She is unusually intelligent she learns to read before beginning school , unusually confident she fights boys without fear , unusually thoughtful she worries about the essential goodness and evil of mankind , and unusually good she always acts with the best intentions.
In terms of her social identity, she is unusual for being a tomboy in the prim and proper Southern world of Maycomb. One quickly realizes when reading To Kill a Mockingbird that Scout is who she is because of the way Atticus has raised her. He has nurtured her mind, conscience, and individuality without bogging her down in fussy social hypocrisies and notions of propriety. At the beginning of the novel, Scout is an innocent, good-hearted five-year-old child who has no experience with the evils of the world.
As the novel progresses, Scout has her first contact with evil in the form of racial prejudice, and the basic development of her character is governed by the question of whether she will emerge from that contact with her conscience and optimism intact or whether she will be bruised, hurt, or destroyed like Boo Radley and Tom Robinson.
Ace your assignments with our guide to To Kill a Mockingbird! SparkTeach Teacher's Handbook. The dialogs between Jem and Scout, his cynical approach and her ideas, free of any social standards, shape a major part of the aesop of the novel.
Throughout the story we see how the character of Scout Finch changes, how she matures and understands herself and the world around her better. The Tom Robinson case shatters her unconventional belief in humanity from the one hand, but strengthens her and forces her to rethink her attitude, still not being jaded, from the other. At first, we see Scout as an iconic tomboy. Any problem can be solved with a good old fist fight. Another example, where bravery just outweighs the survival instinct is when Scout hits a member of a lynch mob that came for Tom and does it rather successfully for a six-year-old!
Even at the beginning of the story this tendency worries her father, Mr. Finch a lot. When Scout starts another fight, he talks to her, asking her and Jem too seek for the other solutions of their problems. Scout respects her father so much that she agrees and she makes herself to behave properly for three weeks those who have kids or younger siblings can imagine what three weeks mean for a six-year-old: almost an eternity. It was the first time I ever walked away from a fight.
Somehow, if I fought Cecil I would let Atticus down. Atticus so rarely asked Jem and me to do something for him, I could take being called a coward for him. I felt extremely noble for having remembered, and remained noble for three weeks.
She finds another kind of higher nobility in avoiding the fights like it serves a greater goal. These three weeks taught Scout a lot. Before she thought that every problem can be fixed very quickly and whoever hits harder is right. But after she has to search for other ways, Scout Finch starts to think about the real meaning of justice, diplomacy and superiority of intelligence over physical strength.
Though, she still has a hair-trigger temper, she starts her way to mastering her emotions and thinking before acting. Finally, she agrees that there are lots of other variants of settling down the quarrels and they are sometimes better. The woman relating the story obviously recognizes that her father is exceptional. However, the child Scout complains "Our father didn't do anything.
He sat in the living room and read. Although the story takes place over the course of three years, Scout learns a lifetime's worth of lessons in that span. Here, too, the reader should remember that in many ways To Kill a Mockingbird is Scout's memoir — the adult Jean Louise can better understand the impact of various events than the child living through them. Scout hates school because in many ways it actually inhibits her learning. Her teacher is appalled that she already knows how to read, instead of celebrating that fact.
She is bored waiting for the rest of the class to catch up to her skill level, and she doesn't have more than a passing respect for either of the teachers she describes in the story.
The most sympathy she can muster toward a frazzled Miss Caroline is to remark "Had her conduct been more friendly toward me, I would have felt sorry for her. As a sign of her maturity, though, at the end of the story she realizes that she doesn't have much more to learn "except possibly algebra" and for that she needs the classroom.
Scout faces so many issues in the duration of the novel, but one of the most lingering for her is the question of what it means to "be a lady.
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