6—
Woman and the Authorial Voice:
Disembodied Desire:
To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)

Miss Lee Considers the Novel to Be a Simple Love Story.
Contemporary Authors

I Yearn for the Law.
Julia Kristeva

The question of whether a woman's voice can assume authority as the voice of a woman turns on all the issues of women's speech we've examined so far: the way women's voices are positioned within narratives that require their submission to patriarchal roles, how female characters are made to use language that silences them, how the cinematic conventions of visual and audio representation convert woman to spectacle, precluding her status as subject, and the placement of women on the weak end of sound/image hierarchies. The authorial voice is rarely heard as a woman's voice in classical cinema, but when it is, it can illustrate some key points about the differences between women's and men's voices in film. While the male disembodied narrator has historically been positioned as the authoritative "enunciator" of his cinematic text, the ability to assume a position of bodiless invulnerability (the voice of God) is tested when the disembodied narrator is a woman. The value of sacrificing the body in order to embrace this illusion of mastery is also subjected to serious questioning.

To Kill a Mockingbird is a major work in American popular culture both as a novel and as a film, although it has not been seriously addressed in either film or literary studies.^[1] In this essay I would like to propose a reading of To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) that challenges traditional accounts of the film as a liberal statement on race relations and focus instead on the film's construction

of a female authorial presence. First, by looking at the construction of the author, Harper Lee, in the press around the time of the novel's publication and the film's release two years later, I propose to examine the various ways Lee's image could be appropriated to bolster readings of the film as a story "authored" by a woman. "Authorship" in this case encompasses the common literary definition ("the occupation or career of writing books")^[2] as well as a cinematically constructed "authorial presence" made vivid by the film's incorporation of a voice-over narrator speaking in the first person. How do the film's narrative and narrator develop the relationship of novelist Lee with the main character, Scout? How is Scout's relationship to language confounded with desire; what does this desire enable and what does it foreclose? What are the implications of giving the woman-author a cinematic presence through the use of voice-over? And, more important, what is it about not only the story but her telling of it —the fact that it is presented as being "authored" by a woman—that ultimately makes the film compatible with patriarchal ideology? And, lastly, is there any way a feminist rereading of the film can open it up and allow us—if briefly—to hear the female voice?

The film's credits pose the first of a series of disjunctions that will figure throughout the film. A little girl hums on the sound track as we see a series of objects that will assume significance in the course of the film. We see only her hands as she makes her first attempts at creation, drawing pictures around the objects of her life. The splits between sound and image, language and voice, character and authorial consciousness that will be central throughout the film are immediately reformulated with the introduction of a woman narrator, herself a figure in crisis as a disembodied voice exiled from the image. Over the film's opening shots, a woman's voice introduces us to Maycomb, "a tired old town," and to herself: "That summer I was six years old."^[3] The camera sweeps down langorously as a child in overalls swings into the frame on a rope.

The woman we hear, whom we shall never see, is the adult the child will become.^[4] It has been argued that when there is a temporal disjunction between the offscreen self of the narrator and the figure we see, it is caused by trauma.^[5] The narrative of To Kill a Mockingbird relates the trauma that divorced the voice from the image, the adult woman from the physical, unselfconscious child. Through her voice, the narrator assumes the place of author as literally (and only) a speaking female subject. As we shall see, what she authorizes—the sacrifice demanded of the female who would speak—is the writing out of her own body.

To Kill a Mockingbird concerns two children, Scout (Mary Badham), a six-year-old tomboy, and her ten-year-old brother Jem (Philip Alford). They live with their widowed father, Atticus Finch (Gregory Peck), in the small town of Maycomb, Alabama, in the early 1930s. While exploring their world over the course of two summers, Scout and Jem seek to discover the secret of the mysterious Boo Radley, a recluse living in a dilapidated house down the

street, and witness their father's controversial defense of a black man accused of rape.

When the film was released, it was the liberal civil rights stance of the rape trial that was seen as the "point" of the film and of the book before it. Critics hailed or dismissed the film according to their perception of its presentation of the racial issue. John Russell Taylor's review in Sight and Sound labeled the film an "Oscar trap with a bait of high-toned liberal sentiment."^[6] No small part of the film's appeal as "respectable," "progressive" entertainment was its status as an adaptation of an award-winning best-seller. The novel, published in 1960, won the Pulitzer Prize and within a year had sold 500,000 copies and been translated into ten languages.^[7] Harper Lee was transformed into an instant celebrity, interviewed in Life, Newsweek , and the Christian Science Monitor .^[8] The formation of Lee's public image was strongly influenced by the perception of the novel as a thinly veiled autobiography. As the consciousness of the "author" inflected contemporary readings of both the novel and the film (and as the concept of author-as-woman will be central to my reading), a short biography of Harper Lee is in order.

