Everyone Is "The Other"

Harper Lee is a famous American woman writer,who has been considered as one of the most representative American southern writers in the early 1960s.To Kill a Mockingbird was Lee’s only published book,which won the Pulitzer Prize,and has become a classic of modern American literature.The novel is mainly divided into two parts according to the plot.The first part is about the white neighbor Boo Radley and the second part is Tom Robinson’s rape case.The small town Malcomb epitomizes the southern American society in the 1930s.It is a society with fixed patriarchal system and social hierarchy,a society full of violence,racial prejudice,and inequalities,but also a society where lived wise and rational people like Scout and Atticus,who make efforts to fight against prejudice and fight for the justice.Everyone could be "the other" since throughout human history this world has been full of bias,prejudice and inequalities.The prejudice,especially racial prejudice,is the recurrent motif in world literature.In her novel To Kill a Mockingbird,Harper Lee explores the experience of otherness in a variety of guises.At one level,it is a human story of racial prejudice in a fairly limited community;at another it is a communal expression of experience of the otherness.Therefore,"the other" in the novel is the focus of this thesis.In To Kill a Mockingbird,"otherness" is not only manifested in the racial discrimination but also through the bias and prejudice among the group of white people.In order to analyze "the other" more comprehensively,this dissertation applies the theory of post-colonialism to analyze "the other" reflected in the confrontations between the whites and blacks,and Foucault’s power theory to reveal the tendency of marginalization among the whites themselves.These two theories share the common ground in revealing how "prejudice" works and makes everyone "the other",how it permeates the society and affects people and how it brings harm to the both white and black society.The dissertation consists of Introduction,the Body and Conclusion.Introduction part gives a brief introduction to the author Harper Lee and her novel To Kill a Mockingbird,its researches at home and abroad.Chapter one discusses Foucault’s power theory and Post-colonialism.These two theories share the common concept of"the other".Chapter Two mainly analyzes "the other" manifested in white vs.white community from the perspective of Foucault’s power theory.Without the power of discourse,the Children are "the other" in the patriarchal society,the female are "the other" in the man-dominated society,the poor dirty lower class are "the other" in the rich-superior society.Based on the post-colonialism,Chapter Three examines "the otherness" existing in different races.To the superior white,the black are the inferior other.We can find the hatred from the white from the black everywhere,whether in school,in church or in prison.Chapter Four infers from previous discussion that everyone is the "other" and discloses the author’s unifying tendency in race,education,social status and gender by creating a society where there is "just One kind of Folks".Chapter Five is the conclusion of the dissertation.All of the conflicts depicted in the novel,whether between children and parents,the female and the male,the rich and the poor,or the white and the black,are all expressions of an "exclusive other",which is the very product of this small conservative southern town pervaded by prejudice and inequalities.Everyone is "the other",and thus everyone is "the same".