To Kill a Mockingbird : Chapter 11

1. To Kill a Mockingbird: Chapter 11 Mrs. Dubose—what does she symbolize?

2. Jem and Scout have outgrown picking on Boo Radley and now travel to town for their exploring. • Their walks lead them past the house of Ms. Dubose, a mean and prejudice old woman who sits on her front porch with a Confederate pistol and shouts unpleasant things at Scout and Jem when they walk by.

3. Jem and Scout had tried to be nice to her—they respected their elders—but Ms. Dubose didn’t know when to quit. She would call out how they were sassy, lying, cheating rapscallions whose mother was turning over in her grave at their lack of raising. • Jem and Scout eventually went to Atticus about Ms. Dubose, but all he had to say was, “Easy does it…she’s an old lady and she’s ill. Whatever she says to you, it’s your job not to let her make you mad.” Ms. Dubose is a mean old witch and I hate her!

4. One day, Ms. Dubose went a little too far with her tongue-thrashings: calling Jem a lying rascal, Scout a sleazy tomboy who wouldn’t amount to much more than a waitress, and Atticus a low-down, ruination of the family for “lawing for niggers.” Jem, in the heat of the moment, took Scout’s brand new twirling baton and did some thrashing of his own—he destroyed every last one of Ms. Dubose’s camellia bushes.

5. As punishment, Atticus forces Jem to read to Ms. Dubose everyday for a month. • Scout asks Atticus why he’s defending a black man when the whole town says bad things about him. • Atticus tells her that if he had denied Tom Robinson’s case, he couldn’t have been their father because he would be a lesser man than they knew. He couldn’t even go to church if he didn’t defend Tom.

6. Scout accompanies Jem to the reading sessions, and they endure Ms. Dubose’s fits and tongue-thrashings that happen at the end of every reading session. • One day, Atticus drops by Ms. Dubose’s house during Jem’s reading session. They find out that each session has been a little longer than the last.

7. Ms. Dubose dies little more than a month after Jem begins reading. • When Atticus talks to Jem and Scout about her death, he tells them that Ms. Dubose was addicted to a pain-killer called Morphine. Before she died, though, she wanted to be free of her addiction. Jem reading to her made the pain more bearable. • Before she died, Ms. Dubose gave her servant a box for Jem. Inside was a single camellia—what Atticus refers to as the purity of Ms. Dubose’s pained and angry soul.