Rhetoric and Race in To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)
This paper applies narrative and rhetorical criticism to Robert Mulligan's 1962 film To Kill a Mockingbird, adapted from Harper Lee's novel. It examines how the film uses kernel and satellite events to expose the emotional and behavioral roots of racism, bigotry, and mob violence. Through close analysis of two key rhetorical moments — Scout Finch's address to Mr. Cunningham during a lynch mob standoff and Atticus Finch's closing arguments at Tom Robinson's trial — the paper contrasts invitational rhetoric with traditional persuasion. Drawing on Sonja Foss's rhetorical theory and visual imagery schema, the study argues that the film demonstrates the limits of logic-based argumentation against entrenched ideological mob mentality, while affirming the power of individualized, identity-based appeals.
- Introduction: Film as Rhetorical Artifact: Film's rhetoric examined through kernels and satellites
- Historical Context and Civil Rights: Film's placement within 1960s civil rights discourse
- Setting, Characters, and Narrative Structure: Maycomb setting and key character roles analyzed
- Scout's Address to Mr. Cunningham: Invitational Rhetoric: Scout's individualized appeal dissolves mob mentality
- Atticus's Closing Arguments: The Limits of Traditional Rhetoric: Atticus's logic-based persuasion fails against ideology
- Conclusion: Contemporary Relevance and Rhetorical Theory: Film's lessons applied to modern rhetorical challenges
✍️ How to write this paper — guide, tools & examples ▾
What makes this paper effective
- The paper grounds its film analysis in established rhetorical theory, particularly Foss's frameworks for visual imagery and invitational rhetoric, giving the argument scholarly credibility.
- It uses a clear comparative structure, contrasting Scout's successful invitational appeal with Atticus's failed traditional persuasion to illustrate its central thesis about rhetorical efficacy.
- The paper connects a 1960s text to contemporary issues — online mob behavior, gay rights discourse, racial politics — demonstrating the enduring relevance of its rhetorical observations without overstating the analogy.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper demonstrates close textual and visual analysis integrated with theoretical frameworks. Rather than simply summarizing the film, it applies Foss's concepts of rhetorical function, legitimacy, and invitational rhetoric to specific scenes, showing how mise-en-scène (lighting, spatial positioning) reinforces the verbal rhetoric of each pivotal moment. This integration of visual and verbal analysis is a model for intermediate-level media or communication studies writing.
Structure breakdown
The paper opens with a thesis-framing introduction that identifies the film as a rhetorical artifact. It then establishes historical context (Civil Rights movement) and addresses the film's racial ideology critically before turning to setting and character analysis. The analytical core occupies two sections devoted to Scout's and Atticus's rhetoric respectively. A brief conclusion ties the analysis back to rhetorical theory and contemporary relevance. Citations follow MLA format throughout, and a Works Cited list is included.
Introduction: Film as Rhetorical Artifact
The 1962 film To Kill a Mockingbird offers an ideal artifact for narrative and rhetorical criticism, because so much of the film's meaning is found in its dialogue and narration. Adapted from Harper Lee's 1960 novel of the same name, To Kill a Mockingbird follows the story of Jean Louise "Scout" Finch (Mary Badham), her brother Jem (Phillip Alford), and their father Atticus (Gregory Peck), as they confront the racism and bigotry that comes to light during the trial of a Black man accused of raping a white teenage girl in the 1930s. The film contains a number of significant speeches that, when analyzed through rhetorical criticism, can shed light on the unique role of rhetoric in film — especially as it pertains to the use of visual details, something which has not been a major object of study in rhetorical theory until relatively recently.
In particular, examining Scout's address to Mr. Cunningham — a member of a mob intent on lynching the accused man, Tom Robinson — and Atticus's defense of Tom reveals how the film uses both major and minor events, otherwise known as kernels and satellites, in order to achieve its objective aim. That aim is to uncover and critique the underlying emotions and behaviors that contribute to racism, bigotry, and mob violence, as well as to demonstrate the diminishing efficacy of traditional interpretations of rhetoric (Rhetorical Criticism 342).
Though a richly textured work, the objective of To Kill a Mockingbird is readily evident even upon a cursory consideration of the narrative, because this objective is reiterated throughout — both in the central plot of the trial and its aftermath, and in Scout and Jem's interactions with Boo Radley, the town recluse. Both plots focus on the detrimental effects that ill-informed assumptions have not only on the victims of those assumptions, but also on the individuals who hold them, and serve to achieve the film's objective by implicitly and explicitly revealing the underlying emotions and behaviors that precipitate and perpetuate these assumptions. Furthermore, the different rhetorical modes employed by Scout and Atticus serve to demonstrate how traditional forms of rhetoric, embodied by Atticus, are nearly useless in the face of an illogical, immoral mob. In order to better understand how explicit the film's objective is, it will be helpful to consider its immediate historical context as well as the resonance it retains for contemporary society.
Works Cited
Edgerton, Gary. "A Visit to the Imaginary Landscape of Harrison, Texas: Sketching the Film Career of Horton Foote." Literature/Film Quarterly 17.1 (1989): 2–12.
Foote, Horton. To Kill a Mockingbird, the Screenplay: And Related Readings. Boston: McDougal Littell, 1997.
Foss, Sonja K. "A Rhetorical Schema for the Evaluation of Visual Imagery." Communication Studies 45.3–4 (1994): 213–.
Foss, Sonja K., and Eileen Berlin Ray. "Introduction: Theorizing Communication from Marginalized Perspectives." Communication Studies 47.4 (1996): 253–.
Foss, Sonja K. Rhetorical Criticism: Exploration & Practice. 3rd ed. Long Grove: Waveland, 2004.
Grindon, Leger. "Rhetoric and Representation in Nonfiction Film." Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television 19.2 (1999): 261–2.
Holcomb, Mark. "To Kill a Mockingbird." Film Quarterly 55.4 (2002): 34–40.
Mulligan, Robert, dir. To Kill a Mockingbird. Universal Pictures, 1962. Film.
Murray, Jeffrey W. "The Face in Dialogue, Part II: Invitational Rhetoric, Direct Moral Suasion, and the Asymmetry of Dialogue." The Southern Communication Journal 69.4 (2004): 333–47.
Peterson, Valerie V. "The Rhetorical Criticism of Visual Elements: An Alternative to Foss' Schema." The Southern Communication Journal 67.1 (2001): 19–32.
Shackelford, Dean. "The Female Voice in To Kill a Mockingbird: Narrative Strategies in Film and Novel." The Mississippi Quarterly 50.1 (1997): 101–13.
Watson, Rachel. "The View from the Porch: Race and the Limits of Empathy in the Film To Kill a Mockingbird." The Mississippi Quarterly 63.3 (2010): 419–43.
Create your account
Always verify citation format against your institution’s current style guide requirements.