Harper Lee, a patrilineal descendant of Robert E. Lee, modeled the character of Atticus Finch on her father, Amasa Lee. Finch was her mother's maiden name. A biography of the author states that, "Her decision to attend law school is attributed to the strong influence of her lawyer-father."^[9] However, for reasons unstated, Lee left law school at the University of Alabama shortly before she was to complete her degree and turned to writing fiction. Although she left the law, her turning to literature only brought her home. In an interview, Lee exults in contradicting Thomas Wolfe: "I can go home again."^[10] "Home" is her father. She wrote To Kill a Mockingbird in "her father's law office."^[11] A photograph states their symbiotic relationship visually: an aged Amasa Lee sits in a rocker on a front porch, facing left. Harper Lee reclines on a chaise opposite, facing him. Like a pair of inward-facing bookends, they form two sides of a single figure. We must see her through him.

The Lawyer/Father

As the description "lawyer-father" indicates, the role of the father is everywhere inflected by Atticus's function as upholder/performer of the Law. At one point, when asked why he defends a black man, Atticus identifies his integrity as a lawyer as the basis for whatever moral (prohibitive) authority he may have as a parent. He says that if he didn't do his best, "I couldn't hold my head up in town, I couldn't even tell [Scout] or Jem not to do something again."

With their mother dead, Atticus softens the strict precepts of the Law with a maternal compassion. He councils Scout not to torment the eccentric, unseen Boo Radley or to ridicule a young backwoods guest, or to embarrass a

poor man who pays his legal fees with hickory nuts. Although he is a crack shot, he admonishes the children never to kill a mockingbird because mockingbirds only exist to give pleasure. At all times, the father teaches fairness, compromise, and balance. At one point, Scout is dead set against ever returning to school because of a fight with her teacher. "[She] said you were teachin' me to read all wrong and to stop it. . . . If I keep goin' to school we can't ever read anymore." He asks her if she knows what a compromise is. "Bending the law?" "Uh . . . no," he explains, "It's an agreement reached by mutual consent. . . . You concede the necessity of goin' to school, [and] we'll keep right on readin' the same every night, just as we always have." In this case "lawyer talk" substitutes for and demonstrates the best brand of "father talk."

The subject of this altercation shows not only Atticus's paternal/legal technique but what Atticus teaches that Scout values most. He teaches her to read. In the first and most striking "writing out" of the mother (which I shall address in more depth later), Lee echoes a tendency identified across the work of literary women, the "massive disavowal of the tutelary role the mother classically assumes with respect to the child's linguistic education, of her function as language teacher, commentator, storyteller" (Silverman 1988, p. 105, discussing Julia Kristeva's work). In To Kill a Mockingbird, the mother has been dead since before Scout, our storyteller, can remember and, significantly, since before she learned to speak. Atticus is all, and Scout's happiest moments are when she and Atticus read together at night. Literature becomes the focus of a privileged, private time.

Early in the film, Atticus sits at the foot of Scout's bed as she reads Huckleberry Finn aloud. At first it seems as if Scout has escaped socialization into her gender role. Looking like a female Huck Finn, she has short straight brown hair that is always falling in her eyes, an accent you could cut with a knife, and wears overalls most all the time. However, in teaching language, Atticus teaches gender difference. After Scout puts down her book and gets ready for bed, she asks to see Atticus's pocket watch. She snatches it as he dangles it hypnotically in front of her. "Atticus? Jem says this watch is gonna belong to him some day." "That's right." "Why-y-y?" she asks. He answers, "It's customary for the boy to have his father's watch." Scout asks: "What are you gonna give me?" and he replies, "I don't know that I have much else of value that belongs to me ." He mentions her mother's jewelry. Scout stretches and purrs with pleasure as her femininity is inscribed for her by a commanding masculine figure.^[12] While his age desexualizes him (he is early on identified as "old"), Scout's calling Atticus by his first name obscures his position as father, making him ripe as a focus for infatuation. As "her father," he is abstract, like the Law. As "Atticus," the incest taboo is obscured, and a mythical equality allows Scout to play at feminine wiles while her father paternally seduces her into femininity.

Just as Atticus's role as father is always measured and balanced by his position as a lawyer, his standing as a lawyer is affected by his fatherhood. Atticus is appointed to defend Tom Robinson, a black man accused of raping Mayella Ewell, a poor white woman. Time accused Peck of playing "Abe Lincoln of Alabama,"^[13] and when a lynch mob gathers outside the local jail the night before the trial, the scene is shot in a way strikingly reminiscent of a similar scene in Young Mr. Lincoln . As Marsha Kinder points out, Lincoln, political patriarch and upholder of the law, becomes the phallus, unwinding to intimidating height, and possessing a solidity that (1) cannot be moved and (2) assumes not only the authority but the raw power to symbolically castrate lesser men who seek to act outside the Law.^[14]

