Lonelier than Boo Radley
On Halloween and Reformation, a look at the Mayella Ewells of our time and why humans need friendship
“Miss Mayella,” said Atticus, in spite of himself, “a nineteen-year-old girl like you must have friends. Who are your friends?”
The witness frowned as if puzzled. “Friends?”
Every October, I read one of my favorite books: To Kill a Mockingbird.1 This year, to better tackle laundry and food prep and cleaning, I listened to it for the first time. And as with most exercises in listening to something familiar, I heard the story differently than if my eyes had been racing along printed pages. Sure, the narrative still vividly painted a gloomy and darkly humorous portrait of progressive education, which I wrote about years ago. And the slow and lovely layering of vivid, complicated characters became even more evident to me. But one particular line in the book showed me just how prescient Harper Lee's 1960 classic was, particularly in how it anticipated a serious 21st century malaise.
For the unfamiliar, the novel comes through the voice of Scout Finch, a young girl living in small town Maycomb, Alabama. She is remembering a pivotal time in her childhood in the 1930s. Her father is Atticus, an attorney. She spends much of her play time with her brother Jem and friend Dill imagining what their reclusive neighbor is like. They fear and revel in the unknowns concerning the mysterious Boo Radley, concocting gruesome horrors about him from vague and furtive adult gossip they’ve gleaned from their neighbors. Boo’s house is considered haunted by all the local young folk.
The driving event of the story centers around a highly charged court case. In a pivotal scene from the courtroom, Atticus is questioning Tom Robinson, the black defendant on trial for his life due to a charge of rape. In Alabama in the 1930s, rape carried a capital charge, or the penalty of death. Another tragic figure in the case, both pathetic and culpable, is Mayella Ewell. The provincial consensus is that she is white trash, the oldest girl in a big family who spends her days toiling in privation and filth. Her father is a lazy, cruel man, primarily concerned with his own pastimes of drinking and collecting state aid. Tom, an honest and compassionate neighbor, has helped out Mayella over the years when she’s asked for his assistance. Now, he’s been charged with raping her. As Scout listens, she realizes something.
As Tom Robinson gave his testimony, it came to me that Mayella Ewell must have been the loneliest person in the world. She was even lonelier than Boo Radley, who had not been out of the house in twenty-five years. When Atticus asked had she any friends, she seemed not to know what he meant, then she thought he was making fun of her.
“Lonelier than Boo Radley.” Now that’s something.
And after all the times I’ve read those words, I heard them this time with 2024 ears. In them, I heard the ubiquitous void of our time.
Last spring, Jonathan Haidt, a prominent social psychologist and researcher, published The Anxious Generation, an earth-shaking indictment of what’s happened to young people in recent years. The subtitle pinpoints its aim: “How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness.”2 One of Haidt’s frequent collaborators is Freya India, a young woman who writes primarily about the problems young women are facing in this age of digital interference.3 In a searing post titled “Aren’t you lonely?”, she wrote:
Look around; loneliness is everywhere. Gen Z are posting friendship applications on Facebook. We’re ruminating on Reddit forums about why we feel so alone, and why there’s no community anymore. We eat dinner with YouTubers. We pretend to FaceTime influencers. We play video games alone in our rooms, or watch strangers play instead. Even the fact that #mentalhealth has over a hundred billion views on TikTok seems to me less a triumph of mental health awareness and more like a collective cry of loneliness. Why aren’t we opening up to each other, in real life? Why are we telling TikTok?
These are disturbing questions. What keeps so many young people from the interactions common to humans across time? This problem isn’t confined to girls, of course. But what has happened in particular to females, known for being more emotional and dependent on social interaction, highlights how destructive loneliness can be in our society at large. Mainly, this loneliness involves both a loss of self and purpose and, finally, a loss of home. Ted Goia recently shared this insight from Hannah Arendt:
The mass phenomenon of loneliness… has achieved its most extreme and antihuman form. The reason for this extremity is that mass society not only destroys the public realm but the private as well, deprives men not only of their place in the world but of their private home, where they once felt sheltered against the world.
