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What song would go well with Ms. Maudie's house burning?

Picking a song to match the mood, tone, or images in a particular section of a story is one interesting way to help that part of the story come alive for you, or to help yourself connect to it on a personal level.


So, as we're thinking about how Ms. Maudie's house burns down in Chapter 8 of To Kill a Mockingbird, we're imagining how Scout feels. It's the middle of the night, it's very cold outside, and the chaos of the fire and all the men scrambling to put it out combine to give Scout a feeling of both terror and excitement. You can also imagine how Ms. Maudie feels--she actually says later that she hates her house and was glad when it burned down, so she can build one more to her liking. Remember, she's happier outside in her garden, anyway.


Taking all that into consideration, we're looking for a song that expresses exhilaration and even joy as something is destroyed. Let me suggest Carrie Underwood's "Blown Away." It's an exciting song that describes how a storm destroys a house. It also involves every single piece of house being blown away, just like every bit of Ms. Maudie's house was also destroyed. Although the song is about a tornado and rains tearing down a house, while Ms. Maudie's home is lost to a fire instead, the ideas are similar: nature's fury destroys each structure. You can also point to the driving rhythm of Underwood's song and explain how it expresses Scout's terror and excitement, and you can draw a link between Ms. Maudie's happiness after the destruction to the indications in Underwood's song that the girl living in the house actually wants it to be destroyed: "She prayed 'blow it down.'"


However, this song is certainly not the only one you can connect thematically to the house burning in Mockingbird. Your chosen song doesn't even have to be literally about a house getting destroyed. Any song that expresses Scout's exhilaration and fear, or Maudie's strange acceptance of her material losses, or even a bizarre combination of cold and heat, will do the trick. The connections you make between your song and the novel are more important than the actual song you select.

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