Atticus/Peck is found sitting casually in a tipped-back chair on the porch of the jailhouse, reading a massive law book. Cars pull up and the lynch mob assembles. Peck uses his friendly, but masculine and authoritative, voice to encourage the men to go home. He invokes the Law. Like Lincoln, "he throws back on the crowd the threat of its own violence,"^[15] saying that the local sheriff is nearby, presumably with a gun. This is a bluff. As the editors of Cahiers du cinéma point out in their analysis of Young Mr. Lincoln, "in the ideological discourse, Law must have power insofar as it is legitimised by its own statement, not through physical strength [or violence], which is used as a last resort and often [as here] simply as a verbal threat."^[16] The members of the lynch mob tell Atticus the sheriff has been lured away on a phoney emergency. Just then, the children, who have been watching from nearby, break through the crowd and jump onto the jailhouse steps. Atticus, frightened for the children, orders Jem to take Scout and their friend Dill home. Jem, being a brave boy (and knowing his gender role), refuses. He will stand and fight. It is Scout who ingenuously disarms the crowd by saying, "Hey!" to one of the men. Shamefaced at her innocent kindness (shades of Shirley Temple), the men withdraw. It is Scout who completes, but at the same time subtly undermines, the Lincolnesque stature of her father. In the 1939 film, it is Lincoln who "defuses the crowd's anger" by "shifting" to a strategy of "complicity/familiarity with the crowd" and by "addressing one individual amongst the lynchers."^[17] Through Scout, a "feminine" and childlike compassion enables the phallus to remain standing and rescues the Father/Law from suffering a direct assault.

The centerpiece of the film and the book is Tom Robinson's trial. Our first introduction to the major participants in the case occurs when the children rush down to the courthouse and, standing on each other's shoulders so they can see in, relate to us the arraignment going on inside. Everything about the trial has resonances of a "primal scene"—in its confusion of sexuality and violence (a misperception typical of children witnessing sexual activity), in the scandalized adults, and particularly in the fact that children are barred

from the proceedings. Jem and Scout are present at the trial because of the kindness of an elderly black minister who lets them sit with him in the balcony reserved for blacks.^[18]

Although it is acknowledged that the black defendant cannot win in a case that depends on his word against a white woman's, Atticus is able through cross-examination to establish that Mayella was beaten by someone who was left-handed, that her father Bob Ewell is left-handed, and that, as both principals testify, Tom Robinson was in her house when her father found them together. In traditional rape defense, she says he attacked her, he says she attacked him.

Atticus's summation to the jury establishes his position not only on civil rights, but primarily on the law:

Now gentlemen, in this country our courts are the great levelers, and in our courts all men are created equal. I'm no idealist to believe firmly in the integrity of our courts and of the jury system—that's no ideal to me, that is a living, working reality.

In Atticus's system, the law is not an oppressive, castrating law (John Ford's Lincoln) nor is his humanity dependent on a maternal weakness (Griffith's presentation of Lincoln as the "Great Heart," for instance).^[19] Rather than envisioning the law as ubiquitous and oppressive, in this vision, the law wielded by the father is a tool for accomplishing justice. This is what makes Atticus fundamentally a liberal lawyer. If the justice that can be accomplished through the law lies only somewhere in an undefined future, so be it. Atticus is not a radical or a revolutionary. Knowing its flaws, he still maintains the law first and foremost as a safeguard against impulse, darkness, and sexuality.

Woman is made to stand as the negative term against which the Law defines itself. In Atticus's summation, it is explicitly the woman who is guilty, and what she is guilty of is desire. According to Atticus, Mayella committed perjury "in an effort to get rid of her own guilt":

She has committed no crime, she has merely broken a rigid and time-honored code of our society. . . .

What did she do? She tempted a Negro. She was white, and she tempted a Negro. She did something that in our society is unspeakable: she kissed a black man. Not an old Uncle, but a strong young Negro man. No code mattered to her before she broke it, but it came crashing down on her afterwards.

In standing on the "time-honored code" Atticus redirects the trajectory of the legal/moral process of guilt-finding. "The defendant is not guilty, but somebody in this courtroom is."

During the trial scene, Scout and the voice of the narrator are shunted aside as the male characters work to expose Mayella's transgressive desire. Yet vi-

sual, verbal, and structural parallels abound that connect the women in and around the text. Mayella has two feminine first names, as does Jean Louise Finch, who is labeled with this double dose of femininity when she's being socialized for school and can no longer use the androgynous "Scout" (much as Nellie Lee assumed the pseudonym "Harper"). The character of Scout and Harper Lee, writer, were explicitly compared in the press. According to Newsweek, Miss Lee "strongly calls to mind the impish tomboy who narrates her novel," both in her "Italian boy haircut" and "the heavy touch of Alabama in her accent."^[20] In Life, Lee is pictured without makeup, wearing a short-sleeved sports shirt, pants, and tennis shoes—what the magazine labels "hometown getup."^[21] Collin Wilcox, as Mayella, in turn looks like an ungainly, adolescent Scout. Her hair is straight and unkempt, a hair ribbon pathetically failing to keep scraggly bangs out of her eyes. She also wears no makeup. The nondescript print dress Mayella wears at the trial is strongly reminiscent of Scout's dress on her first day of school. ("I still don't see why I hafta wear a darn ole dress, " Scout declares.) Both child and adolescent wriggle inside their clothes as if trapped by shapeless tributes to an ideal of femininity that just doesn't seem to fit. Mayella, the discredited and exposed "white trash 'victim,'"^[22] is the link between the child we see and the woman on the sound track, and the cause of their division.

