Coming of Age Novels
Coming of age novels, Cold Sassy Tree and To Kill a Mockingbird introduce readers to 14 year old Will Tweedy of Cold Sassy, Georgia and 5 year old Jean Louise “Scout” Finch of Maycomb County, Alabama. Both characters were brought up in small, close-knit southern towns, with false views of the world, and ignorance to knowledge and experience. As the stories progess however, the two gain a new type of knowledge and realization of the world. Experiences dealing with love, death, racism and discrimination helped the character’s child-like ideas of the world blossom into a more adult-like perspective. Will and Scout had changed in ways both . My paper will further discuss the traits that Scout Finch and Will Tweedy share.
Will Tweedy is a teen-aged free spirit, living in Cold Sassy at the beginning of the twentieth century. On July 5, 1906, scandal breaks in the town when Will’s grandfather, Rucker Blakeslee, marries Miss Love Simpson; who is half his age. Rucker married Miss Love barely 3 weeks after his wife Mattie Lou, had died. Scout Finch was only 5 years old when her father, Atticus Finch, took on the role of lawyer for a negro man named Tom Robinson, during the Great Depression. Atticus was talked negatively about throughout the white community of Maycomb. He was thought of as a traitor, and “nigger lover” (p.108) Both Will’s and Scout’s families were centers of attention in their towns. Atticus and grandpa Rucker gave them similar adive. Atticus told Scout to pay the name calling no mind, and to stop fighting her classmates when they called him a bad name, or said a bad thing about him. Rucker tells Will to discard the social constraints of Cold Sassy. With the help of these two men, Scout and Will were able to learn how to handle the gossip that spread around town, about their families.
Another issue the children were exposed to was discrimination. The blacks in Cold Sassy and Maycomb County, were treated as an inferior race. The blacks of Cold Sassy that
Will Tweedy is a teen-aged free spirit, living in Cold Sassy at the beginning of the twentieth century. On July 5, 1906, scandal breaks in the town when Will’s grandfather, Rucker Blakeslee, marries Miss Love Simpson; who is half his age. Rucker married Miss Love barely 3 weeks after his wife Mattie Lou, had died. Scout Finch was only 5 years old when her father, Atticus Finch, took on the role of lawyer for a negro man named Tom Robinson, during the Great Depression. Atticus was talked negatively about throughout the white community of Maycomb. He was thought of as a traitor, and “nigger lover” (p.108) Both Will’s and Scout’s families were centers of attention in their towns. Atticus and grandpa Rucker gave them similar adive. Atticus told Scout to pay the name calling no mind, and to stop fighting her classmates when they called him a bad name, or said a bad thing about him. Rucker tells Will to discard the social constraints of Cold Sassy. With the help of these two men, Scout and Will were able to learn how to handle the gossip that spread around town, about their families.
Another issue the children were exposed to was discrimination. The blacks in Cold Sassy and Maycomb County, were treated as an inferior race. The blacks of Cold Sassy that