‘I Don’t Want to be a [White] Girl’: Gender, Race and Resistance in the Southern Gothic

Abstract

‘By watching her I began to think there was some skill involved in being a girl.’¹ So says Scout, white tomboy narrator of Harper Lee’s 1963 novel, To Kill a Mockingbird. Scout’s one role model for femininity is Calpurnia, her family’s African-American servant. In Mockingbird, Lee pastiches a generic formula established more than a decade earlier by Carson McCullers and Truman Capote. Crucial ingredients in this recipe include Gothic effects, gender dissident white focalising characters, black women servants and the violence of Southern racism. The film adaptation of Lee’s novel makes the struggle between Scout and Calpurnia over femininity even more explicit. In a scene where Calpurnia urges Scout to be more ladylike, Scout responds angrily, ‘I don’t want to be a girl.’² This chapter explores the relationship between these three things — race, gender and the Gothic — especially as they work within mid-twentieth-century Southern American literature. What use are Gothic effects in this body of work, and how can we think through their entanglement with narrative constructions of both race and femininity? The term which is under erasure in Scout’s protest is ‘white’ as her ‘ladylike’-ness is clearly racialised as white, yet her only point of feminine identification is as a black woman.