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  • Hi, I’m John Green, this is Crash Course Literature,

  • and today were going to talk about To Kill a Mockingbird.

  • So Mockingbird is the rare class of American literature

  • that is both one, relatively easy to read and two, pretty fun to read.

  • I mean, it’s got a cool and somewhat creepy plot that draws you in.

  • There is a young girl, Scout; her brother, Jem; and their weird neighbor, Dill, who become obsessed with their

  • even weirder neighbor, “BooRadley.

  • The kids spend a lot of time reenacting Boo’s backstory

  • the highlight of which involves him allegedly stabbing his father in the leg with scissors

  • and the children become schooled in gender, race, and class relations in Depression-Era Alabama.

  • Mr. Green, Mr. Green, I’m from Alabama!

  • I know, Me From the Past, because I am also you. Anyway, the kids, and also, of course, we as readers,

  • are schooled in all things ethical by the Gregory Peckian Atticus Finch:

  • public defender, sharpshooter, and one of the most beloved father figures in American fiction.

  • [INTRO]

  • So, To Kill a Mockingbird was an absolute literary sensation when it was published in 1960.

  • The Chicago Sunday Tribune called it “a novel of strong contemporary national significance.”

  • Time Magazine said that it

  • "teaches the reader an astonishing number of useful truths about little girls and about Southern life."

  • Now some disparaged Lee’s treatment of poor Southern whites and African Americans as one-dimensional,

  • but Mockingbird so far, at least, has a kind of timeless appeal to it.

  • And to be fair to those critics, there is something simple about Mockingbird and the

  • way that it imagines justice, but it’s also very compelling.

  • And there are times when it feels dated, but again, it was written in 1960.

  • Anyway, it won the 1961 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, it’s been printed over 30 million

  • times, translated into over 40 languages. That’s a lot of dead mockingbirds. So who

  • would write a story with such a depressing title? Well, Harper Lee.

  • So Harper Lee was born in 1926 in the bustling metropolis of Monroeville, Alabama.

  • MFTP: Alabama! Roll Tide! Ooooh, yes, Me From the Past, we are aware.

  • So critics often point out that there are many parallels between Lee’s childhood and

  • that of her main character, Jean LouiseScoutFinch. Lee’s father was an attorney who

  • unsuccessfully defended two African American men accused of murder. Lee’s brother, Edwin,

  • was four years her senior. The family employed an African-American housekeeper

  • who was central in Lee’s upbringing. Lee’s mother, was not dead, but she was quite distant.

  • And Lee’s childhood playmate, Truman Persons, was a weird kid who spent extended periods

  • visiting relatives next door. Now in literature, this boy Truman provided the model for Dill

  • Harris. In real life, this Truman reinvented himself as Truman Capoteicon of American

  • letters, author of Breakfast at Tiffany’s and In Cold Blood. That’s right - he spent

  • his summers in Monroeville. In fact, there’s a longstanding literary

  • conspiracy theory that since Harper Lee never wrote another book, maybe Truman Capote is

  • the real author of To Kill a Mockingbird. Which, if you read Mockingbird alongside anything

  • Truman Capote ever wrote, you will immediately realize that it’s just ridiculous. Harper

  • Lee wrote To Kill a Mockingbird. Harper Lee has not written another novel.

  • She didn’t enjoy the spotlight and has declined most requests for interviews and speeches.

  • But she did write a brief, and piercing foreword to a later edition of Mockingbird:

  • The only good thing about Introductions is that in some cases they delay the dose

  • to come. Mockingbird still says what it has to say; it has managed to survive the years

  • without preamble.” Her publishers were like, “We need a new

  • foreword so we can sell more copies of the book.” And she was like, “All right, but

  • my introduction is gonna be about how useless introductions are.”

  • All right, before we discuss how Mockingbird manages to “[say] what it has to say,”

  • let’s look at the plot in the Thought Bubble: So, Scout, Jem, and Dill spend two summers

  • sipping lemonade and cultivating fantasies about their mysterious homebound neighbor,

  • BooRadley and daring one another to touch his door. The children act out events

  • from Boo’s life. And although Boo remains hidden, his chewing gum does not. This gum,

  • along with other gifts, appears in a tree outside the Radley house.

