Harper Lee’s first published novel, “To Kill A Mockingbird,” was released at exactly the right time, 1960, the year John F. Kennedy was elected president and the beginning of the decade in which the Civil Rights Movement changed America forever. Its attitudes about racial justice and the liberal humanist credentials of its hero, the lawyer Atticus Finch, were unimpeachable. The novel was a natural Pulitzer Prize winner.
In high school in Alabama, it was placed on our required reading list well above works by Southern writers of far greater artistic merit. William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, Kate Chopin, Tennessee Williams, Carson McCullers, Walker Percy, Eudora Welty, and even Lee’s childhood friend, Truman Capote, all took a back seat to the millions who embraced “To Kill A Mockingbird.” It was proudly displayed in the living rooms of countless homes alongside Margaret Mitchell’s “Gone With The Wind,” a paradox that has never been fully reconciled, or even recognized, by Southerners.
Now, Lee and “To Kill A Mockingbird” are back in the headlines with the publication, 58 years after its submission, of her real first novel, “Go Set A Watchman,” causing many to ask the wrong questions, such as “Is Atticus Finch A Racist?” (USA Today) and “Will this book diminish my love for Atticus Finch?” instead of “Have we all overrated ‘To Kill A Mockingbird’?”
Lee did something that has oddly gone unnoticed by most critics, but was picked up immediately by her fellow Southerner, Flannery O’Connor, who made a brutally frank observation: “It’s interesting that all the folks that are buying it don’t know they are reading a children’s book.” O’Connor did not mean that was written from the point of view of a child; she meant that it was meant to appeal to a child’s mentality.
This should be obvious from nearly every utterance that comes from the mouth of the “virtuously dull” — to borrow a phrase from Pauline Kael on Gregory Peck’s cinematic portrayal — Atticus Finch:
“The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience.” To which a skeptical reader might reply: OK, yes, that sounds noble when it refers to questions of racial equality. But Atticus doesn’t tell us how we should respond when someone’s conscience tells them that the Confederate battle flag should fly over the town square or that gay marriage is wrong on “religious grounds.”
“Why do reasonable people go stark raving mad when anything involving a Negro comes up is something I can’t pretend to understand.” What Atticus doesn’t seem to understand is that anyone who goes stark raving mad when anything involving a Negro comes up isn’t a reasonable person in the first place.
“If you can learn a reasonable trick, Scout, you’ll get along better with all kinds of folks. You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view …” Oh, I don’t know about that. I think it’s fairly easy to understand the point of view of Dylann Roof. Nor do I particularly want to get along better with people like him.
At times, Finch’s sugar-coated myths are downright offensive, as when he tells Scout the “real” story of the Ku Klux Klan. “Way back around 1920, there was a Klan. But it was a political organization more than anything. Besides, they couldn’t find anyone to scare.” He goes on to explain that Klansmen gathered one night at the home of Sam Levy, a Jewish friend of his, and “Sam made them so ashamed of themselves they went away.” I wouldn’t have thought that anyone near or above the age of Scout could read this passage and not feel that their intelligence had been insulted.
And yet, it hasn’t stopped ‘To Kill A Mockingbird’ from becoming what was recently called in The Wall Street Journal “the most beloved novel in American history — more popular than even the Bible in numerous polls.” Not surprising, really, considering that the Bible is in many ways more realistic.
From Sophie Gilbert, at The Atlantic
To some extent, the stories of the most compelling fictional characters never really end—we are free, in our imaginations, to conceive all kinds of additional things happening to them. What’s fan fiction if not the purest expression of an impulse to keep the stories going? It’s a desire J.K. Rowling has tapped into more efficiently than any other creator, continually refining and extending the Harry Potter universe via tweets, interview tidbits, and now a play that will offer a fully-formed addition to the canon.
Harper Lee’s “Go Set a Watchman” is indisputably the most eagerly awaited work of fiction since Rowling wrapped up her Potter series in 2007. …
One longtime fan of the book, an Alabamian quoted in the New York Times, said about “Watchman,” “I’m not reading it. I want Atticus to remain the Atticus I adored.” Someone needs to inform that fan that neither Atticus is real, they’re fictional characters in different books who simply share a name.
That fan and millions of others should also be forced to acknowledge that the Atticus of “Mockingbird” was an idealized version of Lee’s father while the Atticus of “Watchman” is no doubt closer to real life. According to her biographer, Charles J. Shields, Amasa Coleman Lee once remonstrated a white preacher in the family’s hometown of Monroeville, Ala., for sermonizing on racial justice. Early in “Watchman,” Atticus angrily asks Scout, “Do you want Negroes by the carload in our schools and churches and theaters?” Perhaps not, the wishy-washy liberal Atticus of “Mockingbird” might reply, but we could sure use a few on our football team.