When Mayella is being cross-examined by Atticus, she quickly reverts to childlike behavior. She perches on the edge of her chair, clutching the seat with her hands. When Atticus asks if the evening of the attack was the first time she ever invited Tom Robinson inside her yard, she nods and barks an emphatic "Yes!" When he asks her if she hadn't asked him in on previous occasions, she shrugs, bites her lip, and puts her arms behind her. "I mighta . . ." The camera lingers on Mayella so that we can see the rapid transitions from childlike confusion to rehearsed certainty. When Atticus asks her about the details of the attack, she squints up at him through her bangs with a quizzical look. Atticus fixes her in a stern authoritative stare; the judgment he

passes upon her as a lawyer replicates his disapproval of her from the position of the father.

The film makes it abundantly clear that Mayella is lying and Tom Robinson is surely innocent. It is part of the liberal grounding of the film, however, that in order for Robinson not to be the racist specter of the black rapist, he be figuratively castrated. Long before we see Robinson, we hear him as a ghostly offscreen voice asking Atticus, "They gone?" after the mob outside the jail has gone. The first time we see Robinson speak is at the trial, when he is made to stand and declare his impotence; he can't have beaten Mayella with his left hand because it was mangled in a shredder when he was young. His entire arm is "useless." Atticus calls him "not an old Uncle but a strong young Negro man, " but the Robinson we see is defined as physically incapable. He only speaks when prompted and cued by Atticus.

John Ellis finds a similar process at work in another film of the period, John Ford's 1960 Sergeant Rutledge . Pam Cook summarizes his argument. "The film produces a commentary on racism by taking the myth of black supersexuality as its central problem, displacing the myth in favour of the proposition that blacks are a-sexual; Rutledge [a black cavalry officer accused of rape] becomes a human being only insofar as he foreswears his sexuality" (quoted in Pam Cook, ed., The Cinema Book [London: BFI 1985], p. 188). This is why ultimately To Kill a Mockingbird is next to useless on the issue of race, except as an artifact of early 1960s liberal sentiment. Cook also points out how "the trial device enables commentary to be carried out at all points of ambiguity. . . . Thus multiple meanings are limited and controlled"—potentially militating against feminist, progressive, or resistant readings (ibid.). However, I would like to propose a feminist reading that resists the film's smooth liberal surface by examining how women are distorted and fragmented (both in their relationships with each other and in relation to their own desires) by the racist and patriarchal system delineated in the film.

When Mayella begins her scathing assault on the system in which she is becoming ensnared, the camera zooms in.

I got somethin' to say and then I ain't gonna say no more. He took advantage of me. And if you fine, fancy gennelmen ain't gonna do nothin' about it, then you're just a bunch of lousy, yella, stinkin' cowards. The whole bunch of ya. And your fancy airs don't come to nothin '. Your "Miss Mayella," it don't come to nothin', Mr. Finch. No—no—

Diving out of the bottom of the frame, she runs off the witness stand and plunges into the crowd.

As regards the case, everything Mayella says is identified as false. Everything about the way she speaks, the hesitancies, the fact that what she says does not bear on the case, and especially her accent, brands her as "incoher-

ent" and "inarticulate." In a point I shall take exception to later, Silverman argues that for women in Hollywood sound films "every corporeal encroachment, from a regional accent or idiosyncratic 'grain' to definitive localization in the image," causes the voice to "lose [its] power and authority" and become, like the body, subject to aging and death. . . . Synchronization marks the final moment in any such localization, the point of full and complete 'embodiment'" (Silverman 1988, p. 49). One could say that Mayella's outburst is obsessively synchronized, her accent and the zoom in to a close-up calling attention to every word as she forms it. The Southern Californian Gregory Peck as Atticus, on the other hand, supplies barely a nod in the direction of an accent. As the embodiment of all-are-created-equal sentiment, his nondescript middle American is appropriate.

Yet I would argue that it is precisely the way Mayella speaks that supplies much of the power of her tirade and is the source of a particular power for all of the women in the film. Scout doesn't hide her accent, saying "Hey!" to everyone. Nor does Harper Lee. Scout's language is as unsocialized as her hair and clothes. For instance, at one point she says that another character "won't take nothin' from nobody." While I shall argue the perverse embodying power of the regional, feminine voice in relation to the narrator, for now, Mayella's accent traps her in her gender and her class, and the fine fancy airs of Atticus, and the court's careful show of concern for her as "victim," "don't mean nothin'."

