Wordwind, your comment on Boo Radley hit on something I thought about when I posted that list; if memory serves me correctly, Boo Radley became a recluse pretty much by choice.


Not exactly, Jackie. Boo Radley was not a pariah by choice. Young Arthur Radley as a teenager had gone gallavanting about with a group of teens who had committed acts of vandalism, including locking up an adult in an outhouse. The judge sentenced the teenagers to a stint in the junenile detention center in a city to the north of Maycomb, the town of the novel. Arthur's father told the judge he would take care of Arthur himself, and the judge agreed. The father removed his son from society--permanently. The young man went through a kind of cruelty we can only imagine. One of the wisest characters in the novel comments that some people are more menacing with their Bibles than others with a fifth of bourbon--or something to that effect. Arthur's father was one of those Bible-thumping, self-righteous detroyers of souls. And he destroyed Arthur's (Boo's) spirit--but not his soul.

All kinds of rumors and stories--untrue--develop about Boo Radley in his adulthood of seclusion, for his father never permitted him outside again--all schooling, all socializing, all human contact outside the front door brought to an abrupt halt.

After the father's death, Arthur is so adversely affected by seclusion that he no longer knows how to meet the world and he remains inside, a recluse, not so much by choice, but by intense neurotic habit. And the town's people show him little mercy in their talk about him, other than the more sensitive and intelligent people of Maycomb, who are few.

Rumors abound: pecans that fall from the Radley yard into the school yard will poison you; children run past the house; black folk whistle on the other side of the street to get past the house; rumors abound about Boo's coming out at night to slaughter squirrels and eat them raw--Southern gothic at its best. And tremendously harmful--the power of gossip to change the good sense of a town. The church folk contribute in their own way to the gossip surrounding Arthur and he has been isolated not only by his family but also by the town at large. And his neurosis changes him into a being unable to change. This is long before the years of putting every stray dog in the seat of a therapist. He is simply an outcast.

And Lee wants to show how superficially we read one another. Boo ends up being a hero of sorts, although he ultimately (and heroically) commits a murder to save the Finch children. But Atticus makes the final decision to keep this act of heroism secret because Arthur would not be able to handle psychologically the acts that would be lavished upon him as a hero--he has had too much destroyed within him to be able to meet people. The church ladies bringing him pecan pies in celebration would be too much for him to handle--so the act is kept secret.

His ability to reach out is extended to the maximum in the toys he leaves for the children in the knothole of the tree--and, of course, finally saving their lives. But he cannot talk to them. Only a little word at the end before he once again embraces the isolation that unmade the man.

So, Boo is a pariah in the most poignant sense of the word, yet one we love and feel sympathy for--but with whom few would want to change places.

Incidentally, the fictional Boo Radley's story of sickened isolation by a Bible-thumping parent was based on an actual person, "Son" Boulware, which you will find variously spelled in the criticism. However, the Boulware spelling is what appears on his tombstone.