Note: Unlike everyone else, seemingly, I read Go Set a Watchman without re-reading To Kill a Mockingbird. As such, I probably feel less upset and "betrayed" than others. That said, I plan to reread this and then read my new copy of Mockingbird.
***
This is a book that could not have been published in 1957, not least due to the undeveloped skills of the writer. Readership was also not ready for it, and in some quarters, evidence suggests that people still are not ready for it in 2015. Although the Southern Gothic genre has never shied away from the unsavory and uncomfortable, it is the bald honesty of Harper Lee in the context of 1957 that startles the reader. It's not a benchmark book or a new classic; rather, Go Set a Watchman gives the reader the opportunity to see characters and writers "in progress," like seeing early Disney cartoons starring Mortimer Mouse rather than Mickey, or reading an early draft of the Star Wars script with Luke Starkiller and an alien Han Solo.
One element that may or may not shock readers is the innate feminism of Jean Louise "Scout" Finch. As feisty as ever, she primly tells her some-romantic interest Hank Clinton that she rather be his mistress than his wife. But unlike Heloise before her, Jean Louise manages to break free not only of the dire social limits on women of her hometown but also the bounds between her and her Abelard; it takes more than a meeting of minds and spirits to make a relationship that Jean Louise could be happy with. She fully believes that if she caved and married Hank, she'd probably find Mr. Right a few years later and then wallow in misery over what could of been. She doesn't want to end up like childhood friends and kill her "self" to be a wife, a fear that I and other women of the 21st century face. That said, this is not a love story.
Nor is it a story about Atticus Finch, Jean Louise's beloved father and hero to vast swathes of readers, despite what early reviews have zeroed in on in the pre-release media blitz. Revelations regarding Atticus occur a third of the way into the book, and they do not solely center on him. They touch Hank, the now-retired maid Calpurnia, the meddling Aunt Alexandria, and even the quixotic figure of Uncle Jack, who features far more prominently in this book compared to To Kill A Mockingbird. Dill and Jem make flashback appearances, but Boo Radley is never mentioned. The trial of Tom Robinson is barely recognizable, though it is a pivotal memory. These revelations thrust readers into a different, more disturbing world than Mockingbird.... but that is the point. We the readers are on the same journey as Jean Louise and share her terror and disgust.
That is the main plot of the book -- not "Atticus Finch is a segregationist," but rather, Jean Louise has come home to an increasingly alien world and those dearest to her more sullied than when she was a child. At some point, the oblivion of childhood lifts and people see their elders for what they are, particularly parents. I speak not of blind objection to "The Man" or "the Institution," but that Dad was not always such a square, or Mom was not nearly such a saint. They had lives outside of the house, outside the realm of childhood. Some perceive this information at an early age and call their parents out for it in the midst of their own teenage rebellion. Others don't have the illusion broken until they return home on their first college break and find, to their dismay, that Mom and Dad are rejoicing in having an empty nest. For some, once they fly the coop permanently, they are rudely awaken by their parents "other" lives; Jean Louise falls into this category, having moved out five years prior and settling in New York City.
Jean Louise is consistent in her portrayal from To Kill a Mockingbird. She remains color-blind, blunt, and ever-seeking the truth in people at 26. During this visit to Maycomb, at the same time she makes her journey from New York to Alabama, the NAACP and the Civil Rights Movement are likewise descending upon the South. This description sounds like an invasion or a swarm of locust, but this is how the denizens of Maycomb -- including Atticus -- perceive it. Jean Louise is frustrated and horrified as she hears anti-integration rhetoric spill out of the mouths of her uncle and father. Worlds collide and the apocalypse is imminent -- not due to the progress to come but due to the inevitable destruction of the familiar, old ways of the society that Atticus and Uncle Jack lived in and that Hank wants to continue to live in; being of "poor trash," he wants society to remain the same so he can get a leg up for once, not have it reorganized out from under him.