The effect of the trial on Scout is another matter. In the novel, the trial is seen through the eyes of the children. Scout is sleepy, and it is Jem, a budding lawyer, who appreciates the formality and abstractness of the law, the rules of evidence and the ritual nature of the cross-examination, which, incidentally, humiliates his father's client. In the film, Jem eagerly watches the first two witnesses. When Mayella testifies, Scout is lost in the background of a long shot that favors Jem. As the trial proceeds through the testimony of the police chief, Bob Ewell, Mayella, and Tom Robinson, there are ten reaction shots either isolating or favoring Jem. When the testimony is over and the jury is considering its verdict (and Mayella, for our purposes, has been "convicted"), there is a shot of Scout. She is sitting on the floor looking through the slats of the balcony railing, visually behind bars. The jury returns with a guilty verdict against Robinson, and Jem cries. Scout remains impassive. As the courtroom clears, the black minister who has let them sit with him in the balcony murmurs, "Miss Jean Louise?" Scout looks up from her figurative cage. As Atticus slowly leaves the courtroom, the black population of Maycomb rise in silent tribute. The minister tells her, "Miss Jean Louise, stand up. Your father's passing." It is the first time Scout has to be instructed to pay respect to Atticus.

What comes between Scout and Atticus is the law. Scout does not rebel in

any way against her father, but they are kept apart from this point until the film's climax. (In the scene immediately after the trial, when Atticus is informed that Tom Robinson has been shot down "trying to escape," we forget Scout is even present as Atticus leaves with Jem to inform Robinson's family.) At the trial, Scout confronts the problem of her future. Her desire—a conflation of desire for the father with desire for language—is even more forbidden than Mayella's. Jane Gallop writes that a woman's "desire for the father's desire (for his penis) causes her to submit to the father's law, which denies his desire/penis, [and] operates in its place."^[23] I would like to suggest To Kill a Mockingbird as an illustration of the process whereby a young woman learns that to love language as epitomized by the Law, literalized here as her father, is to sanction the terms of her own exclusion. To speak, on these terms, demands such a complete identification with the Father/Law that it obliterates any chance of a woman speaking in her own voice. And yet Scout, as both child-character and adult author, strives to maintain the father as some kind of ideal. The question, then, is how to become a woman—an adult, a wielder of language, a subject—and not be rejected by the father. What is at stake in this process of extricating language from the Law is not just the girl's preservation of an idealized father, but the possibility of creating a position for herself as subject and author—of constructing a voice. However, we eventually have to ask to what extent this voice is ultimately coopted for the Law when the father is held immune from criticism and the mother is radically excluded.

The Bad Father

Although the trial might introduce ambivalence to Scout's idealization of her father, true antipathy is precluded with Bob Ewell around. The polar opposite of Atticus throughout the film, Ewell is the dark side of paternal authority that Atticus's liberal, maternal goodness conceals. The Methodist teetotaler confronts the alcoholic when Ewell staggers up to the car to glare menacingly at Jem as Jem waits outside the Robinson house for his father.

Atticus always wears a suit and a tie (at home a sweater and a tie), while Ewell throws a jacket over his overalls and scrunches a hat on his head as he sways in the street yelling "nigger-lover" after the Finch's departing car. In place of Atticus's measured, thoughtful reasoning, Ewell asserts the "time-honored" wisdom of racist slurs. More important, where Atticus uses stern disapproval to browbeat Mayella, the testimony at the trial draws a vivid picture of Ewell's style of fatherhood—physically beating his daughter to repress her sexuality. Both fathers are repressive; it comes down to a matter of degree. Ewell and Atticus's deeper relationship as the dual sides of the role of the father is revealed in their complementary actions. Ewell's abuse of the law prompts Atticus's exposure of Ewell's daughter, Mayella. Atticus's actions as the enforcer of the law looses Ewell on Atticus's children.

Some time after the trial, when Jem and Scout are returning from an agricultural pageant, Scout finds out what it can mean to be a woman. She has been transformed by costume into a representative of one of the state's prime agricultural products, a ham. In the dark, threatening woods between school and home, the instinctual violence her father's law means to control is unleashed. The good father, whose actions have provoked the attack, is nowhere to be found.

The scene is presented through the severely restricted vision of Scout. A man grabs Jem and breaks his arm, but before he can hurt Scout, immobilized by her costume, another figure appears. As a close-up of Scout's eyes shows her desperately trying to see what is happening, we hear the heavy breathing of a struggle. Scout, choosing between the confinement of respectability and near-nakedness, wriggles out of her costume and runs home. In the distance, she sees a man carrying Jem up the front steps. Atticus runs out of the house and Scout jumps into his arms. As the police chief and Atticus grill Scout to find out who was fighting with Ewell, Scout points to a shadowy figure behind the bedroom door. "Why, there he is. He can tell you his name. Hey, Boo!" And Boo Radley, never before seen, emerges from the shadows.

