A Post-colonial Perspective Of To Kill A Mockingbird

Harper Lee is a successful American woman writer. To Kill a Mockingbird is her onlypublished novel. She inherits the American southern literature tradition and relives the black’smiserable situation in American southern states in1930s. This thesis intends to interpret thenovel To Kill a Mockingbird from the respective of postcolonialism based on the postcolonialtheories of Fanon, Foucault, Said and Homi K. Bhabha.In the early1960s, Harper Lee was considered as one of the representative Americansouthern writers. Like other famous American southern writers-----William Faulkner, RobertPenn Warren and Thomas Wolff, she reveals different white people’s attitudes toward theblack in Maycomb, the small southern town, and that racial prejudice has brought tremendoushurt to the black. After all, Harper Lee is one of the white writers. To a certain degree, sheunconsciously shows the white people’s sense of superiority when talking about the black’slife and culture. The novel starts from Arthur, a white “mad” man，interspersed with thenarrative of Tom’s wrong case and ends up Arthur’s killing Ewell who intended to hurt Jemand Scout. It completes with a happy end. The whole novel appears white-dominatedunconsciously.Based on analyzing Tom Robinson, the wrongly accused black man, and Calpurnia, theblack are the white’s adjunct and remain “Other” in racial, cultural and identity aspects. Theysuffer insult and oppression from the white. As for the elimination of racial discriminationand the change of the black people’s survival problem, she points that in white-dominatedsociety, all African-Americans are docile, poorly-educated folks who need the protection ofthe white. She shows that what the black people can do is only to wait for the white’sredemption or the white’s conscience awakening. Harper Lee combines the growing-up ofwhite children’s with the promotion of the Southern moral regression and helps themcomplete the pursuit of their identity. Meanwhile, she criticizes the ugliness of the oldsouthern history. In the course of Southern Reconstruction, she describes the positive factorsof the southern culture. From children’s respect, she points out that American southernhistory should be in the hands of both the white and the black. The southern white people should get rid of the ugliness of their old tradition and create a new southern future with theblack. The children like Scout and Jem reflect on the hopeful strength of breaking the oldsouthern tradition and reconstruct new southern society.