Saturday, April 14, 2007
Trial
Harper Lee's father was a lawyer, her sister was a lawyer, and Harper Lee herself attended law school. The book's depiction of the trial of Tom Robinson is one of its most memorable sections. Do you think that the author's legal background is what makes the trial scenes memorable or do you think it is the author's description of the characters that makes it memorable?
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3 comments:
I would ask, "how prevanlent were trial settings back when the book was written?" Present day, trial cases feature regularly as settings, not only in stories but also in TV and film...was it not as common place then? Well, I suppose there were a number of plays (Inherit the Wind, etc.) with famous courtroom sceens...
It is a very dramatic way of illustrating Harper Lee's point. If she had just written that Tom Robinson was wrongly convicted, it would not have had the same impact.
I think of courtrooms as...sort of a place of...sort of intellectual combat...but, the setting also lends itself to the gravity of the situation...since it's a criminal trial, there's a lot at stake...if it was just two people chatting about the trial in the check-out line, it wouldn't have been as dramatic.
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