Arendt was writing in The Human Condition, published in 1958. This is before televisions in most households were common, before society changed radically from the practice of inviting loud and insistent digital strangers into their homes that distracted from real and immediate people and life. And this was long before screens multiplied and connectivity exploded to all day, every day. Now, this flood has hollowed out our homes, making families ghosts to each other, opening people to the onslaught that is the mass over the individual, over the particular and quotidian glories that are found only in caring, attentive, intimate, private realms.
Take Mayella. She’s a precursor to the kind of girl we see everywhere now. She’s got something of a soul that yearns for order and beauty, shown by the carefully cultivated geraniums in slop jars that line the chaotic squalor of her yard. But despite her many siblings, she is isolated by ignorance and vice, mostly due to her father and his chosen station. She’s surrounded by people but very alone (does this sound familiar yet?). As Scout notices, Mayella doesn’t even seem to understand what friends are, and this is because she doesn’t have any.
Prior to her last encounter with Tom Robinson, Mayella demonstrates a pitiful desire for basic human friendliness, going out of her way to ask for Tom’s help and more importantly, his attention. This is despite the fact that they are in vastly different social circles due to the color of their skin. Over time, Mayella has recognized, at some visceral level, that Tom is courteous and gentle. He is showing her friendliness borne out of his compassion for her. But when her primal scream for physical affection violates his boundaries and a deep societal taboo, she blames him. She tells a lie and doubles and triples down on it. Without friends herself, she can’t understand how repentance and forgiveness even work. So she doesn’t apologize or admit her wrong, even when approached and given the opportunity by Atticus. Instead, she sabotages her need for beauty and goodness by rejecting truth, the bedrock of virtue. What began as her individual tragedy ends with families and homes being blown apart by the literal death of other people.
And yet Mayella is a sympathetic character. It’s achingly evident that she is in a tough spot. Her father’s well-known vices exacerbate her low-class, and thus fairly invisible, status. A case could be made that she’s trapped, and terribly so, by both her background and her familial relationships. But that explanation remains incomplete. Scout sees the conundrum of Mayella’s situation:
She was as sad, I thought, as what Jem called a mixed child: white people wouldn’t have anything to do with her because she lived among pigs; Negroes wouldn’t have anything to do with her because she was white. She couldn’t live like Mr. Dolphus Raymond, who preferred the company of Negroes, because she didn’t own a riverbank and she wasn’t from a fine old family. Nobody said, “That’s just their way,” about the Ewells. Maycomb gave them Christmas baskets, welfare money, and the back of its hand. Tom Robinson was probably the only person who was ever decent to her. But she said he took advantage of her, and when she stood up she looked at him as if he were dirt beneath her feet.
There are some who see the high anxiety rates and snowflake proclivities of young women today, especially, as solely the culminating result of multi-generational bad decisions, from helicopter parenting to ubiquitous device use. “It’s not their fault,” goes this view. There are others who see it as girls wallowing in the navel-gazing disembodied digital life inevitably encourages, themselves delaying if not outright destroying their maturation. “It’s all their fault,” goes this view.
The reality is that both are true, and deeply true. The mess is overwhelmingly messy. We should neither wash our hands of our serious parental or neighborly responsibilities to do the extremely hard work of teaching and modeling and practicing virtue with young people. Nor should we excuse young people’s role in learning virtue. To do either is to engage in more lies, to perpetuate more loneliness and its concomitant wreckage. It is to whisper and excuse with self-righteousness or to indulge out of self-protection, both of which stem from our own guilt in not doing what is right. Trying to stand athwart the loneliness problem, pointing fingers, is far too easy. It is like nodding toward a dilapidated house and saying, “A hain’t lives there.”
So what are we to do? How do we befriend the lonely?
