“The ‘Her’ They Were Talking About”: Gender, Childhood, and Queer Time in the Works of Harper Lee
Date
2017
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Producer
Director
Performer
Choreographer
Costume Designer
Music
Videographer
Lighting Designer
Set Designer
Crew Member
Funder
Rehearsal Director
Concert Coordinator
Advisor
Moderator
Panelist
Alternative Title
Department
Haverford College. Department of English
Type
Thesis
Original Format
Running Time
File Format
Place of Publication
Date Span
Copyright Date
Award
Language
eng
Note
Table of Contents
Terms of Use
Rights Holder
Access Restrictions
Haverford users only until 2018-01-01, afterwards Bi-College users only.
Terms of Use
Tripod URL
Identifier
Abstract
This essay analyzes both of Harper Lee’s novels, To Kill a Mockingbird and Go Set a Watchman, arguing that their protagonist, Scout, conceives of normative adult womanhood as restrictive and therefore finds ways to circumvent growing up linearly. Through close reading of moments demonstrating Scout’s tomboy role, her existence in liminal spaces, and her tendency towards flashback, as well as the use of queer and trauma theory as presented by authors such as Kathryn Bond Stockton, J. Halberstam, and Elizabeth Freeman, this essay seeks to demonstrate how gender, childhood, and time are inextricably related in both of these works. Examining the two novels together allows readers to better see how Scout refuses to move straightly, normatively, into adulthood, instead enacting a sort of sideways growth. Looking at both novels also reveals a queer timeline of Lee’s own writing process. The queer temporal patterns of Mockingbird and Watchman’s writing, setting, and release echo Scout’s own nonlinear growth and suggests that issues of gender and time were perhaps even more central to Lee than the racial themes for which the novel has come to be known. The essay concludes by aligning Scout and Lee as two figures that exemplify Stockton’s notion of queer childhood, and discussing how both the writing process and reading experience of Mockingbird and Watchman are extra-textual demonstrations of queer time that mirror Scout’s own experience in the texts.