Mockingbird response, Andrea

From the beginning of Mockingbird, the presence of the actress playing the adult Scout drew my attention to theatricality. This was particularly true in the scene where Jem tries to send Boo a note using a fishing pole.

Adult Scout is standing alone in front of the Finch house after the children are called inside. Her narration tells us that Scout could tell Jem was planning something from the way he ate his dinner. Adult Scout moves to the side of the porch out of the way and watches the children with clear amusement. Then Jem and Dill run around the side of the house, Jem carrying a fishing pole. Scout comes out of the house as Jem and Dill attach a note to the pole. She insists on being included in the plot in spite of Jem’s grumbling. Then Dill and Scout stand guard at the two ends of the stage while Jem makes a few wide swings at the Radley house with his fishing pole, none of which come close to attaching the note to the window. Atticus comes out of the house and catches Jem in the act, while Dill frantically rings his warning bell. Then Atticus scolds the children and warns them to leave Boo in peace. As Atticus scolds the children and they react with fear and mortification at being caught, adult Scout’s amusement grows. She might have even put a hand to her mouth as if to stifle laughter. Although the situation is serious and fearful to the children, to adult Scout it is comical.

The relationship of adult Scout to the children reminds me of a passage in Witmore in which he discussed the effects of having an audience onstage observe the child actors in Beaumont’s play The Knight of the Burning Pestle:

“In the language of narratology, this difference represents a shift in focalization, a movement of the vantage point from which the audience’s attention is directed toward its appropriate objects (which include its own reactions). Whereas in the former case of Marston and Jonson, the important relationship to be conjured on and pointed at was the one that obtained between child performer, on the one hand, and experientially engaged audience member on the other, the nested plot of Knight collapses the positions of experiencer and pointer into one position . . . With this dramaturgical innovation, the possibilities for fictional internal reference have multiplied, but there is also a loss: the child, as child, no longer plucks the string that once stretched between his own peculiar presence and his auditor’s engaged senses.” (Witmore 133)

This performance of Mockingbird complicates Witmore’s assessment of child drama in several ways. First, I did not feel that the presence of adult Scout completely eliminated the effect of the child performer. I felt the same pleasure in the disconnection between the seriousness of the situation for the children and the comedy of it for an adult as I might have if adult Scout had not been present on the stage to demonstrate that reaction. In addition, the relationship between the child actors and their characters is not the same as the one Witmore describes for most of the article because they are portraying children, and the audience doesn’t experience the same ironic appreciation of naïve children acting as adults. Does this change the aspect of metadrama that Witmore discusses? Are his observations of child theatre completely relevant to the use of child actors in Mockingbird? Perhaps his predictions about audience reaction to a ‘nested plot’ have not played out because these children are not enacting a metadrama, but are merely children representing children. Adult Scout seems to serve as a mirror for the audience’s reaction rather than a barrier between audience and child actor.