Narrative Space In Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird

Harper Lee was an American novelist who was well-known for her single published novel To Kill a Mockingbird(Mockingbird).With the instant success,this novel won the1961 Pulitzer Prize and enjoys long lasting popularity.With Scout as the first-person narrator,To Kill a Mockingbird offers a vivid panoramic picture of life in a small southern town Maycomb during the Great Depression.This novel deals with complex themes including racial injustice,the destruction of innocence and issues of class as well as the limitations society imposed on women and so forth.Of all these themes,the living condition of people on the margins of Maycomb(especially the black people and the female)is worth attention and serves as the research emphasis of this thesis.And the theoretical bases of this thesis are space theories,especially those of Gabriel Zoran and Henri Lefebvre.Therefore,based upon their exposition and classification of the spaces,this thesis respectively analyzes how the spaces in the textual,geographical and social levels in To Kill a Mockingbird help highlight its spatiality and further give expression to the distribution features of the spaces where the marginalized people reside and to the marginalization of these non-mainstream minorities.As a matter of fact,numerous theorists have contributed to the enrichment of the conception of space from narrative,social and post-modern geographical perspectives:containing the meaning of an existing empty area or geographical landscape,the notion“space” is also bestowed with social attributes;moreover,several narrative techniques used in a literary narration also help to make a text's spatiality prominent,further revealing the conflicts and contradictions within.The first part of this thesis gives a detailed explanation of the spaces theories applied in interpreting To Kill a Mockingbird.After that,the second part of the thesis concentrates on the narrative techniques of the work(the perspective of children narrative and timoral nonlinearity)to explore its spatiality,which diverts readers' attention to the spaces and evokes their concerns for the relationships and conflicts between characters.The intention of this part lies in the effortto prove the feasibility and reasonability of studying To Kill a Mockingbird with the use of the space theories.The next part elaborates on the study of the image of Maycomb as a whole and on the culture and deep-rooted values underlying the geographical landscapes,that is,how the culture and outdated beliefs of the old South were still deeply engraved in townspeople's behaviors and values,finally resulting in the existence of Maycomb's usual disease.Besides,the analysis of the residential locations of different groups of people manifests the center-periphery spatial structure of Maycomb.Studying from the dimension of social space,the last part firstly reveals the caste system and the ubiquitous monitoring in this small southern town.Both of them indicate the rigid spatial boundaries which restricted the citizens in Maycomb,especially those on the margins of the town,to their own spaces.Then,a specific analysis of the living spaces of the black people and the female shows how the discipline mechanism of Maycomb demanded them to behave according to their identities and finally resulted in their marginalization.Through the aforementioned researches,a conclusion is made that both geographically and socially,the black people and the female in Maycomb were excluded from the mainstream and remained invisible to those people with superiority,even deprived of the right of speech and of the right to use the privileged center and multiple services.