To Kill a Mockingbird — Chapter 13

About This Passage

Lee builds this character sketch as a small comic catalogue — river-boat manners, the objective case, an incurable gossip, the royal prerogative — and the rhythm of the list does the work. Each item is funny on its own, but the cumulative portrait is not entirely comic: Lee is establishing that Aunt Alexandra arrives at the Finch house with a complete and confident moral system, untouched by self-doubt, and the rest of the chapter (and much of Part Two) will be a measured argument with that system. Notice how the prose itself sounds like Aunt Alexandra's speech-rhythm — the catalogue, the parallelism, the certainty.

Narration Prompt

Summarize Chapter 13 by tracing its three movements: Aunt Alexandra's arrival and Maycomb's welcome of her, her installation of a doctrine of Streaks and gentle breeding in the Finch household, and Atticus's borrowed-voice speech to Jem and Scout that ends with him walking the speech back. Conclude by considering how Chapter 13 prepares the household for the trial chapters that follow.

Discussion Questions

1. Aunt Alexandra arrives at the Finch house and within two sentences has given orders to Calpurnia and corrected Scout. What evidence does the chapter offer that Aunt Alexandra has come to live, not to visit, and what does the chapter suggest about whether Atticus invited her or accepted her arrival as something already decided?
2. The chapter develops Aunt Alexandra through a doctrine of Streaks — Drinking, Gambling, Mean, Funny — and the rule that the longer a family has lived in one place, the finer it is. Analyze what intellectual work this doctrine performs for Aunt Alexandra and Maycomb. What does it explain, what does it permit her not to explain, and how does Jem's Ewell counterexample expose the doctrine's central flaw?

+ 3 more questions in the complete study guide