Scout Coming Of Age Essay

Coming of age novels, Cold Sassy Tree and To Kill a Mockingbird introduce readers to 14 year old Will Tweedy of Cold Sassy, Georgia and 5 year old Jean Louise “Scout” Finch of Maycomb County, Alabama. Both characters were brought up in small, close-knit southern towns, with false views of the world, and ignorance to knowledge and experience. As the stories progess however, the two gain a new type of knowledge and realization of the world. Experiences dealing with love, death, racism and discrimination helped the character’s child-like ideas of the world blossom into a more adult-like perspective.

Will and Scout had changed in ways both . My paper will further discuss the traits that Scout Finch and Will Tweedy share. Will Tweedy is a teen-aged free spirit, living in Cold Sassy at the beginning of the twentieth century. On July 5, 1906, scandal breaks in the town when Will’s grandfather, Rucker Blakeslee, marries Miss Love Simpson; who is half his age. Rucker married Miss Love barely 3 weeks after his wife Mattie Lou, had died.

Scout Finch was only 5 years old when her father, Atticus Finch, took on the role of lawyer for a negro man named Tom Robinson, during the Great Depression/

Atticus was talked negatively about throughout the white community of Maycomb. He was thought of as a traitor, and “nigger lover” (p. 108) Both Will’s and Scout’s families were centers of attention in their towns. Atticus and grandpa Rucker gave them similar adive. Atticus told Scout to pay the name calling no mind, and to stop fighting her classmates when they called him a bad name, or said a bad thing about him.

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Rucker tells Will to discard the social constraints of Cold Sassy.

With the help of these two men, Scout and Will were able to learn how to handle the gossip that spread around town, about their families. Another issue the children were exposed to was discrimination. The blacks in Cold Sassy and Maycomb County, were treated as an inferior race. The blacks of Cold Sassy that worked white households used different dishes for their meals, as Will and Miss Love talked about one morning in the kitchen. “I mean colored cooks know white people don’t want them using their dishes and things.

That’s why they all drink out of jars and eat off of old plates or pie pans. ” (P. 205) Scout was first introduced to discrimination with Tom Robinsons trial. On the trial’s ending, Scout learned that blacks are treated differently then whites because they’re a different kind of “folk”. She also learned that Atticus had no problem defending Tom; and even proved his innocence. But since Tom is black, he was found guilty in the eyes of the white jury. Will Tweedy also has a lesson on love when his relationship with Lightfoot McClendon doesn’t work out.

The first time he kissed her, while they were in the cemetary driving his dad’s car, he realized the kiss was a mistake. Lightfoot was a mill girl, and mill town people were looked down upon by the other members of Cold Sassy. After she ran away, Will started to worry about her. It was then that he realized, he had feelings for her in a deep kind of way. The last time he had seen Lightfoot, had been when she came by the store to tell about her engagement to Hosie Roach. Not only was the girl he loved getting married, she was also getting married to Hosie Roach, his enemy.

He was saddened about the engagment, but still wished her the best. This lesson on love Will learned was that, love doesn’t always work out the way you might want it to. Scout learns the true meaning of getting to know someone by “getting in their skin and walking around in it. ” (P. 30) Scout used this way of thinking for Boo Radley. Many people in Maycomb thought Boo was a crazy, evil man because of a trial he went through as a teenager. Scout found out however that, that wasn’t the case at all.

Boo had done many things for Scout and her brother Jem such as; leaving them gifts in the hollowed tree, stitching up Jem’s pants when he ripped them on the fence, putting a blanket over Scout’s shoulders while she watched the fire, and saving both her and Jem from Mr. Ewells. With all of these nice deeds done for them, Scout concluded that the neighborhood had the wrong idea about Boo, and after walking him home the night he saved them, Scout took a minute to stand out on the porch, and try to see Maycomb the way Boo saw it from his window.

Will and Scout both experienced death, but in two different ways. Will’s experiences with death happened with first his grandmother, and then later with his grandfather. Miss Love Simpson had a baby on the way, that Rucker did not know about. Since Will had spent so much time with his grandfather, it was now his job to help take care of the baby, and make sure his grandfather’s legacy is not lost. Scout had experienced death in the forms of her mother and Tom.

Scout’s mother had died when she was a baby, so she didn’t remember her much, but her mother’s death affected the way Scout was raised. With her mom dead, Scout was brought up in a household ran by a widowed father, and a colored cook. Both Scout Finch and Will Tweedy learned important lessons at early ages. These lessons are what shaped their now, adult-like perspectives on life, world, people and themselves. Those are some similarities and differences between the two characters.