Mrs. Dubose--who Scout describes earlier in the book as "just plain hell"--insults Atticus as Jem and Scout are passing one day, saying, "Your father's no better than the niggers and trash he works for!" (117). They buy a couple of toys in town then walk back by her house, and her porch is empty. Jem--not Scout--loses his mind, snatching Scout's new baton and using it to dismember every camellia in Mrs. Dubose's yard. When Atticus...
Mrs. Dubose--who Scout describes earlier in the book as "just plain hell"--insults Atticus as Jem and Scout are passing one day, saying, "Your father's no better than the niggers and trash he works for!" (117). They buy a couple of toys in town then walk back by her house, and her porch is empty. Jem--not Scout--loses his mind, snatching Scout's new baton and using it to dismember every camellia in Mrs. Dubose's yard. When Atticus comes home, he's holding the broken baton and a handful of camellia buds.
When confronted, Jem admits he did it but tells Atticus why. Atticus responds that behaving this way toward a sick woman is inexcusable, and orders him to go apologize to Mrs. Dubose. Jem returns having apologized ("but I didn't mean it"), and explains that he'll have to work every Saturday to help her garden recover, and will have to read to her every Saturday for two hours for a month. Atticus requires that he do it.
After the ordeal is over, Mrs. Dubose dies one month later, whereupon she has Jessie (her maid) prepare a box for Jem. It contained a perfect camellia, a snow-on-the-mountain. Jem initially throws it to the ground and screams, "Old hell-devil! Why won't she just leave me alone?" (128). Atticus then explains that Mrs. Dubose, who used the Saturday readings to distract her from her morphine withdrawals, which she was determined to break her addiction to before she died, was "a great lady"--despite the awful things she said about Atticus. Atticus wanted Jem to understand what true courage was: It wasn't "a man with a gun in his hand. It's when you know you're licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what. ...Mrs. Dubose was the bravest person [Atticus] ever knew" (128).
When Scout goes to bed, Jem is fingering the flower's petals, deep in thought.
Incidentally, white camellias are symbolic both of purity and of death--both appropriate connections in this passage.
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