To Kill A Mockingbird A Cold Weather Analysis

As a bright autumn filled to the brim with discovery and growth began to fade, the winter winds whipped into Maycomb, Alabama. In a southern town touched throughout the year by sun and mugginess, the unusually harsh cold bit into the residents, promising a longer winter than perhaps it had yet experienced. The cold weather front sweeping into the sleepy Alabama town not only laid the groundwork for important plot points, but also carried with it deeper significance. The onset of a cold winter in the setting of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird portended a bitter cold front to come in the relationships between the Finches and the Maycomb townspeople.
Snow had not come to Maycomb since 1885, last visiting the town decades before the Finch children were born. When it did arrive, the children experienced an entirely new side of the natural world surrounding them. Scout, the novel’s protagonist and narrator, screamed at her first sight of the white flakes falling from the sky and carpeting the ground, informing her father that the world was ending (Lee 86). After the initial shock wore off, the children ventured out into the wonderland before them to enjoy the rare treat. Looming behind the
The frigidity introduced into the family’s relationships with their fellow Maycomb residents when Atticus challenged the previously unquestioned rule of racism served as a foundation for the important examination of conscience that was to come. Like the cold front that arrived in Maycomb, the moral frost that would develop threatened to overcome the family’s ability to keep warm in the face of an icy winter. Their endurance defined a story that would stay in our hearts and minds and answered, in part, the question of what it means to be