Family life in To Kill A Mockingbird Essay

In order to appreciate To Kill A Mockingbird fully, we should be familiar with some of the background of its setting. The South in the compound times grew into an atomic number 18a with large cotton plantations and small cities. Because of the necessity for cheap labour to pick and seed the cotton, Negro sla real(prenominal) took a strong ingest there. At the outbreak of the American Revolution, there were over 500,000 slaves in this country, with by far the greatest number in the South. As time passed, plantation protesters form a landed aristocracy. The Negroes, though slaves, gained a measure of economic security. On the perimeter of this were the poorer white farmers who either owned small pieces of land or worked as sharecroppers. To Kill a Mockingbird is set against this background of 1930 Southern life. The Finches are a family who once had a large, successful plantation.Their ancestors had been aristocratic ladies and gentlemen of the South. Now they have been decrease t o gentile poverty. They are better off by far than the Cunninghams, for example, who have nothing but their land. Atticus Finch is highly respected throughout the community generally due to his law career. There are many different kinds of family life in To Kill A Mockingbird. There are white families who are higher and lower class and then b privation families. I think that Harper Lee exaggerates the family hierarchy, i.e. the lower class families are shown as being really poor while the higher-class families are shown to be almost ideal. This makes it clearer to us how different the families are.The Finch family would be an example of an ideal family, which is ironic considering that there is no produce. They are a poor family although better off than most and stand near the top of Maycombs social hierarchy. There is a lot of love, trust and security in spite of appearance the family. Atticus is a very good father and has brought piquet and Jem up to be very mature and respect ful. He devotes himself to his children despite criticism from family and neighbors who think his children lack discipline and proper guidance. Atticus is a wise man, committed to justice and equality, and his parenting style is based on fostering these virtues in his children he even encourages Jem and observation tower to call him Atticus so that they can interact on terms as equal as possible. Throughout the novel, Atticus works to develop Scout and Jems respective consciences.He tells Scout to put herself in a persons shoesbefore she judges them. Calpernia acts as a mother figure and is treated as one of the family. She is also their bridge between the white world and her own black community. Calpernias own family may be black, but they are respectful and clean, good Christian people, who are better than some of the white families. Again, Tom Robinson and his family are black but he is near and respectable. However they are still inferior to the extremely lower class white fo lk.The Ewell family is known as white trash. They would be at the very bottom of the hierarchy. They represent the dark side of the South ignorance, poverty, filth, and hate-filled racial prejudice. In contrast with the Finch family they show poor parental care. Bob Ewell is a father of eight who is a drunken, permanently unemployed member of Maycombs poorest family. The attitude and actions of the father influence the childrens behavior and attitude. i.e., they are renound for attending only the first sidereal day of school.Like the Ewells, the Cunningham family is very poor. They are uneducated country farmers but are honest and hardworking. They take nothing unless they can pay it back in their own way, for example leaving Atticus stove wood, hickory nuts and holly to pay for his services.The Radley family is a very good example of parental failure. Their son Boo is an dexterous child emotionally damaged by his cruel father. The parents mistreatment of Boo has resulted in his life being totally ruined. They are also the displace of Maycombs gossip and from this, we get the impression that Boo is a violent and nasty man, when actually he is kind and befriends and protects Jem and Scout.We dont hear very much about Dills family, but from what we do hear, we can see that he has a very difficult situation where he comes from a broken family. Dill spins grand tales about his father but runs away from home later in the book because he feels his mother and stepfather dont care about him. Harper Lee makes it very clear to us that parents influence children so much so that we can see the enormous expiration between the Finches and The Ewells. We are introduced to a good black family that isdestroyed by a drunken bum who is unfortunately white. This complicates us to show the intricacy of the righteous values that were unjust at the time.