What do we learn about Mrs. Dubose’s health?

Mrs. Dubose is a minor character whose role is nonetheless very important to Jem and Scout's 'coming of age' lessons. She is old, curmudgeonly, and frightens them both, though Jem acts brave around her. They even wonder if she keeps an old shotgun under the blankets that cover her lap and her wheelchair, from which she watches the children from her front porch.
Mrs. Dubose angers Jem when she speaks sharply against Atticus serving at the trial, and in revenge Jem savagely cuts the heads off her beloved camellias. For that, he must read to her every afternoon for a full month. It turns out, his reading soothes her as she weans her body from morphine addiction, prescribed for an unnamed illness. After Mrs. Dubose dies, Atticus divulges the depth of her addiction to Jem, and also shares with his son that he believed Mrs. Dubose to be the bravest person he ever knew. Here, Atticus teaches Jem, to whom bravery is paramount, that he "wanted (him) to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It's when you know you're licked before you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what. You rarely win, but sometimes you do."
Of course, though he is too humble to see it, Atticus is also describing himself as he faces a trial he is well aware he is going to lose.


Scout does not explain the origins of Mrs. Dubose's illness, but she does describe Mrs. Dubose as wheelchair-bound and fragile, prone to "fits," and addicted to morphine for chronic pain. Scout and Jem become directly involved with Mrs. Dubose and her health in Chapter 11 when Jem destroys Mrs. Dubose's camellia flowers in a rage after she has criticized Atticus. Jem's punishment for this outburst is to read out loud to Mrs. Dubose every day for a month, and Scout goes with him. About a month after Jem reads to Mrs. Dubose for the last time, she dies, and Atticus explains to Jem that Mrs. Dubose didn't want to die while in the grips of morphine addiction; Jem's reading out loud to her helped her get through the difficult experience of withdrawal.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How does Bilbo show leadership and courage in The Hobbit?

Bilbo’s increase in confidence and courage is the defining aspect of his character arc. At the beginning of the novel, he is shut away content in his Hobbit hole, happy to remain separate and coddled from the rest of the world. In the movie, Bilbo chooses to join the dwarves on their quest out of a sense for adventure. In the book, however, Bilbo wants nothing to do with them and only joins because he had been duped into signing a contract. Despite being on the adventure somewhat against his will, Bilbo still proves himself time and again, saving the dwarves from the spiders, the trolls, and a number of other dangers they encounter along the way. Bilbo’s character arc has even been cited as a sort of Christian metaphor for the growth of the soul, though how much Tolkien intended on this front is up for debate. From a thematic standpoint, the ring of invisibility also plays into Bilbo’s brand of bravery. If Hobbits are the overlooked creatures of Middle Earth, then it is noteworthy that...
Read more

In “Goodbye to All That,” Joan Didion writes that the “lesson” of her story is that “it is distinctly possible to remain too long at the fair.” What does she mean? How does the final section of the essay portray how she came to this understanding, her feelings about it, and the consequences of it?

In this classic essay, Didion describes moving to New York City from her native Sacramento at the age of twenty-one, and, as she freely admits, a somewhat naive twenty-one, her mind, "programmed by all the movies I had ever seen and all the songs I had ever heard about New York," with the typical feeling, at that age, that, "nothing like this...has ever happened to anyone before." Intending to stay for only six months, she falls in love with the city. As she says, "I do not mean 'love' in any colloquial way, I mean that I was in love with the city the way you love the first person who ever touches you and never love anyone quite that way again." This initial love led her to prolong her residency, since, "I still believed in possibilities then, still had the sense, so peculiar to New York, that something extraordinary would happen any minute, any day, any month." But as the next years roll past, and the "new faces" she encounters...
Read more

Why does the poet say "all the men and women merely players"?

It's one of the most famous lines in literature: All the world's a stage,And all the men and women merely players . . . This famous saying comes from Shakespeare's play As You Like It, and it's spoken by Jacques. What he's saying here is that simply going about our daily lives is a type of performance. Just like actors on a stage, we all have roles to perform: Daughter. Student. Sister. Captain of the soccer team. The fact that Shakespeare writes that men and women are merely players suggests that the roles are preordained and that a person's choice in being a mother, for example, or a doctor or starting point guard for the Brooklyn Nets is out of their hands. What roles a person performs over the course of their lifetime is up to fate. The notion that "all the world's a stage" has entered pop culture, but within the context of the play, this idea does not sit well with Jacques. He's a pessimist, and the idea that everything is up to fate makes...
Read more