To Kill A Mockingbird Flowers Analysis

The flowers in the novel To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee, each represent a different personality for the women and girls that take care of them. Each person’s flower gives an insight into their lives and behaviors. May they represent love, kindness, or stupidity, they all help us understand the person’s life and decisions. As said by Scout Finch, ”Neighbors bring food with death and flowers with sickness and little things in between.”, in To Kill A Mockingbird on page 327. But why were these flowers so important to the book? What do all the flowers represent and why are they associated with certain characters? Miss Maudie Atkinson owned and cared for her beautiful azaleas. Azaleas represent love and passion, but as the reader learns about Miss Maudie they discover that for her the flowers represented her silent willingness to stand up against “the footwashers”(Pg. 59). For her these flowers are her strength. The footwashers would yell at her and say, “He that cometh in vanity leaveth in darkness!”(Pg. 212) for Miss Maudie her flowers were her way of silently fighting against them. Her flowers also represented that she was resilient. Even after the case was lost she still stood by the Finch’s and helped them get

Mrs. Dubose is a very strong willed character , she battled addiction and the symptoms of overcoming it. Her flowers, Snow-On-The-Mountain, represent courage, and patience. Mrs. Dubose had the courage and the patience to overcome her addiction to morphine and to allow ys,,Jem and Scout to read to her everyday. This courage is her main strength. As said by Mrs. Dubose, “Thought you could kill my Snow-On-The-Mountain did you? the tops growing back out. Next time you’ll know how to do it right, won’t you? You’ll pull it up by the roots won’t you?”, (page 146). This shows the reader that her flowers represented her stubbornness to stand up to her addiction and