Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird takes place in a small town named Maycomb County, in southern Alabama. Set in the time period of the Great Depression, the 1930s was a time of poverty, strong racial divides and the peak of the patriarchal white male. Knowing this while reading the novel through a disability lens, one starts to notice the impact this harsh environment has on its characters. I would argue that this environment is disabling to characters such as the poverty stricken Cunninghams and the only main female protagonist, Scout. These disabling characteristics of the environment, such as poverty and a patriarchal society, enhance the characters’ isolation from their community due to their physical appearances.
Poverty effects many families in this small, southern town but one character who stands out as being affected more than most is Walter Cunningham. Initially, Walter’s physical appearance is the first thing introduced, following this is how he came to acquire hookworms, “Walter’s face told everybody in the first grade he had hookworms. His absence of shoes told us how he got them” (Lee 21). Because Walter is not able to afford shoes, he walks around most of the time barefoot which is how he caught hookworms (Lee 21). Walter is called out by his teacher and made to feel uncomfortable about his financial situation and ultimately, his appearance because all the students are now staring at him. The Cunninghams are a poverty-stricken family in Maycomb County, that did not have enough to provide their children lunch everyday nor enough to buy shoes. This is disabling to Walter because since he is poor and cannot afford shoes, he has hookworms on his face. His physical appearance is altered due to his environment which causes him to look different from everyone else. Isolating only him due to his lunch, brings attention to his differences, it is also interesting to note that the first sentence written about Walter is his obvious, physical difference.
The second character affected by her environment is Jean-Louise Finch, also known as Scout. The disabling environment of a patriarchal society isolates Scout from her brother, Jem, and best friend, Dill. As they all three grow older, Jem and Dill start to seclude Scout from themselves with expressions such as “sometimes you act so much like a g-irl it’s mortifyin’” (Lee 42) or “but Jem told me I was being a girl, that girls always imagined things, that’s why other people hated them so, and if I started behaving like one I could just go off and find some to play with” (Lee 45). Belittling words like these eventually kept Scout away and she spent her days sitting with Miss Maudie, her neighbor, on the front porch (Lee 46). Scout reaches the age where people are now starting to categorize and treat her as a girl. Because of this anything she does in a negative light is now attributed to her being a female. The patriarchal society is disabling to Scout and all girls because it fits them all into one collective group thus isolating them from others.
In conclusion, the environment of the small-town Scout Finch and Walter Cunningham live in, disables them by isolation due to poverty and the patriarch. Physical differences that further disable them are a product of their environment like hookworms or being female. These are not the only two characters strongly affected by their disabling environment, but they are two of the most prominent ones seen in our reading of To Kill a Mockingbird so far.
Word Count: 589
I Pledge: Rachel Porchie
