To Kill a Mockingbird — Chapter 13

About This Passage

Lee stages the speech as a borrowed performance: Atticus uses 'his lawyer's voice, without a shade of inflection' — the voice of a man delivering testimony for a client whose argument is not his own. The interruption — Scout finding the redbug, Atticus pausing to watch — is what gives the scene its moral signature. A father who believed the speech would not let a redbug interrupt it; a father who is performing it for his sister's sake will let any interruption happen, because the interruption is permission to break tone. Notice the verb 'persevered': Lee uses it ironically. Atticus is not persevering toward something he wants to say. He is persevering against his own discomfort, finishing the assignment.

Narration Prompt

Trace Chapter 13 in three movements: Aunt Alexandra's arrival and Maycomb's ratification of her installation, the elaboration of her doctrine of Streaks and gentle breeding within the household, and the borrowed-voice speech that ends with Atticus walking it back. Conclude by considering how the chapter functions as the structural hinge that prepares the household, and the reader, for the trial chapters that follow.

Discussion Questions

1. Aunt Alexandra arrives at the Finch house and her first two acts are an instruction to Calpurnia and a correction of Scout. Examine the cumulative evidence the chapter offers that Aunt Alexandra has come to live rather than to visit, and consider what the chapter's careful indirection — Scout's question 'Have you come for a visit, Aunty?' meeting Aunt Alexandra's deflection 'Didn't your father tell you?' — suggests about whether Atticus invited her or accepted an arrangement she had already decided.
2. The doctrine of Streaks performs three pieces of intellectual work simultaneously: it explains, it absolves the speaker from further inquiry, and it organizes a social hierarchy. Analyze each function with reference to the chapter's specific examples — Sam Merriweather's suicide, the Penfield girl's giggle, Miss Stephanie Crawford's nosiness, the Ewell counterexample Jem produces. What does Jem's counterexample reveal about whether the doctrine actually predicts anything, and what does the doctrine's failure tell us about the kind of thinking the trial will require of Maycomb's jurors?

+ 3 more questions in the complete study guide