjll0r3A2Vgji0SFdzaUw/edit.
- Mackenzie. “Being Black in a World Where White Lies Matter.” The Undefeated, The Undefeated, 30 Jan. 2017, theundefeated.com/features/being-black-in-a-world-where-white-lies-matter/.
- “The Law and the Code in Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird.” Southern Cultures, 12 May 2020, www.southerncultures.org/article/law-code-harper-lees-kill-mockingbird/.
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