A Sociolinguistic Study of Racism in ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ by Harper Lee

Abstract

This study addresses a sociolinguistic analysis of how racism is constructed in ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ by Harper Lee. It examines linguistic and narrative forms, and the ideological representation of race, and emphasizes how such forms can create, perpetuate, or resist racial hierarchies. Language embraces discursive strategies such as polarization, negative other-presentation, and implicit bias. Simultaneously, the study examines how ideologies of language like iconization, fractal recursivity and erasure, are employed to construct and render social group images normal, and thereby, recurring patterns of social inequality codified. The study is qualitative in nature and is approached with an eclectic perspective employing; Van Dijk's (1991) theory of discourse and racism and Irvine and Gal's (2000) theory of language ideology. Five extracts from ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ by Harper Lee have been identified as samples of the current study. After analyzing the selected data, it has been found that the novel is a deep well of the indefinable racialization and othering that show confidence in the ruling power of class and ahistorical ethnic vagueness, while in the limited severalty of white supremacy the master of the fetishized plantation phantasm, the whip of the slaveholder's caste system snapping through resistant air. These findings elucidate even more the contention between a sociopolitical context and literary discourse in homologous cases, and the consequential push towards either the reproduction of or the countering of a racist backdrop.