To Kill a Mockingbird — Chapter 14

About This Passage

Lee writes Scout's small face-saving manoeuvre with the formal vocabulary of a child trying to impose adult dignity on an exit she did not choose: 'pondered,' 'concluded,' 'retire with a shred of dignity.' The diction is comic — Scout is six chapters older than she sounds — and yet the comedy is doing serious work. The ironically grand vocabulary signals that the household has just become a place where Scout's ordinary speech-rhythm cannot operate. She has had to escalate to the diction of dignified retreat because the household, with Aunt Alexandra in it, no longer permits the easy register of 'I'm-going-to-the-bathroom.' The same paragraph then deposits Scout in the hall, where she will overhear the argument that gives her the chapter's first piece of moral evidence.

Narration Prompt

Trace Chapter 14 in three movements: the household quarrel that breaks out when Scout's request to visit Calpurnia exposes the unspoken question of Cal's place in the family, the brief sibling fight that ends with Atticus's negotiated truce ('you mind Jem whenever he can make you'), and the discovery of Dill under Scout's bed and the late-night conversation that closes with Dill's small line about Boo Radley. Conclude by considering how the chapter is unified around a single concern — the human need for a place where one is wanted — and how this concern prepares the reader for the trial chapters that follow.

Discussion Questions

1. Atticus's defense of Calpurnia ('a faithful member of this family,' 'I couldn't have got along without her all these years,' 'her lights are pretty good,' 'the children love her') is one of the chapter's clearest moral statements. Examine the precise vocabulary of the defense and analyze how each phrase places Calpurnia inside a category — family, indispensability, parental authority, moral judgment, love — that Aunt Alexandra wishes to keep her outside of. What does this speech cost Atticus in his relationship with his sister, and what does it gain for the household his children are growing up in?
2. Lee builds a deliberate contrast between Calpurnia's silence ('Cal dried me up') and Atticus's plain answer to Scout's question about 'rape.' Each adult has reasons for the choice she or he makes. Examine the contrast carefully without simplifying it: what might have driven Cal's silence (the moment, the racial situation, the trial's approach), and what drives Atticus's plain answer? What does the chapter as a whole teach about the relationship between truth-telling and the moral education of children, and how does this education prepare Scout for the courtroom register of Part Two?

+ 3 more questions in the complete study guide