It is this blind fear in the 1950s South that devours Maycomb, including Atticus Finch. In Go Set a Watchman, he uses any weapon he can to slow down change in the South; while he knows the inevitable, he digs in his heels. To us in 2015, his talk points are tried, tired, and old and..... shockingly current. The arguments here are not different from those invoked in the recent South Carolina flag controversy. Tenth Amendment, heritage, NAACP, unqualified and ill-educated black leaders -- it's all here in a 58-year-old manuscript. As a liberal Yankee who never lived in the South as a child, the arguments are instructive; I finally have some tenuous grasp of what Southerns reach for in defense of these items, these events.
However, Harper Lee, through her persona of Scout, expresses the blunt truth of it all: Maycomb is reaching for the vile tools of racism and segregation to preserve the good old days. Jean Louise calls Atticus out for what he is: though he never once made her doubt his goodness to this point, Jean Louise is shattered by the revelation that her father and other relations are backwards-facing, as bad as those vapid women she disdains in social circles. In the face of change, Atticus is just one of the crowd in Go Set a Watchman. Jean Louise reaches a breakpoint with all of these situations -- without her father, who is she? What does she do with the past? And how do you reconcile it with the present? And the future?
We all have this crisis in some form. This is a grown-up, 20something bildungsroman, not the childhood coming-of-age we have in Mockingbird. It's innately messier, uglier, and more stressful for the reader -- and maybe that's not a bad thing, given recent events.
***
Despite myself and my own identification as this NOT being the point of Watchman, out of love of Mockingbird Atticus, I am taking a dip into the debate.
In Go Set a Watchman, Atticus Finch is a racist, as he believes in segregation on the basis of race. He is not a racist in the same vein as Bob Ewell and the lynch mob from To Kill a Mockingbird however--- let's make that clear. While many apply the label broadly and write them all off -- as Jean Louise begins to do in Watchman -- Harper Lee also recognizes and depicts nuance in the severity of the flaw. This manifests in Mockingbird as we see Bob Ewell, Mrs. Duboise, Judge Taylor, Heck Tate, Link Deas, and Atticus all on a well-defined scale. One of the flaws in Watchman is that all the minor characters seem to blend together at a point -- they're all racists so who cares? Not caring is a fatal flaw in a book; Mockingbird makes us care and identify these people.
There have been some academic articles over the past 30 years stating that Atticus of Mockingbird was racist or never did enough for black people. The 1930s South during the Depression was a vastly different context from post-war Alabama in the Civil Rights era when the book was published, and equally different from context than the 1980s and 1990s when these criticisms first popped up. We must also remember that the POV in Mockingbird is not of Tom or Atticus, but of Scout, who had little to no interaction with Tom Robinson and her father together beyond what she sees at the courtroom and in the famous jail scene. Perhaps the most telling event we see through Scout is when Atticus, of his own will and time, goes to Tom's wife to break the tragic news. Atticus may have been court-appointed, but most Southern white attorneys did not typically go to their black client's home.
To clarify the kerfuffle about the KKK meeting in Watchman, Atticus
had gone to one years before the novel in order to see who was there; he
never trusted a person whose face he could not see. It's pointed out
in Watchman that Atticus tolerated freedom of speech and belief,
but the second that those thoughts and statements turned violent, he
would be the first to go after them. This doesn't do much to reassure
the reader or Jean Louise, in all frankness; both Atticus and Uncle Jack
harken to celebrated, historically fictional depictions of a kinder
KKK, which are a bunch of malarkey and always have been. But Harper Lee
always writes about what she knows -- and it appears that what she was
told (and didn't buy) isn't too far off from tales Southerners continue
to tell.
The Wall Street Journal published
an article in the wake of the early reviews, revealing that Harper
Lee's father, Amasa, had been the same brand of segregationist as
Atticus was in Go Set a Watchman. In the three intervening years, Amasa changed his views; what we see in Mockingbird is the end of a personal evolution. There is far more hope in Mockingbird than in Watchman;
Harper Lee may have thought her father, as wonderful as he was, would
never change that one ugly thing about him. Just like Jean Louise, she
still loved him anyway. And then he did change, much to the delight of
Harper Lee; Scout in Mockingbird never knew otherwise.