In all great novels, there is some quality of moral ambiguity, some identifiable but not necessarily explainable element that keeps the book from being too easily grasped. One hundred years from now, critics will still be arguing about the relationship between Huck and Jim or why Gatsby gazed at that green light across the harbor.
But there’s no ambiguity in “To Kill A Mockingbird.” At the end of the book, we know exactly what our instincts told us halfway through, that Atticus is a good man, that Tom Robinson, a cipher of a character on paper, is an innocent victim of racism, and that lynching is bad. As Thomas Mallon once remarked, the book acts as “an ungainsayable endorser of the obvious.”
It’s not just time to stop pretending that “To Kill A Mockingbird” is a timeless classic, it’s time to stop pretending that stories whose characters fall neatly under labels of good or bad can give us real insight into the insidiously subtle and complex nature of racism.
By Laura Marsh, at The New Republic
The portrayal of Atticus Finch, the lawyer hero of “To Kill A Mockingbird,” as a racist in Harper Lee’s new novel, “Go Set A Watchman,” has been variously described as a “bombshell,” “shocking” and a “revelation” in early reviews. The New York Times suggested that the new novel “could also reshape Ms. Lee’s legacy.” Yet scholars who have written on race and the legal system in “To Kill A Mockingbird” are less surprised. “If you read the book from a racial justice perspective,” Katie Rose Guest Pryal, a novelist and former law professor, commented, “it wouldn’t surprise you that this is who Atticus is.”
In fact, there is a well-established body of scholarship on “To Kill A Mockingbird” that draws attention to flaws in Atticus’s character. Pryal’s 2010 paper on a “failure of empathy” in the novel argues that Atticus never lives up to his own advice that to understand somebody, you have to “climb into his skin and walk around in it.” She points out that Atticus’s defense of Tom Robinson, a black character accused of rape, is not about understanding Tom Robinson: “Neither the jury nor the audience of the novel have learned anything about Tom: where he lives, what his family is like, how he treats his wife and children and others in his daily life.” His defense of Tom relies instead on convincing them that he, Atticus, is honorable. By playing to white prejudices in a system that consistently benefits whites, his strategy does nothing to “disturb America’s racial caste system.”
In her reconsideration of “To Kill A Mockingbird” in its 50th year of publication, Angela Shaw-Thornburg, a literature professor at South Carolina State University also identified problems with Finch’s “paternalistic and downright accommodationist approach to justice.” …
Set in the 1950s, “Go Set A Watchman” tells the story of Scout, Atticus Finch’s daughter, returning to her hometown as an adult. Her time away from home, living in New York, has changed her perspective. She sees herself transformed “from an overalled, fractious, gun-slinging creature into a reasonable facsimile of a human being.” And she also sees more clearly her father’s bigotry: in this novel, Finch opposes desegregation, rejects the work of the NAACP, and has attended a meeting of the Ku Klux Klan.
These details are new and shocking; but this dimension to Finch’s character is not entirely new. “In the imagination he is much greater than he is in the actual books,” says Ann Engar, a professor at the University of Utah who has written about the novel’s influence on the legal profession: “In the book, for example, Atticus Finch is assigned to defend Tom Robinson. He doesn’t volunteer to do it.” Similarly Pryal found that “whenever I gave talks at conferences on he possibility that Atticus might not be the anti-racist hero everyone believes him to be, people would freak out because they hold Atticus very close to their hearts.”
From Albert Burneko, at Deadspin
If the idea that Atticus is a secret racist strikes you as jarringly inconsistent with the character you encountered in “To Kill a Mockingbird,” do not feel as though you must read this new book to figure out what’s right. The Atticus you have known belongs to you; you created him. Some of your raw materials — just some of them — came from Harper Lee’s words, some of them came from your own life and experiences, and some of them (probably, let’s be real) came from Gregory Peck’s performance in the wonderful 1962 film adaptation. You combined them in your head and made an Atticus, and you know what he’s like. If Harper Lee is saying this Atticus is a Klan-rallying bigot — her lawyer would like us to believe she is, anyway — she might be wrong! She literally does not know him as well as you do. She knows him only slightly better than an absentee sperm donor knows the in-vitro-fertilized child raised by someone else.
Stiff-arming the new book for the sake of preserving your relationship with the old one might seem cowardly, or at least unappealingly incurious, if “Go Set a Watchman” were not arriving amid legitimate doubts about its provenance and the reasons for its publication 55 years after its predecessor. But this is a gussied-up version of a non-book that was rejected and replaced half a century ago, offered up now by a shady lawyer in extremely dubious circumstances, trying to tell you that one of the best American novels ever written was wrong about its most beloved character. Everything about it is sad. Read it if you want to; I hope you won’t.
