In chapter 13, we learn that Aunt Alexandra is a person who doesn’t take no for an answer. When Jem and Scout return from attending church with Calpurnia, they see her sitting on their porch. Scout described it as, “I looked down the street. Enamored, upright, uncompromising, Aunt Alexandra was sitting in a rocking chair exactly as if she had sat there every day of her life.” (Lee 168) Scout shows us that Aunt Alexandra has a tendency to make herself feel at home, and also that she expects others to allow her to barge in at any random moment. In addition, Aunt Alexandra loves attention. She’ll make it a point to get herself noticed, just like she did by joining and becoming secretary of the Maycomb Amanuensis Club when she had only been staying with Atticus for a short amount of time.
Aunt Alexandra is highly comparable to Charlotte Phelan in The Help, who is always trying to get her daughter, Skeeter, to act more feminine and proper. But despite all of Charlotte’s nagging, Skeeter remains the way she is and forces her mother to accept it.
Overall, Aunt Alexandra is a character who has very old-fashioned views on women, isn’t very understanding, and does not fully comprehend where she is and isn’t wanted.
Do you think Aunt Alexandra will end up changing Scout? Or will Scout end up changing Aunt Alexandra?
I think that Aunt Alexandra is also a lot like Mrs. Dubose. Both of them are highly opinionated, and feel a certain self-righteousness. She believes she is entitled to judge all the people around her, and take immense pride in herself and her family. Not so much in the people of the family, but the family's reputation of being how she wants it to be (seemingly "perfect"). In fact, she judges the people in the family for not being the way she wants them to, like Scout, for example. Her opinions on how she should look and act, like Charlotte said, ladylike, she gladly inflicts upon her without mercy. In the grand scheme of the family pride situation, she had told Atticus to pass the message on to the children that they “...are not from run-of-the-mill people, that [they] are the product of several generations’ gentle breeding… and that [they] should try to live up to [their] name” (177). She expects the family to be exactly like this, and not go off her straight and narrow in any way. Mrs. Dubose also has her opinions like this, about the Finch family, but negative ones as we saw in the past chapters. We also see that the community is very family-centered, as everyone are judged by which family they belong to.
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