  • Meanwhile, Scout learns that her father, Atticus, has been appointed to defend Tom Robinson,

  • a black man with a deformed left arm, wrongly accused of raping Mayella Ewell, a friendless

  • white nineteen-year old who lives behind a garbage dump. Mayella lives with a gaggle

  • of filthy and uneducated siblings and an often-drunk father, who beats and possibly molests her.

  • Despite Tom’s obvious innocence, I mean, Mayella was hit on the right side of her face

  • by a man without a left arm, the white population of Maycomb resents Atticus for being his court

  • appointed public defender. With the help of Jem and Scout, Atticus dissuades a mob from

  • lynching Tom. Atticus is less successful, however, at swaying the jury. Tom is declared

  • guilty; He escapes from prison and then is shot and killed.

  • Bob Ewell, the father of Mayella, is miffed at being ridiculed by Atticus in court. After

  • spitting at Atticus, Ewell attacks his children. Boo Radley comes to the rescues and makes

  • good on his history of stabbing people, and the children are saved.

  • Thanks, Thought Bubble. So there we see, like, two of the biggest problems with To Kill a

  • Mockingbird. First, that the Ewell family is kind of like one-dimensionally villainous.

  • And secondly, that the great hero of the story is this, like, rich white dude.

  • But having acknowledged that, I don’t wanna miss all the stuff that’s still really resonant

  • and important to contemporary readers. So throughout the book, Scout is encouraged

  • to look at things from other peoplesperspectives. Which of course was, like, the great fundamental

  • failure of the Jim Crow South. Like at the end of the novel, Scout no longer

  • sees Boo as this, like, terrifying other, she’s able to imagine how events appear

  • from his perspective. And in doing so, she’s following Atticus’s

  • famous advice:

  • You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view--until

  • you climb into his skin and walk around in it.“

  • I just want to clarifying that were not talking about, like, Silence of the Lambs-style

  • walking around in someone else’s skin, I’m talking about empathy.

  • That said, it occurs to me that bringing up Silence of the Lambs allows us to talk about

  • the macabre and Mockingbird as, like, a Southern Gothic novel.

  • So you all remember the Gothic novel from Frankenstein, with its blend of horror and

  • its interest in the sublime. So Gothic literature relies on archetypes,

  • like grotesque monsters, innocent victims, heroic knights, etc.—to create dramatic

  • tension and it uses dark settings, like medieval castles, to heighten the emotional impact

  • of a story. Now in the Southern Gothic movement that emerged

  • in the American South, “real,” although still fictional, people replace those Gothic

  • archetypes. Like at the start of Mockingbird, Boo is a reclusive monster; Jem, Scout and

  • Dill are his potential victims; and Atticus is an heroic knight.

  • Now later, ignorance, racism, and violence prove to be the novel’s realmonsters.”

  • And Tom and Mayella are their victims. Atticus, of course, gets to remain the hero.

  • And in Southern Gothic fiction, decaying buildings or bodies replace the medieval castle as the

  • dark settings that heighten a story’s emotional impact.

  • I mean, were told that Maycomb is a town in which,

  • In rainy weather the streets turned to red slop; grass grew on the sidewalks, the

  • courthouse sagged in the square.” And many of Maycomb’s inhabitants also have

  • bodies that are broken, infected, or off-balance, right? Like Atticus is too old to play tackle

  • football and, to his daughter’s inexplicable horror, he wears glasses.

  • He’s a monster! Now he’s a regular person. Now I’m a monster again.

  • Mrs. Dubose, the cantankerous morphine addict, has a particularly heinous mouth. Tom’s

  • left arm has been torn apart in a cotton gin. Jem’s left arm is eventually deformed by

  • Ewell. And ultimately, these broken, off-balance,

  • horrifying attributes of Maycomb and its inhabitants expose the corruption and decay of Southern

  • culture itself. So Mockingbird is one of the great Southern

  • Gothic novels, but it’s also one of the great American bildungsromans.

  • Like Jane Eyre, it’s a novel about a young person’s education and coming of age. So

  • at the beginning, I’m like - Ooohhhh, it must be time for the open letter.

  • Oh hey there, Darth Vader. An open letter to the German language:

  • Dear German, youve given us so much. “Vaderfor instance, the German word forfather.”

  • Schadenfreude”, the pleasure we experience when others suffer. “Kummerspeck”, which

  • literally translates togrief bacon,” the way we eat when were sad.

