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To Kill a Mockingbird | Growing Pains: Levels of Maturity in To Kill a Mockingbird

In this essay, J. Kersh tracks the growth and maturity of major characters in the novel, including Boo Radley and Scout.

As To Kill a Mockingbird opens, we get a glimpse of Scout and Jem’s world – dark, overgrown, one might even say a bit decaying. It’s hardly the bright world of Alice in Wonderland or The Wind in the Willows. Neither, though, is it the harsh existence of The Lord of the Flies; the key word to describe Maycomb county would have to be “realism.”

Harper Lee seems to be showing the children as realistic characters in the midst of a heightened “Southern Gothic” background. A great deal of...

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