Although they had never seen him, Boo has played a major role in the fantasy lives of Scout and Jem. The children dare each other to go near his house. He leaves them trinkets in the hollow of a tree, which they save and keep secret from Atticus. Boo lives in the kind of old dark house Annette Kuhn calls "the classic 'other scene,' the site precisely of enigma and mystery."^[24] The "Radley place," like the house Kuhn describes from The Big Sleep, is the object of the children's "obsessive return," and the subject of major set pieces in the film's first half (Scout's precarious inner-tube ride that crashes her into the front porch, Jem's brave venturing to touch the front door, the nighttime raid, etc.). The children's secret project of "making Boo come out," of making the house divulge its mysterious tenant, is interrupted by the trial and its consequences. But the house returns in the film's penultimate scenes, with Boo himself as the answer to the final enigma.

Boo stands as the test case that proves the superiority of literature over the law. When it becomes apparent that Boo stabbed Bob Ewell in order to save the children, Atticus tells the sheriff there will have to be a trial. Although he owes his children's lives to Boo, Atticus cannot break free of the law's "guilty or not guilty." Boo, however, confounds and subdues the logic of the law. The sheriff urges the interests of a "higher" law—compassion. Scout concurs. As she did at the jailhouse, Scout gently indicates the limits of her father's law. By translating Atticus's literal prohibition against killing mockingbirds into a more powerful metaphorical one, she explains that Boo is like the mockingbird, only seeking to please, and it would be a sin to cause him harm. Together with the sheriff, Scout in effect makes Atticus party to a cover-up.

Boo not only exceeds the law's restrictive binarism, he is explicitly inarticulate. His story must be told by someone else. It is Scout who argues his case, takes him by the hand and walks him home. As she stands alone on the Radley porch. The victorious discoverer and interpreter of the "other scene," the narrator returns on the sound track in a wash of lush Southernisms set against Elmer Bernstein's delicate, emotion-laden score.

The summer that had begun so long ago had ended and another summer had taken its place . . . and a fall . . . and Boo Radley had come out. I was to think of these days many times, of Jem and Dill and Boo Radley and Tom Robinson. And Atticus.

He would be in Jem's room all night. And he would be there . . . when Jem waked up in the mornin'.

Back home, Scout crawls into her father's lap. The father can now be restored because the law has been subtly but firmly displaced.

The Narrator

As I have shown, Lee was a well-known public figure at the time of the film's release. The image that the public would have brought to To Kill a

Mockingbird of the author as a literary personage would have included not only biographical information about Lee, but a rich legacy of other works of the same genre. The reviewer for the New York Times, for instance, exclaimed thankfully that, in the novel, "Miss Lee has not tried to satisfy the current lust for morbid, grotesque tales of Southern depravity."^[25] The genre to which he refers—and to which both Mockingbird 's certainly belong—is the "Southern Gothic." Many critics specifically compared Lee to other women writers working in this genre (e.g., Carson McCullers and Flannery O'Connor). One reviewer even condescendingly judges Lee on the basis of gender: "Miss Lee does write like a woman. . . . She paints Scout in warm tones and we like the child."^[26] What is important is the contextualization of Lee and the book within a genre understood in its day as hospitable to women (if not altogether becoming) and tied firmly to a specific region.^[27] Southern Gothic novels were also the source of a spate of films made in the late 1950s and early 1960s such as God's Little Acre (1958), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958), The Sound and the Fury (1959), Sanctuary (1961), Sweet Bird of Youth (1962), and anything authored by Tennessee Williams or Truman Capote.^[28]

In addition to preserving the first-person narration of the book, creating an "authorial presence," and foregrounding the work's status as an adaptation, the use of a narrator in the film version of Mockingbird introduces an extra dimension familiar to fans of the genre, a feverish preoccupation with words. The films of Tennessee Williams's works alone are filled with words lovingly lingered over; Burl Ives starting a roundelay of "men-dacity" in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, or the contagious "dementia praecox" in Suddenly Last Summer, or Katharine Hepburn in the latter blissfully invoking "Sebastian and Violet, Violet and Sebastian," as she rises to madness in a byzantine iron-work elevator.

The opening moments of To Kill a Mockingbird are defined by Kim Stanley's slow, rolling emphasis as she tells us, "Maycomb was a tired . . . old . . . town," or when she describes how the ladies in the summer "were like soft teackes with frostin's of sweat and sweet talcum." This sense of words as somehow special in themselves is restricted to the narrator. Scout never treats language like this. Nor—interestingly—does she ever express interest in becoming a writer. It is the woman narrator who binds the identification of Scout to Harper Lee. It is through her that we are instructed to read Scout as the central character, and through her voice that we are made aware of a narrating consciousness outside the film. The narrator is Scout grown up, but she is also the cinematic stand-in for Harper Lee, reiterating in the film the widespread assumption that the novel was partly autobiographical. Because of the narrator, we assume that Scout one day will choose to record her growing consciousness of injustice, choosing to become a woman who lingers over the rhythmic alliteration of "sweat and sweet talcum"—or a woman who leaves law school to write fiction.

