WARNING: There are some spoilers in this blog post. Normally I’m against giving spoilers, but I felt it necessary, because I really wanted to go in-depth about this book. Your best move here is to go to the nearest book store, pick up a copy, and read. I’ll wait.
The publication of Go Set a Watchman has been mired in controversy since the news first circulated in February. It’s been fifty-five years since her only other novel, the critically acclaimed, Pulitzer Prize-winning high school curriculum mainstay To Kill A Mockingbird had been published. Questions about Harper Lee’s consent and the too-convenient-to-be-true timing of the discovery after Lee’s sister’s death dominate so much of the discussion, and they’re valid, but I’m not going to comment much on that. Why? Because they’re unanswerable questions, for me at least. I’m certainly not privy to the meetings that took place to discuss Watchman, and it’s not like I can call up Harper Lee to ask her directly (Oh, but that would be so amazing. All the things I’d ask her…)
So that leaves me with the book itself, 278 pages of complicated feelings. In the first chapter alone we find out Jem is dead. That took me a while to swallow—I read the first chapter online a few days before the book came out, in the middle of a terrible cold, and when I read that Jem had apparently dropped dead one day, my scratchy sore throat emitted a What?! so high-pitched only dogs knew my pain. The news isn’t even given gently; Lee mentions it almost in passing while describing a different character’s entry into Jean Louise’s world—and by the way, did anyone else find it jarring to hear her be called Jean Louise instead of Scout? And then there’s the Atticus business. Our beloved To Kill A Mockingbird hero, the New York Times and many others told us, was a bigot. And thus one of the biggest literary moments of the century got even more complicated. How could we rally around this sequel to an American classic when the hero we knew turned out to be the kind of man we thought he was fighting against?
And that brings me to my first point about a widespread misconception about the novel: we shouldn’t call this a sequel. Calling Watchman a sequel to Mockingbird is misleading at best, no matter how sequel-like it might seem. Yes, both books center on a family in Maycomb, Alabama. The names are the same, and so are most of the personality traits, but certain plot points don’t add up. To me, it’s more like the Friends episode, “The One that Could Have Been”.
I’m well aware I may have lost some of the more academic-minded folks, but stay with me.
For those who aren’t familiar, “The One That Could Have Been” is an exploration of what the six Friends’ lives would be like if one specific thing had turned out differently: i.e. what if Rachel had married Barry instead of leaving him at the altar in the pilot, what if Ross’s first wife had never come out as gay, what if Phoebe took a Wall Street job instead of remaining a masseuse and sometime-songwriter. Obviously there are no literal similarities between the plots of the episode and Watchman, but there are as many what-ifs to contend with when reading Watchman as when watching “The One That Could Have Been”, and we can take a lesson from Friends in how to let go of certain ideas about established characters. In order for us to deal with this book without banging our heads against the wall, we have to separate it completely from Mockingbird.
I know this is a difficult thing, especially if you’re like me and you geared up for the release of Watchman by…reading Mockingbird nonstop for two months. I now wish I hadn’t done that; it might have been slightly easier to read Watchman if Mockingbird hadn’t been so fresh in my mind. But even so, there are enough plot points that flag it as not being the same timeline as Mockingbird. There’s the existence of Henry “Hank” Clinton, for one, a young man who apparently has been friends with Jean Louise and Jem since childhood (and whom Jean Louise is seriously considering marrying), but was never mentioned in Mockingbird. There’s also an easily overlooked family discrepancy in the form of Francis: in Mockingbird, he’s Aunt Alexandra’s grandson, and in Watchman, he’s Aunt Alexandra’s son. But the biggest red flag that we could not view Watchman as a straightforward sequel comes in the scene where Jean Louise sneaks up to the courthouse balcony to observe a Maycomb citizens’ council meeting. As she is horrified by the speaker’s racist views, she flashes back to another scene that took place in the courtroom when she was a child: the case in which Atticus defended a black man accused of raping a white woman. But in Jean Louise’s recollection, it’s revealed that that case marked the first and only occasion in Maycomb that a black man accused of a violent crime was acquitted. In Mockingbird, Atticus lost that case. How can we possibly look at this as any kind of sequel when a plot point that big gets completely reversed?
