Social Stratification in To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

Introduction: Sociology, Stratification, and Literature

Sociology has long inquired into the profound need people feel to classify their fellow humans — to label them, assess their standing in relation to others, and assign them to a group. This impulse is not inherently harmful, provided the criteria used are free of prejudice. The stratification of human society goes back several millennia, and as much as one might wish to believe that the modern world is approaching an era in which social status as a basis for discrimination will become a thing of the past, the present offers strong evidence that stratification persists even in the most advanced nations.

Literature is one of the vehicles through which writers have exposed the evils of certain societies and reminded us that human beings are always a perfectible image that need only look in the mirror from time to time and listen to common sense. Harper Lee's novel To Kill a Mockingbird is one such literary work that, aside from its indisputable artistic value, functions as a manifesto for all those who still believe the most developed parts of the world have found the solution to inequity, injustice, inequality, and prejudice — and are working to spread it across the globe.

Maycomb's Social Hierarchy During the Great Depression

The action in Harper Lee's novel takes place in a small Southern town heavily affected by the Great Depression. Poverty touches nearly everyone, and only a few are truly able to provide for their families as though economic times were normal and prosperous. The small town of Maycomb struggles to keep afloat, and the people living there become all the more eager to draw distinctions between classes, to divide one another, and to place each person into one stratum or another.

Four main classes stand out from the novel's opening chapters. The narrator, Jean Louise Finch — called Scout — is a child preparing to live out the last years of her innocence, and she becomes our guide through each layer of this rigidly ordered world.

The Finch Family and the White Elite

Scout's father, Atticus Finch, is a successful, intelligent, and exceptional lawyer whose own father was also a lawyer. He has raised his two children, Scout and her brother Jem, in a liberal atmosphere free of prejudice — in the spirit of absolute human values and in deep disregard for any criterion of judging people other than their intrinsic worth as human beings.

Scout's first days in school are difficult because her father had not prepared her for a reality quite different from the ideal world and way of life he had taught his children they inhabited. The novel carries a strong moralizing tone, and the Finch family — represented above all by Atticus — appears to be ideal in nearly every respect, save one: the children's mother died when Scout was two years old. Nevertheless, their father does a commendable job of educating his children until they encounter reality themselves and discover a gap between that reality and their father's teachings.

In the small world of this Southern town, Atticus Finch is an aristocrat. He is white, a second-generation lawyer, and a descendant of landowners. In the real economic landscape of the Depression, the Finch family is among the fortunate few who have preserved their assets and continue to earn a good living through Atticus's intelligent and highly regarded work. He refuses to raise Scout in the spirit of the Southern belle and allows her to develop according to her true nature, to pursue her own dreams and aspirations. He must be aware that the world — especially in the early 1930s, when the nation was swept up in the destructive wave of the Great Depression — is a hard place for those unwilling to conform. Atticus is the one character who seems nearly impossible to imagine in the real world, because he consistently sets the moral tone and never appears to choose injustice, regardless of the cost. He is constant, and therefore almost inhuman.

The Poor Whites: The Cunninghams and the Ewells

The two children in the novel are caught between what they have learned at home about the world, what the real world presents to them, and how they are expected to respond to these new dimensions of their lives. Scout's first days at school are particularly significant, as she meets children who are different in many ways from anyone she had known at home. One of them — the Cunningham boy — has no lunch bag and no money to buy his meal. He represents the next social class: the poor but hardworking whites, those who work the land. Although his parents never have cash on hand, they are able to pay for services rendered to them with the produce of their farm, and they never attempt to acquire anything they cannot pay for.

Conflict arises quickly because Scout is unprepared for the reality of children who go hungry, and her teacher is too inexperienced to acknowledge that not every child has the means to eat a meal at school each day. Stereotypes are firmly in place, and the innocent six-year-old Scout — unable to act outside the framework of her own limited judgment — is punished by a teacher who is equally incapable of understanding her reaction.

Further down the social ladder sits the Ewell family, whose children come to school only on the first day of each year — just enough to avoid being accused of breaking the law. The absurdity is clear: the law exists to serve justice, and justice demands that every child receive at least an elementary education. Yet the Ewell family is not only too poor to keep their children in school for more than a single day, but they are also on the side of breaking the law in other respects. They appear to do no regular work of any kind and survive through theft. They are poor, dishonest, and degraded — the class that the two groups above them work hard to distance themselves from at almost any cost.

Conclusion: Prejudice, Progress, and the Promise of Democracy

Harper Lee depicted the unsweetened but real aspects of life in a small town struggling through the Depression years. People who were starving were too blind to see that the path to progress lay in shedding prejudice and rebuilding society with all who could lend a hand. Atticus's African-American cook, who also helped raise his children after their mother died, teaches lessons in common sense that transcend formal education, skin color, and wealth alike.

Diversity is the key to a young nation like the United States, and its strength has always come from the way people from all corners of the world worked together to make it endure and grow into a world power. The great empires of history were replaced by colonial powers, and those in turn made way for a new kind of power: a democracy in which all people are entitled to pursue their own happiness. To Kill a Mockingbird stands as a reminder that the distance between that promise and its fulfillment is measured, above all, in prejudice — and in the courage required to dismantle it.