Chaos In To Kill A Mockingbird

Chaos in town. Divided cultures. Family feuds. All of these traumatic things can be seen in To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. Despite the fact that these may be interesting things to witness, it becomes a little less pleasing once discrimination comes into play. In a battle between wrong and right, there's only one true answer, right? Wrong. Identity contingencies often blind people from seeing what is wrong or right because they are too worried about the image they have painted of a person from little information. When identity contingencies are near, discrimination is just around the corner, waiting to prey on victims in Maycomb. The town of Maycomb is portrayed as a subjective community in an attempt to show readers that perceptions
Lee often shows how young, intelligent characters are challenged because of their age, which causes readers to reflect on the fact that one’s age, does not measure their maturity. “Go home, Jem,” he said. “Take Scout and Dill home.”
We were accustomed to prompt, if not always cheerful acquiescence to Atticus’s instructions, but from the way he stood Jem was not thinking of budging.
“Go home, I said.”
Jem shook his head. As Atticus’s fists went to his hips, so did Jem’s
“Everything’s all right. You know, she was a great lady” (149). Atticus Finch practically worships the late Mrs. Dubose, though she has said terrible things about him and been rude to his family, because he could see past that she was old and had a health condition that caused her to act the way she did. Instead, Atticus only looked for the full story of someone. In this, he found that Mrs. Dubose was a brave, persisting individual, not a grumpy, old, judgemental lady. However, Atticus’ non-critical beliefs are only upheld by him, and the rest of the town is unable to see the full story of someone as easily is Atticus can. This causes a great deal of discrimination in Maycomb. “He did not begin to calm down until he had cut tops off every camellia bush Mrs. Dubose owned, until the ground was littered with green buds and leaves” (136). This is one of many examples where citizens of Maycomb strip others of respect for an unjust reason, and fail to look into a person’s full story. Jem was too imprudent to realize that Mrs. Dubose had little control over her temper, and therefore proves that even the young people of Maycomb have become subsequent to the towns’ biased culture.
In the end, the town of Maycomb evaluates others negatively due to identity contingencies before knowing a person’s