Now that I’ve mentioned him, we might as well get into the minefield that is Atticus Finch in Go Set a Watchman. I started reading my copy of the book riddled with anxiety—when exactly would it be revealed that Atticus was racist? I turned the pages carefully, as if the next chapter could release Gregory Peck wielding a burning cross at me. The first indication happens when Jean Louise finds a pamphlet among her father’s things titled The Black Plague. Jean Louise reads it, brings it to the kitchen like a dead rat, and mocks it when her aunt prevents her from throwing it away. She assumes it’s just a random thing, possibly belonging to her aunt, but when Alexandra tells her it’s something Atticus got at a citizen’s council meeting, Jean Louise is shocked not only that her father would go to such a meeting, but that they even had such a meeting in Maycomb. For those not aware, citizen’s councils at this time in history in the South were like slightly-more-acceptable versions of Klan meetings, and thus damning in Jean Louise’s opinion. The discovery of the pamphlet’s owner sends Jean Louise off to the courthouse, where another meeting of the Maycomb County Citizens’ Council is underway. She finds not only her father and Hank in attendance, but many other prominent men from the town, all listening to the bigoted vitriol of a man whose introduction includes the fact that he’s quit his job to dedicate his life to the preservation of segregation (Jean Louise then notes, “Well, some people have strange fancies.” I love that line). As the hate-filled speech continues, Jean Louise is unable to remain in the room; she stumbles out, horrified by the idea that her father would condone the kind of talk she just witnessed, and felt that he had “betrayed her, publicly, grossly, and shamelessly.”
The next day there’s the business with the car accident—a black man had hit and killed a white man. When Atticus says he’ll take the case Jean Louise’s hopes rise—and fall when it becomes clear that Atticus only wants to ensure that there are no NAACP lawyers involved. Incidentally the black man involved is the grandson of Calpurnia, who had retired some time ago from working for the Finch family. A visit Jean Louise pays to her shows her how bad the race relations have become in Maycomb: instead of greeting her like family, Calpurnia interacts with Jean Louise impersonally, with “company manners,” and at the end of their one-sided conversation she plainly asks Jean Louise what “you”—the white folks—are doing to “us”—the black folks. This broad accusation makes a distraught Jean Louise ask Cal if she hated the Finch family. Calpurnia silently shakes her head.
The novel culminates in a showdown between Jean Louise and her father. After he finds her berating Hank for his involvement in the meetings, Atticus brings her to his office, where a discussion of their wildly differing opinions on segregation devolves into Jean Louise screaming at her father.
So there you have it: Atticus Finch cast in the role of a stereotypical white Southern man railing against change. It’s upsetting to be sure; his defense of segregation involves essentially blaming the oppressed African-Americans for being educationally behind their white oppressors. The hero we rallied behind in Mockingbird is seemingly nowhere to be found in Watchman—but perhaps it only seems that way because we should have been looking for a heroine instead.
What no one seems to talk about is Jean Louise’s part in all this. In Watchman, she is not Scout Finch, the feisty child just beginning to question the world around her. She is a twenty-six-year-old woman who has, since her childhood, learned to keep her fists down but will still fight anything she perceives as injustice. Yes, she kind of falls apart at the thought of Atticus being a bigot, but even that is better than an uneasy acceptance. She rages to herself and at others whenever the people in her life blame the poor race relations on the Negros. As she says, “it’s no more the Negroes than I can fly.”
At the coffee that Alexandra hosts, Jean Louise is painfully confronted with bigoted views. When Hester repeats some of the things that had been said at the citizens’ council meeting, Jean Louise challenges the idea of “mongrelizin’ the race” as being more of a reflection on the white people that fear it. Her assertion more or less gets dropped out of awkwardness. And there’s the exchange she has with another woman on the integration of New York:
“…I looked around and there was a Negro woman eating her dinner right
next to me…Of course, I knew, she could, but it did give me a shock.”
“Did she hurt you in any way?”
“Reckon she didn’t, I got up real quick and left.”
Jean Louise’s companion here misses her subtle indication that the problem didn’t lie with the black woman sitting in a drugstore eating a meal. During this whole scene, Jean Louise realizes that somewhere along the line she had missed out on the information that turned her peers into bigots. What she finds revolting is what the other women take for granted as The Way It Has Always Been. “I should like to take your head apart,” Jean Louise thinks about Hester, “put a fact in it, and watch it go its way through the runnels of your brain until it comes out of your mouth. We were both born here, we went to the same schools, we were taught the same things. I wonder what you saw and heard.”
Also during this scene is a wonderful inner dialogue Jean Louise has with the entire city of New York. This is one of the things I wish Harper Lee could have delved into a little deeper: Jean Louise’s complicated status as a Southern transplant to the North during the beginning of the Civil Rights movement. In the beginning of the novel, the North’s attitude towards the South is estimated through what the newspapers are saying; The New York Post, Jean Louise tells her father, assumes there’s a lynching with breakfast every day. During the coffee scene, Jean Louise silently begs New York to forgive her for associating with the kind of people who talk of “mongrelizin’ the race,” begs for New York to believe that “everything I learned about human decency I learned here.”