  • And, of course, terms likesitzpinkler,” a man who sits to pee.

  • But perhaps your greatest gift isbildungsroman,” because not only did you give us the word,

  • you also kind of gave us the idea. So this sitzpinkler would like to thank you

  • for that and all of your many linguistic gifts. Best wishes, John Green.

  • So at the beginning of Mockingbird, a six-year-old Scout can already read the newspaper, in spite

  • of a lack of formal education, and when Scout demonstrates that she can read at school,

  • Miss Caroline — a teacher with a loose grasp of John Dewey’s philosophycommands:

  • Now tell your father not to teach you any more. It’s best to begin reading with a

  • fresh mind. You tell him I’ll take over from here and try to undo the damage—“

  • But of course both academically and morally, Scout doesn’t get her education in school,

  • she gets it precisely from her father. Scout’s also called a tomboy, and most women

  • in her community critique how she speaks and dresses and plays. Yet who can blame her for

  • wanting to be a tomboy? Jem often tells her that girls are hateful and embarrassing and

  • frivolous and worse, when Dill beginsfollowing Jem about,” he starts to treat Scout as

  • an object: “He had asked me earlier in the summer to

  • marry him, then he promptly forgot about it. He staked me out, marked as his property,

  • said I was the only girl he would ever love, then he neglected me.”

  • Scout consistently resists the notion that women are a form of property. In fact, throughout

  • the novel, Lee uses Scout’s reflections to expose the performative aspects of gender

  • or the ways in which gender, like, results from what feminist critic Judith Butler describes

  • as therepeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid

  • regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a

  • natural sort of being.” That’s a bit complicated, but basically,

  • Scout stands in opposition to the idea that you have to do or be a, b, or c in order to,

  • like, be a real woman. But of course, there are limits to how much

  • Scout can act like a boy. Like when Jem and Dill spend afternoonsgoing in naked

  • swimming in a creek, Scout is left to divide thelonely hoursbetween Calpurnia,

  • the housekeeper, and Miss Maudie. And these two women prove to be Scout’s

  • strongest female allies. Calpurnia supports Scout’s independence by teaching her to

  • write in the kitchen. And Miss Maudie bolsters Scout’s confidence. Like when a neighbor

  • ridicules Scout for wearing pants, Scout recalls, “Miss Maudie’s hand closed tightly on

  • mine, and I said nothing. Its warmth was enough.” Vitally, neither of these women is able to

  • serve on a jury in the town of MaycombMaudie, “because she’s a woman,” and Calpurnia,

  • because she is both a woman and black. This not-so-subtle social commentary provides the

  • backbone for Harper Lee’s argument about the dangers of limiting women’s political

  • rights, like had those women sat on that jury, Lee implies, the trial might have gone very

  • differently. But of course, the jury ends up taking the

  • side of Mayella Ewell. And although it’s difficult to forgive her for wrongly accusing

  • Tom, it’s clear that she is also a victim of this perverse form of patriarchy.

  • Rather than being permitted to, like, attend school and have a normal life, Mayella has

  • been forced to care for seven siblings and keep house for a violent, drunk father. She’s

  • isolated and friendless, and she tries to kiss Tom and when her father catches her,

  • he beats her, and possibly rapes her. And only then does she allow herself to try to

  • escape that violence by blaming someone else. Mayella’s world is circumscribed and terrifying,

  • which is strongly contrasted with Scout’s pre-adolescent freedom and wonder.

  • So in the end, I would argue that what some critics read as a one-dimensional treatment

  • of the Ewell family, turns out to be a pretty sophisticated commentary on gender relations

  • in the time and place of the novel. This reminds us again that when we read, we

  • as readers are empowered to make choices. A novel really is a collaboration between

  • the author and the reader. And Harper Lee’s great novel may be straightforward

  • in its prose and in its plot, but when it comes to opportunities for that collaboration,

  • it is extremely rich. Thanks for watching. I’ll see you next week.

  • Crash Course is made by all of these nice people, and it exists because of your support

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  • making Crash Course possible; thanks for watching, and as we say in my hometown,

  • Don’t forget to be awesome.”

Hi, I’m John Green, this is Crash Course Literature,

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モッキンバードを殺すために、パートI - クラッシュコース文学210 (To Kill a Mockingbird, Part I - Crash Course Literature 210)

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