There is nevertheless a price to be paid in choosing literature if not the law,

one the film makes clear. In accepting her father's liberalism (and consequently gainsaying radical change), Scout must forfeit the right to openly speak her desire. The role of rebellious daughter is projected onto the discredited Mayella. Scout becomes nothing but words, luxurious words, but only words. By accepting the substitution of language in place of her beloved Atticus, Scout becomes the film's narrator—a bodiless woman. The choice of literature, seen in this light, seems at first to be a compromise that borders on collaboration.

What is notably absent from the film's adoration of language obtained through a nurturing father is the figure of the mother. For Lacan, "division from the mother" is necessary for the accession to language. In subsequently passing through the Oedipus complex, the female subject is encouraged to reject her mother, to "assume the burden of male lack as well as her own . . . by defining the female body as the site of anatomical insufficiency . . . [and] the female voice as the site of discursive impotence" (Silverman 1988, p. 123). In doing so, the female subject accepts the negative patriarchal definition of the feminine, just as tomboy Scout resoundingly rejects all things "girlish" as she accedes to the "normative and normalizing desire for the father" (ibid.). On the other hand, feminist writers have suggested a more positive reason why women need to distance themselves from their mothers—the need to establish separate identities in the face of what Dorothy Dinnerstein has called the "threat . . . of maternal omnipotence."^[29] Silverman, for example, argues that Kristeva's father-centered and "highly rationalized language must be understood . . . as a defense against her desire for union with the mother," which "within the terms of her own analysis . . . would necessarily mean the collapse of her subjectivity and the loss of her voice" (ibid., p. 113).

Whether Lee's elimination of the mother is a negative rejection of the feminine or a positive assertion of self in the face of a potentially overwhelming identification with the mother, it is clear that the elision of the mother is fundamental to Lee's authorship.^[30] In this sense we can situate the novel To Kill a Mockingbird within the tradition of the Freudian "family romance" as described by Marianne Hirsch. In The Mother/Daughter Plot, Hirsch argues that "the Freudian family romance pattern clearly implies that women need to kill or to eliminate their mothers from their lives" in order to become writers (1989, p. 56). "It is the mother's absence which creates the space in which the heroine's plot and her activity of plotting can evolve. . . . To free the girl's imaginative play, the mother must be eliminated from the fiction" (ibid., pp. 57, 56). As we've seen resoundingly in Mockingbird, this particular "'female family romance' . . . is founded on the elimination of the mother and the attachment to a husband-father" (ibid., p. 57). As Harper Lee said in the epigraph to this chapter, To Kill a Mockingbird is "a simple love story."

Actual mothers are notably absent from both the film and Lee's novel, while fathers abound. Scout's mother has died before the story begins. May-

ella is surrounded by younger brothers and sisters, yet a mother is never mentioned. Dill's mother is somewhere up north, and Boo's offscreen mother dies somewhere in the course of the narrative, without ever being seen. The repression of the maternal assures that the maternal space within the film will be troubled and perverse. A neighbor lady offers occasional words of comfort, and Calpurnia, the black maid, enforces discipline, but the major potential mother figure besides Atticus is, oddly enough, Boo. Unlike father figures who attack children or pass judgment, Boo does motherly things—making toys, sewing Jem's trousers, watching over the children, protecting them from harm. Kuhn's "old dark house"—here associated with Boo—is "the site of unspeakable mysteries whose naming must yet be the condition of their solution"; it is located in the "both familiar and unfamiliar, reassuring and threatening" nature of the uncanny, and one finds there "nothing other than the riddle of the feminine, . . . [the] body of the mother" (Kuhn 1982, p. 10).

If Boo is what is at the heart of the repressed maternal space, then it is there that we can locate the most violent resistance to the father, particularly the father's power to castrate. Viewers frequently take Boo to be retarded or mentally ill. However, the book makes it clear that his condition is the result of overzealous punishment by his father. In many ways, Boo resembles Benjy from William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury , another Southern Gothic with a 1930s setting, and one in which the threatened castration is literal. Boo is a man who, as a boy, assaulted his own father—a father described as highly principled, but cruel. Boo wields the knife again when he stabs Robert E. Lee ("Bob") Ewell to death.^[31] Boo's revolt establishes resistance against the father as coming from the maternal space. Scout's endorsement of this rage when she takes Boo by the hand and shields him from Atticus's law attests to a common cause.^[32] Scout—the woman in the process of creating her own story—also rejects the father's power to castrate. By becoming a writer, Scout can fix herself in time as a child, permanently "Scout," and avoid assuming the problematic feminine status of Jean Louise. But this is also why the adult Scout cannot be represented visually; in patriarchy, the non-castrated woman exists only as a discursive position. A voice.