From Maureen Corrigan, at NPR
Now 72 and crippled by arthritis, he’s still a wry patriarch, but in one of the novel’s key scenes — set, as in “To Kill a Mockingbird,” in Maycomb’s courthouse — Atticus allies himself with the kind of men who several years later stood shoulder to shoulder with Bull Connor and George Wallace.
“Go Set a Watchman” is a troubling confusion of a novel, politically and artistically, beginning with its fishy origin story. Allegedly, it’s a recently discovered first draft of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” but I’m suspicious: It reads much more like a failed sequel. There are lots of dead patches in “Go Set a Watchman,” pages where we get long explanations of, say, the fine points of the Methodist worship service.
The novel turns on the adult Scout’s disillusionment with her father — a disillusionment that lovers of “To Kill a Mockingbird” will surely share.
One could say, as some commentators already have, that Atticus here displays layers of contradictory attitudes about race harbored by whites, no matter how progressive. But, no. This Atticus is different in kind, not just degree: He’s like Ahab turned into a whale lover or Holden Caulfield a phony.
In “To Kill a Mockingbird,” Atticus was his own man; here, he essentially tells Scout you have to go along to get along. This Atticus, we’re told, joined the Ku Klux Klan in his youth; now, he’s on the local Citizens Council. This Atticus is a eugenicist: He believes in racial theory and reads pamphlets with titles like “The Black Plague.” He warns the horrified Scout that: “We’re outnumbered here (in Maycomb)” and observes that “Our Negro population is backward” and “Negroes down here are still in their childhood as a people.” Scout, who takes up her fallen father’s torch of progressivism, likens his views to those of Hitler and Goebbels.
Yet, the more poignant revelations in “Go Set a Watchman” have to do with Scout. … I ached for this adult Scout: The civil rights movement may be gathering force, but the second women’s movement hasn’t happened yet. I wanted to transport Scout to our own time — take her to a performance of Fun Home on Broadway — to know that, if she could only hang on, the possibilities for nonconforming tomboys will open up. Lee herself, writing in the 1950s, lacks the language and social imagination to fully develop this potentially powerful theme.
Everybody who loves “To Kill a Mockingbird” is going to read it, no matter what I or any other reviewer says about its literary quality, the bizarre transformation of Atticus or its odd provenance. All I know for certain is that “Go Set a Watchman” is kind of a mess that will forever change the way we read a masterpiece.
From Joseph Crespino at The New York Times
As a guide to the complexities of Southern politics, and to the political transition of white Southerners from the Democratic to the Republican Party — a shift that has remade American political life over the last half-century — “Watchman” is actually a more revealing source than Ms. Lee’s celebrated novel.
How is it possible that the fair-minded Atticus Finch of “To Kill a Mockingbird” could also be the embittered racist depicted in the newly published “Go Set a Watchman”?
It’s not just the story of a daughter’s changing perspective. Southern political history is full of figures who evolved along similar lines. One of the best examples is Strom Thurmond, the longtime senator from South Carolina. Thurmond was a committed New Deal Democrat in the 1930s as a state legislator. As governor in the late 1940s, he advocated for the repeal of the poll tax and called in the F.B.I. to investigate a lynching in his state.
Yet in 1948, in an effort to position himself for a Senate run two years later, Thurmond thrust himself to the front of the reactionary forces that organized a third-party campaign in protest of the national party’s civil rights policies. Throughout the 1950s, Thurmond led white Southerners’ widespread resistance to civil rights, organizing the 1956 Southern Manifesto, a denunciation of the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education and pulling off a one-man, 24-hour filibuster of the 1957 Civil Rights Act.
In “Watchman,” Ms. Lee shows a deft understanding of political realities that go unmentioned in “Mockingbird.” In that novel, Atticus defends Tom Robinson because it is the decent thing to do. It is only in “Watchman” that we learn of an ulterior motive, one shared by politically astute segregationists throughout the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s: If white Southern officials didn’t pursue local justice in crimes involving African-Americans, then the federal government or the N.A.A.C.P. would.
The Atticus Finch of “Mockingbird” has always been an overburdened figure. In 1960, when the novel was published, the South had just ended a decade of fierce reaction. Where were the decent white Southerners, many people wondered, who could lead the region through this crisis? The stoic, civic-minded Atticus Finch gave Americans hope. But that comfort has come at the cost of easy answers for complex issues. Whatever its flaws as a work of fiction, “Go Set a Watchman” brings a moral and political complexity to Atticus Finch that is overdue.
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