So, my conclusion on this front: Watchman Atticus = racist; Mockingbird Atticus = not a racist.
Atticus fought the dragon and lost in To Kill a Mockingbird, but he survived and remained hopeful. The dragon ate him entirely in Go Set a Watchman.
Let's move on.
*****
"Atticus and the law" is a theme that carries through in both books. So again, out of my slavish adoration, we're going there.
Although she herself is a bit miffed by the violation of States Rights by the Supreme Court (possibly referring to Brown v. Board in 1954), Jean Louise understands that the ends justify the means; it's a strong-arm in the right direction. In Go Set a Watchman, Atticus, like Abraham Lincoln, personally believes that while black people are not equal to white people in terms of the stuff they're made of, they are equal under law. Unlike in To Kill a Mockingbird, Atticus won the rape case and exonerated the black defendant; he did it because it would have been unjust by the letter of the law, not because of his personal convictions in true equality as expressed in Mockingbird.
This is most clearly illustrated in Go Set A Watchman when Calpurnia's grandson Frank mows down a drunk white man in the middle of the street while speeding. Atticus takes the case before the NAACP can get there, because he knows that the NAACP will try to get Frank off regardless of whether he is guilty, using the line that the system is against him because of his race; Atticus wants the law to ring true, and indeed, as far as the reader knows, Frank did accidentally kill a drunk man while speeding. Here, Atticus is painfully lawful neutral, to use a role-playing alignment term.
This brings us to my key question going into the book. I'm still not sure of the answer. Who is the more ethical man? Mockingbird's Atticus, who fought a case in part because of his own "good" personal convictions (despite the outcome)? Or Go Tell a Watchman's Atticus, who took a case despite his personal beliefs regarding race and won it because of his love of the law?
****
So the writing of Watchman --- problematic.
Technically speaking, the book does need more work than a publisher would have tolerated. The flashbacks are awkwardly placed, though probably the best-written elements of the book itself. This is probably why we have Mockingbird. It also helps that they cut out the womanhood bits from Mockingbird; did not need that oft performed trope. The conversations are dense and preachy at times. The drama is domestic: the private life revelations and Jean Louise's reactions to them are the "Action," with the car accident only there to illustrate Atticus's love of law and contempt of the NAACP. Meanwhile, Mockingbird has the two parallel stories of the mystery of Boo Radley and Tom Robinson's trial and aftermath for action, with the coming-of-age story acting as a steady, flowing river. That said, I enjoyed the character of Uncle Jack, and while I know that he had to be cut down for Mockingbird to work, I believe I will miss his presence once I re-read it. Much of Jack's wisdom is ported into Atticus, while the eccentric, rambling story-telling got the boot to the wayside or otherwise transformed in the whimsical, child-like narrations of Scout.
Is Watchman a proper sequel to Mockingbird? The nature of Atticus would be inconsistent if it were, as would the details and outcome of the Robinson trial. Hank was non-existent during Mockingbird, as was Boo Radley in Watchman. All things considered, we either have to accept that Jean Louise/Scout is a profoundly unreliable narrator or, as I stated in the first paragraph, Watchman was an early prototype that didn't quite work out all the kinks.
Should this have been published/? Yes. It's blunt and confronts the ugly tools people reach for to "preserve." It's not as well crafted or subtle as Mockingbird, but on occasion, I do think a cudgel is appropriate to wield. The fact we are still coping with the feelings Jean Louise does tells me the book is relevant and deserved to see the light of day, if only to give 2015 a good slap in the mouth (spoiler?). From another perspective, there is a question of exploitation of an aging author. In 2013, Harper Lee went to court because she felt she was being scammed by a literary agent. Considering that Watchman's survival in a bank box was already known to her by that date (in whatever story you believe about it), I am inclined to believe that Harper Lee did this of her own free will. Why, I don't know. To see what people thought? To show the evolution of a book, as an academic exercise? .......I just really hope it's not a scam, erk.