In today’s world we would succinctly define this as “white guilt,” but I think it’s more than that. Jean Louise is trying to find her place during a social revolution. Her views clash too much to belong to her hometown anymore, but at the same time her pleas to New York hint that her new home has brought its own prejudices against her. Perhaps the people in New York pause for a second when they hear Jean Louise’s Alabama drawl; perhaps they misjudge her as a real-life Scarlett O’Hara (but only for a second—I can’t imagine that Jean Louise behaves anything like Scarlett). Unfortunately Harper Lee never gives us a clear picture of Jean Louise’s life in New York, which is a shame.
A lot of people seem to think that Jean Louise is passive when it comes to these clashes in ideology, but I don’t see how—from mocking the “Black Plague” pamphlet in conversation with her aunt, to the debate attempts at the Coffee, to her final shouting match with her father, Jean Louise doesn’t stay silent about her beliefs. She might not have a landmark court case to put her convictions on public display, or even a lynch mob to single-handedly disperse, but she certainly doesn’t shy away from calling people out. When Atticus asks her if she really wants “Negroes by the carload” in schools and other public places, Jean Louise simply states, “They’re people, aren’t they?” And I think it’s fair to mention that at the end of the novel, Atticus is proud of his daughter for voicing her strong convictions. It’s hard to admit any kind of positive attribute after reading his views on segregation, but if there is one, it’s that he won’t hold a grudge against Jean Louise for profanely disagreeing with him.
When critics aren’t getting hung up on alternate-universe Atticus, they’re talking about the quality of the writing in Go Set a Watchman. Watchman, as far as we know, was Harper Lee’s first attempt at publication, and the publishers considered it, found many parts that they liked, but ultimately asked Lee to give it another go. There are passages that I found to be really powerful, but if I’m going to be honest, there are aspects that make me understand why the original publishers asked her to try again. The flashback scenes of Jean Louise’s childhood are well-written, and it’s nice as a Mockingbird fan to get a glimpse of the late Jem and their old friend Dill, but they seem jammed into the story without any real purpose. The scenes with Uncle Jack Finch were obviously supposed to show us how much his roundabout explanations confuse Jean Louise, but I think Harper Lee maybe did too good a job with that—I found myself skimming his dialogue until something jumped out that made some kind of sense. The thing I ponder most though is Jean Louise’s perspective of her father. We’re told countless times about the paragon of justice Atticus had been during Jean Louise’s childhood, but that’s the thing—we were told, not shown. I know the show-don’t-tell trope from every beginner-level creative writing class is more of a guideline than a hard-and-fast rule, but I can’t help but wonder if the Legend of Atticus Finch we have engrained in our minds did a lot of the work to justify Jean Louise’s meltdown. In the end, though, none of this makes me feel any differently about Harper Lee as a writer—for a first attempt, this is pretty damn good, and I’m glad her publishers saw that and encouraged her instead of flat-out rejecting her. And for writers just starting out, Watchman can serve as an example: you won’t be perfect right away, but through the power of revision, you could end up with a masterpiece like Mockingbird.
I recently read an article about a small bookstore in Michigan who is offering full refunds of Go Set A Watchman for those who feel that this newly-published work of Harper Lee’s is a terrible plague upon her legacy. I can’t even begin to formulate a coherent, mature response to this obvious display of literary snobbery, and I’m not going to tell people how to run their business. But if you truly love a book, any book, it’s hard for me to understand how anything could tarnish it. I’m going to return to my Friends comparison once again. The episode “The One That Could Have Been” happened in the middle of the sixth season as a two-parter episode. Two-part episodes are usually a mark of a highly important plot moment in any series, but what makes “The One That Could Have Been” stand out among the other Friends two-parters is the fact that it DOESN’T advance any story arcs. The episode is a truly stand-alone moment; it has no effect on the overall trajectory of the series. That’s also how I view Watchman. It’s an important book in literary history, and even in comparison to Mockingbird. However, I don’t think one will affect the other any more than I think one is a sequel of the other. Granted, I haven’t tried re-reading Mockingbird yet, but I look forward to it. Now that I’ve had a peek at what could have been, I think it’ll make me appreciate one of my favorite books even more.
Much thanks to Moxy at Tea and Ativan for editing this monster of a blog post.
For The Stories 