The ending of To Kill a Mockingbird may well suggest that there are reasons for hope: the brooding, gothic presence of the Boo Radley house has been replaced in Scout’s imagination by a heightened sense of her place in society; beyond the Finch household, there are signs that Maycomb is losing some of its intolerance. However, these signs are illusory: Lee’s Maycomb remains a profoundly racist place, even if its greater excesses may yet be concealed by the workings of the judicial system.

The reasons for optimism are clear: Scout’s childish prejudices towards Boo Radley have been replaced by a more mature understanding of a him as a person; Tom Robinson’s trial was not the mere formality the culture of racism which prevailed in Maycomb might have lead us to expect; and even the town’s institutions, as embodied in Braxton Underwood, are showing signs of recognizing the invidiousness of the injustice perpetrated against Tom.

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While these signs may offer us some comfort that Tom’s death was not in vain, there are few signs that the trial has changed much about Maycomb life, where even the Finch household sustains a pattern of white/black relations structured around the patterns of slavery.

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It is not only characters’ behaviour – as in Calpurnia’s acceptance of her lot – that suggest racism has not been banished, but Lee’s narrative itself, in particular its presentation of black characters, gives deeper reasons for concern.

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It is easy to see To Kill A Mockingbird as a text which fits neatly into the narrative of liberation and increasing freedom that the

1960s Civil Rights movement so proudly espoused. However, the fact that Lee goes to such lengths to make her black characters so harmless and unthreatening suggests that the novel itself is not yet ready for a true liberation of black people, and, as such, it simply perpetuates the old anxieties and prejudices on which slavery and the Jim Crow society were grounded.