To Kill a Mockingbird — Chapter 12

About This Passage

Lee uses Reverend Sykes's sermon to make a structural point: the moral codes Scout has heard from her own white pulpit are not foreign to First Purchase. The doubled voice — twelve-year-old Scout's wide-eyed reception, the adult narrator's appraisal ('the Impurity of Women doctrine that seemed to preoccupy all clergymen') — lets Lee both honor the sincerity of the sermon and gently critique the universal misogyny it shares with the white churches. Notice how the adult narrator places 'denunciation' and 'austere' in the same breath as 'Impurity of Women' to make the affinity audible.

Narration Prompt

Trace Chapter 12 as a structural unit. Identify the two halves of the chapter (Atticus's absence and the church visit), explain how each half develops independently, and analyze how Aunt Alexandra's appearance on the porch in the final paragraph functions as the chapter's hinge into Part Two of the novel.

Discussion Questions

1. First Purchase is constructed in the chapter as a counter-economy operating in parallel to the failed institutions of white Maycomb. Build a reading that demonstrates how the closed-door collection, the lining-out of hymns, and Calpurnia's bilingualism are all responses to forms of denial — economic, educational, social — and explain why Lee places these three responses in the same morning.
2. The chapter is narrated by adult Scout looking back on the child she was. Identify the specific lexical choices ('ecclesiastical impedimenta,' 'forthright denunciation,' 'preoccupy all clergymen,' 'the Impurity of Women doctrine') that betray the adult narrator at work, and analyze what Lee gains by sustaining a doubled voice rather than collapsing the chapter into either pure child reportage or pure adult retrospection.

+ 3 more questions in the complete study guide