To Kill A Mockingbird Maturity

Ziad Abdelnour once said, “Maturity comes with experience, not age.” This simple quote illustrates how maturity does not only come as a person gets older but also with the things we see and experience. This is also shown in the famous novel, To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. In this book, a young brother and sister named Scout and Jem are approaching puberty and begin to understand more things that go on during the 1930’s in a small town called Maycomb. In the close-knit community of this town, their single father and respected lawyer, Atticus, has been protecting the children from the realities of racism, hatred, and hypocrisy, but is now told to represent an African-American man, Tom Robinson, in a rape case against a white woman, Mayella Ewell. But unfortunately, Atticus knows there is no way he can win, as the prejudice of an all-white jury in a white woman’s rape case would never acquit an African-American accused thereof. The two kids have “adventures” in Maycomb that further their understanding of the trial and throughout the book, their maturity increases, not from their age, but from the experiences they have every summer. Therefore, Harper Lee implies in To Kill a Mockingbird that maturity is gained through experience through her use of the …show more content…
Not protected by their father, Jem and Scout witness the racism and horrors of world first hand through a trial that convicted an innocent African-American of rape just because the defendant was White. After the trial, we see the two children in a dilemma of how such a thing could occur, but the experiences they had helped increase their maturity, helping them understand the true meaning of all this. In all, we usually think that our maturity is strictly based on age, but, especially in today’s world, the things we see and experience shape it