In To Kill a Mockingbird, Scout and Jem go to the school on All Hallow’s Eve for fun, games, and a pageant highlighting the virtues of the local economy and people. In the darkness, as they return home, they receive the greatest act of service from Boo Radley that they can get: the gift of their lives.
Christians are all familiar with Jesus’s words about love. “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.” And then immediately: “Greater love has no one than this, than to lay down one’s life for his friends.” He’s speaking about Himself, of course. He’s speaking of the compassion God has for us and how God in Love physically sacrifices in order to save us. He is our ultimate and perfect Friend. Martin Luther wrote,
And yet the love of the Son of God for us is of such magnitude that the greater the filth and stench of our sins, the more He befriends us, the more He cleanses us, relieving us of all our misery and of the burden of all our sins and placing them upon His own back. All the holiness of the monks stinks in comparison with this service of Christ, the fact that the beloved Lamb, the great Man, yes, the Son of the Exalted Majesty, descends from heaven to serve me.4
Luther was noticing the link between clear-eyed recognition of sins, be they ones of omission or commission, known or unknown, and of Jesus’s incarnational friendship to us: His priceless gift of grace. On this day, also All Hallow’s Eve, in 1517, Luther nailed his Ninety-Five Theses to the Castle Church door in Wittenberg, which is understood as the start of the Reformation. What is the first thesis? “When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said, “Repent” (Matthew 4:17), he willed the entire life of believers to be one of repentance.”5 Repentance drives us to the cross and to Christ. Without it, we lose Him. We also lose the ability to relate to our neighbors. For if we can never see ourselves for who we really are—filthy and selfish sinners—then forgiveness is worthless. And if we lose forgiveness, we can’t truly love others, for we can’t understand them as sinners in need of forgiveness, either.
Boo is a mortal man. I don’t think it’s metaphorically accidental that in protecting Scout and in bearing Jem upon his back to carry him home after a vicious attack, he stays in the shadows. Boo is lonely, but Scout has misjudged him. He has the benefit of loving other people, namely her and her brother. In his love, he does not exalt his own service to his neighbors. He just serves. And this is what Christ does for us, too. He steps in for us, taking on His body our sin and inability to save ourselves. After this justifying work, He sanctifies us, enabling us to befriend the lonely and love our neighbor, over and over again, in whatever place and circumstance we find ourselves.6
People need friends. Friendship can be as simple as neighborly attention given without regard for repayment or as complicated as teaching a daughter or young lady, over and over again, how to live with and to practice love and mercy in an inevitably messy and broken world. Rubbing shoulders with and sharing fence rows alongside other people is awkward. It is hard, because we will invariably hurt each other. But by repenting and receiving forgiveness, we are made whole. We are no longer alone. We do well to remember how Jesus befriends us, totally and completely, the magnitude of which we can barely understand. He reaches out His hand and satisfies our deepest longing for belonging. By His grace, we can also show the way home to our best and most constant Friend, who never fails us.
If you haven’t read it, consider this your spoiler alert. Read the book anyway.
I follow his Substack, After Babel, and you should, too.
Her Substack is GIRLS: Girlhood in the Modern World. I also highly recommend it. No, I don’t plan on stopping my reading recommendations, either in this post or in the future.
This is from Luther’s sermons on the Gospel of St. John, p. 166 in vol. 22 of Luther’s Works, American edition, edited by Jaroslav Pelikan, copyright from Concordia Publishing House. This quote is from an excerpt reprinted in the entry for October 31, Reformation Day, in the Treasury of Daily Prayer, also published by CPH.
This entire passage from John 15 is beautiful. Christ as the vine nourishes us branches.
Wow, this was absolutely outstanding. Thank you for such a lovely, well-thought, and thought-provoking essay to consider on Halloween as we turn on our porch light and wait for trick-or-treaters we know aren't coming, because neighbors don't know each other anymore, and the kids all went trunk-or-treating already.
Just lovely to see the way you brought these three themes together so artfully. Repentance and forgiveness as the antidote to loneliness….I will be thinking on that this week! Thank you!