Image of Great Depression in To Kill a Mockingbird Free Essay Example

October 19, 2021 by Essay Writer

To Kill A Mockingbird shows you a story of how society was during the Great Depression ,but one town in particular Maycomb county where they wasn’t just poor ,but they had rules and guidelines also where they was greeted with a lot of disrespect and most importantly prejudice. Prejudice is where people judge one another before they get to know them, judging someone based on there group whether it be race, religion, or if someone is more or less financially as stable.

In any community prejudice is dangerous. It excludes people from certain community’s, makes it hard to get justice, and just cause so much unnecessary hatred amongst the community. If there was not any judgment the community could live so much more peacefully and there would be significantly less crime and danger.

In To Kill A Mockingbird , Harper Lee shows how prejudice is a fault to all community’s but Maycomb County specifically. For an example Boo Radley being left out of the community just for being different.

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He is not like everybody else only because he doesn’t come out of his house. His neighbors never really tried to get to know because he was different instead most of the neighbors started and spread rumors about why he stays in his house or his family history. Jem talks about Boo Radley by saying “ Boo was about six-and-a-half feet tall, judging from his tracks; he dined on raw squirrels and any cat he could catch, that’s why his hands where bloodstained – if you ate an animal raw, you could never wash the blood off.

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There was a long, jagged scar that ran across his face; what teeth he had where yellow and rotten; his eyes popped; and he drooled most the time.” In this quote from the book Jem is judging boo on what he looks like because of this act of prejudice the kids where scared to go on the property and the townspeople feared him. They treated him with disrespect and treated him as if he was unequal because of their prejudice ideas.

Another example of prejudice is in the court case. The court case of Tom Robinson where Tom is being trialed for an accusation of raping Mayella Ewell. Mr. Ewell, a white male, who is defending his daughter against Tom, a black male. Even though a lot of the evidence show Tom is very much innocent, he still lost the trial. Jem believes the trial wasn’t fair on Tom with all the presented evidence. When Jem brought up the fact that the trial was unfair Atticus’s response was “In our court, when it’s a white man’s word against a black man’s word, the white man’s always wins. They’re ugly but those are the facts of life” Atticus only said this because all the evidence was on Tom’s side but yet Tom still lost the court hearing. Tom only lost the case because his word is significantly less important than the white man. In this case it seems like the court sees Tom as less than the Ewell family just because of his skin color.

Racism put him behind bars instead of evidence of any actual criminal acts that was committed. Atticus realizes the fault of the community. He realizes how unfair it was, he understands that prejudice is how the case was determined not the truth or the evidence. The last example of prejudice in the book is that Aunt Alexandra judged Scout’s friend Walter for being “lower in society” because of the family he came from there are indications that his family lacks wealth. Aunt Alexandra is being prejudice when she says “Because-he-is-trash, that’s why you can’t play with him. I’ll not have you around him, picking up his habits and learning. Lord-knows-what” Aunt Alexandra is judging this little boy because he comes from a poor family. She thinks very little of him because of his family’s financial situation. It is very sad to judge a young boy over his family’s struggles but just because his family is poor doesn’t mean that Walter is a troubled kid or that he has bad habits to be learned. She simply judged a child for the economic struggles of his family. She simply wouldn’t consider letting Scout be Walters friend because his family didn’t have the same amount of money, so Aunt Alexandra’s prejudice stopped Scout from making friends with Walter.

In conclusion to, To Kill A Mockingbird, Harper Lee was trying to show when and where prejudice could take place in Maycomb County. In this book prejudice happens a lot to show you that being prejudice causes more harm instead of taking a step back and accepting people for them self’s not what rumors tell you what to think of someone. Harper had very many good examples of how people judged other people for being any kind of different than themselves. In this book it showed people being prejudice against Boo Radley, Tom Robinson ,and Walter Cunningham, where it showed people judging them before getting to know them, judging them over rumors and thinking they are less equal than anybody else because of race, religion, or wealth. In this book prejudice is a major theme through the whole thing, in which shows how much of an affect it had on society in that time of history.

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