Childhood Presented in To Kill a Mocking Bird by Harper Lee and The Blu

Childhood Presented in To Kill a Mocking Bird by Harper Lee and The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison Childhood should be a time of great learning, curiosity, joy, playfulness and guiltlessness. The reality is that it can be a time of extreme vulnerability and dependency. The innocence and fragility of a child is easily manipulated and abused if not nurtured and developed. Family relationships are crucial in the flourishing of young minds, but other childhood associations are important too. These include school life, friends, play and peer-group. Both novels portray these factors and their effects on the character formation of their subjects, to some extent and, show that growing up can be a painful process greatly accelerated by the events that the children encounter. Scout and Jem are the daughter and son of Atticus Finch, a widowed lawyer based in Maycomb, twenty miles from Finch's Landing the family plot. They are a white, middle class family who have a black cook/housekeeper. Their story is written in To Kill a Mocking Bird, which was published in 1960. It's author, Harper Lee, was a white woman who incorporated many of her own childhood experiences into the book. She too came from a small, sleepy town in Alabama, her own father was a lawyer and her childhood friend was Trueman Capote, from whom she drew inspiration for Scout and Jem's friend Dill. Perhaps the most influential of the events that occurred during Lee's childhood was the Scottsboro Trials, where nine innocent young black men were accused of raping two white women. This was undoubtedly the inspiration for the climax of the novel, the rape trial of Tom Robinson. Lee wrote the novel in the late 1950's at the beginning of the Civil Rights Move... ...nced, and easy to read way. The character of the narrator Scout is infused with wit and humour and she paints pictures of lazy summer days at play, while still managing to deal with the rape trial and its aftermath. Her characters develop throughout the novel by a series of moralistic encounters with neighbours and family, until by the end of the novel Scout realises that they have learnt so much and remarks: "As I made my way home, I though Jem and I would get grown but there wasn't much else left for us to learn, except possibly algebra." (To Kill a Mocking Bird, P308) Lee certainly gets her point across but does so in a gentler, less harrowing way. BIBLIOGRAPHY To Kill a Mocking Bird, Harper Lee, William Heinemann Ltd, 1960. The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison, Picador, 1990. - OTHER RESOURCES USED www.sparknotes.com www.pinkmonkey.com