Besides her love for her father, "Scout" (indicating this single persona constructed out of the character on screen, the voice-over narrator, and the author) seeks to heal the "wound" of symbolic castration through storytelling. Western tradition seeks to nail down being itself with words ("I think therefore I am," "the party of the first part," Brown v. Alabama, Roe v. Wade ), but storytelling creates a space between the words that the reader can fill, potentially, with that which cannot be put into words: the "re-membered" plenitude offered by the mother's voice.^[33] Scout's transformation of the literal into metaphor (Boo as the mockingbird) illustrates the crucial, undefinable space the maternal can preserve against the letter of the law. Oral storytelling being a preeminently feminine form, it is the telling of To Kill a Mockingbird

that allows Scout-the-author to reconstruct a self that incorporates child, adolescent (Mayella incorporated if not embraced), and woman/writer—to become, in effect, her own mother-in-language.

The resulting female subject is, perhaps necessarily, fragmented across several "bodies" in the text: Scout, Mayella, the nameless, bodiless narrator, and Harper Lee. A disjointed subjectivity, I would argue, is characteristic of the experience of women in patriarchy. Here, it is through literature that woman-as-(discursive)-subject is capable of reuniting the fragments of herself declared irreconcilable by the Law.

By writing the novel, Harper Lee reunites the fragments of "woman" scattered by pressures of law and language and makes them all legitimate, valued parts of her past. In the film's use of "Harper Lee, literary persona," however, the woman-as-author serves a different purpose. I would argue that "woman's authorship" in the film is foregrounded precisely because it affirms and consents to the idolization of the father-as-representative-of-the-law. (This could also be posed as one of the reasons for the film's continuing popularity—popularity being a measure of a work's comforting endorsement of the status quo.) However, despite the film's containment of "female authorship" through its appropriation of Lee's persona, I would now like to propose a rereading of the female narrator's voice-over from a feminist point of view.

With the body of the mother "missing," the adult female voice holds a dramatically increased authority. Mary Ann Doane notes that it is rare for a woman's voice-over to continue throughout a film,^[34] but it is precisely the narrator's return at the end of To Kill a Mockingbird that imposes the sense of closure and wholeness. It would be precisely here, in the narrator's physical, voluptuous voice, that the woman's (the author's, and perhaps the mother's) body might reinsert itself into the cinematic text.

Kristeva theorizes the semiotic as the eruption of the body into the symbolic. We can specify the semiotic here as the voice that surrounds and articulates language.^[35] Combined with the Southern Gothic's generic inclination to play with words as things, Kim Stanley's specifically regional, feminine, embodied voice on the sound track fills the emptiness of the words-as-language with a definite sensual pleasure. Stanley's (and Collin Wilcox's and Mary Badham's) accent, enunciation, and vocal timbre (all the things that are so hard to describe) call attention to that space outside of language and return us to the body—here, undeniably, a woman's body. Where literary narrators may seem androgynous, in film a voice-over must be em-bodied at every moment, gendered to a degree difficult to express in words. That is why I would assert that all of the aspects Silverman identifies as limiting the authority of the woman's voice in classical Hollywood cinema enrich it as a woman's voice in Mockingbird .

Contemporary feminist writers have celebrated regional women's speech as a form of language uncontained by dominant literary values and not subject to

grammatical dicta.^[36] In what Molly Hite identifies as a black feminist tradition, the daughter's desire for the language of the father is reformulated in terms that do not necessarily exclude or devalue the mother.^[37] For instance, in discussing Alice Walker's The Color Purple , Christine Froula describes Celie as "a woman reborn to desire and language" whose story "allegorizes not only women's need to be economically independent of men but the daughter's need to inherit the symbolic estate of culture and language that has always belonged to the father ."^[38] Although the father's culture and language are not adopted without question or change, by depicting women as entitled to language and to the right to speak in a political sense, Froula suggests a position from which women can speak something other than their own exclusion under Oedipus. The language women speak in these works combines the oral tradition of their mothers with the "right to write" taken from their fathers. The film's voice-over (replete with accent, rhythm, warmth, and tone) makes the oral tradition sensually explicit, once again merging Kristeva's symbolic and semiotic, reasserting the body that continues to exist despite the law.

In the last shot of the film, Scout, having led Boo home, returns to Atticus's lap, as the narrator bestows her blessings on them all. In the background, highlighted and visible for the only time in the film, we see a framed portrait of a woman, the mother who was lost. The final image is wrapped in the woman's voice as the author embraces her creation—an image of father-daughter bliss within a symbolic system that enables her to speak her resistance to the law. However, the limited validation of the female voice does not encourage resistance to patriarchy. It can instead be seen as a way to preserve the father by covering over awareness of his inadequacy. And the disturbing cost of that may be not only the forfeiture of desire but infantilization.

As long as the mother is absented and the father idolized, the woman's "authorship" will underscore her acceptance of her exclusion as an adult subject. The approval of the father, representative of the Law, can be won only by renouncing desire. In To Kill a Mockingbird , female desire is displaced onto

language and excluded from the image. "Scout" becomes a bodiless woman, her existence spread across the various women within and surrounding the text. However by recuperating her fragmented self through the process of storytelling, and by insisting on a regionalized and gendered voice that exceeds language, the woman can mark a small place for herself within patriarchy as a speaking subject—although that subjectivity is, admittedly, a highly qualified one.