Subtle Kinds of Violence: Poverty and Prejudice in "To Kill a Mockingbird" by Harper Lee and “Dry September” by William Faulkner

Southern Gothic is a violence-ridden genre. Its subject matter, characters, and imagery are often disturbing and transgressive. However, this mode of writing does not necessarily rely on shock value, or our primal attraction to the repulsive. Some of the most successful Southern Gothic works offer multi-layered, contextualised depictions of violent behaviour, which should not be conflated with physical brutality. Southern Gothic authors more or less consciously describe in their works a full range of non-physical aggression which emanates from structural violence.

There has been an ongoing semantic shift in the usage of the word “violence” itself. Due to sociocultural forces, its reference has expanded to include acts of aggression that cause harm via other means than physical force used face to face; for instance, World Health Organisation in its classification of violence includes also sexual and psychological attacks, as well as “deprivation or neglect” (Krug et al, 2002, p. 6). Furthermore, these acts may be executed on the levels of community and society, where factors such as “income inequality,” “[strength of] national institutions for social protection,” or “the quality of governance in a country” (Krug et al, 2002, p. 37) are taken into account. In this light, physical brutality in Southern Gothic narratives is but a most conspicuous expression of implicit structural violence, victims of which are both Southern perpetrators and the perpetrated.

It is not a coincidence that lynch mobs in To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee and “Dry September” by William Faulkner consist of working-class men affected by recession. Economic inequality and social stratification are among “risk factors for collective violence” (Krug et al, 2002, p. 220). Income inequality renders these men victims of a dysfunctional government, or, from the broader perspective, victims of a dysfunctional economic system. The underlying issue is that capitalism normalizes economic violence. Those who are affected by economic crises the most (e.g. tenant farmers in To Kill a Mockingbird) tend to repress the fact that they are exploited and that their access to wealth and resources is curtailed. It could be either because the underprivileged have been conditioned into assuming that exploitation of the poor is the natural order of things, or because capitalist patterns of economic abuse form a conceptual hyperobject that is too complex and too pervasive to be assimilated into their consciousness. Mob violence may be seen, then, as a tragically misguided outlet for frustration, sources of which lynch mobs either fail to recognise, or do not wish to recognise out of political complacency.

Moreover, members of the lynch mobs in To Kill a Mockingbird and “Dry September” are vulnerable to “the fuelling of group fanaticism along ethnic, national or religious lines” (Krug et al, 2002, p. 220). The perpetrators of group violence probably would not acknowledge the fact were they aware of it, for that would entail admitting to being weak and impressionable, definitely not self-reliant and individualistic; in other words, such an admission would trigger the loss of symbolic power. As a result, these men fall prey to symbolic violence: they are coerced into assuming a rigid image of masculinity that obtains in the patriarchy, which, again, they internalise as the natural way of being. In fact, the concept of masculinity they espouse is not at all transparent and self-explanatory — it is an ideological construct hardwired into their habitus.

In “Dry September”, John McLendon, being at the hub of local activity, is the main perpetrator of symbolic violence. He is accountable for exercising his dominance in the most drastic way and coercing obedience from his fellows. Yet, the final scene proves that he is also afflicted. The murder he commits brings him neither resolution nor satisfaction. Conversely, under the gaze of the third-person omniscient narrator, he is exposed as a victim of mimetic society; his individuality is challenged as his behaviour is fully determined by the perennial cycle of ritualistic violence. The murder does not change a single thing. The Southern heat seems to have more oppressive agency than John McLendon, regardless of his frantic attempts to assert himself.

By comparison, in To Kill a Mockingbird, Scout’s technique of singling out the members of the lynch mob is so successful because she breaks the fanatic bond of their collective and asserts individual personhood of each member. She disrupts the cycle. She also reminds the men of their underprivileged background by mentioning entailments (Lee, 1962, p. 156). One may conjecture that, in reality, it is the quiet fury of being contained in the state of helpless poverty that propels the men out of their houses, rather than their sense of duty, i.e. their independent, laudable decision to right the wrongs done to a defenceless virgin. In addition, Scout unwittingly implies that there are other ways a man can be an in-group member of a community, apart from exercises in toxic chivalry.

There is a whole deep structure of psychological mechanisms that produce interpersonal and collective violence. For instance, violence against minorities can be an effect of displacement. Racial violence against scapegoated black people in To Kill a Mockingbird and “Dry September” can be thus interpreted as triggered by anxiety and tension intrinsic to the segregated society of the South. In these two texts, fear of coexisting with black people, or the Other, transposed into racial violence, erodes the moral high ground of the Dixie. As a result of this erosion, the Southern ethos — comprising protection of white women as one of its tenets — turns into a vacuous, processed, symbolic code that loses its mooring in the Real, like a dead metaphor. Faulkner visualises this process through the character of McLendon who after murdering a black man for allegedly raping a white woman, attacks his own wife. Again, it can be considered an act of displacement: he vents his deep-seated frustration on the most convenient target, the Other — this time a female.

Application of totalising theories to the plurality of behaviours of flesh and blood collectives may have dubious effects, as in the case of Lillian Smith’s Freudianism in Killers of the Dream. She ventures too far in her attempt to explain away phenomena that are much too complex to be subdued to a singular, deterministic pattern. Moreover, her affirmation of black people verges on benevolent prejudice; it replaces blatant violence with its less explicit and malignant, but still dangerous form. This way she involuntarily falls into the same perennial cycle of violence. Therefore, it should be recognised that this short paper is merely a tangential treatment of abusive behaviour present in the two Southern Gothic narratives by Harper Lee and William Faulkner. Its aim is to merely emphasise the active role of implicit kinds of violence, such as poverty, lack of social mobility, and prejudice, in inciting physical brutality.

What could be to Flannery O'Connor’s chagrin, the more our understanding of violence develops and the more comprehensive renderings of its mechanism are produced, the less is left to mystery and ambiguity. However, even if the logosphere manages to illuminate all the mysteries of violence carried out in the Real, not heeding O'Connor's claim that “our life is and will remain essentially mysterious” (O'Connor, 1969), the awareness probably will not coincide with the resolution of our anxieties. This gap leaves much space for visionary literary production. “At a depth where adequate motivation and adequate psychology and the various determinations have been exhausted” (O'Connor, 1969), one could ask why we continue to make the same mistakes against our better judgement.

 

 

Angelika Samoraj, MA I

Jagiellonian University

25 June 2019

Minor stylistic improvements added to the text: 18 April 2023  

 

 

References

Krug E. G., Dahlberg L. L., Mercy J. A., Zwi A. B. & Lozano R. (Eds.). (2002). World Report on Violence and Health. Geneva, World Health Organization.

Lee, H. (1962). To Kill a Mockingbird. New York, NY: Popular Library. (Original work published 1960).

O'Connor, F. (1969). Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction. Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose. Fitzgerald S. & Fitzgeral R. (Eds.). New York, NY: Farrar, Straus & Giroux.