By now, if you aren’t living under a rock, you have probably heard that Harper Lee, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” released a “new” novel this week entitled “Go Set A Watchman.” This release comes more than 50 years after her first novel.
During the few short days people have been able to get their hands on a copy of the novel, the controversy around it has grown immensely. Before the book’s release, many were concerned about Lee’s intentions in releasing this novel, wondering if she were capable of making this decision and fully understanding its ramifications with her age and possible dementia. As people began to read the story, many were shocked at the ways in which the characters in “Go Set A Watchman” diverged from the beloved, time-tested figures in “To Kill A Mockingbird”—namely, Atticus Finch.
In “Watchman,” Jean Louise, known affectionately as Scout in “Mockingbird,” is 26 and living in New York City. The primary conflict in the book occurs between Jean Louise and Atticus, as Jean Louise tries to reckon with the frankly racist beliefs that Atticus holds in the novel: “The one human being she had ever fully and wholeheartedly trusted had failed her; the only man she had ever known to whom she could point and say with expert knowledge, ‘He is a gentleman, in his heart he is a gentleman,’ had betrayed her, publicly, grossly, and shamelessly,” writes Harper Lee.
The Atticus in “Go Set A Watchman,” while still Maycomb, Alabama’s most respected lawyer, believes that the “negros” deserve the full measure of protection under the law—just not that the laws should be amended to also afford those people the full extent of equality. Though I was sad to read about my beloved, glorified Atticus in this way, I was more saddened by my realization that this is the kind of horrifically insidious racism that lasts in some ways to this day.
It remains in many people that believe themselves to be “good” or “righteous” but also somehow, by virtue of only birth, intrinsically better than another. This “Atticus” may be more representative of the tenacious, misleading nature of the Southern anti-segregationist movement, where the very people the town looks up to as its best and brightest are the same people. Much like it does the reader, this new vision of Atticus leaves Jean Louise morally confused to the point of betrayal. The awareness that racism comes not just in the form of evil but also in the form of one of literature’s most beloved characters is disconcerting, to say the least.
Many parts of “Go Set A Watchman” are braver than “Mockingbird” in dealing with racism and exponentially more willing to grapple with the gray areas— the ways that racism sinks its teeth into our every day lives and conversations.
Still other parts seem unwittingly offensive, the author unaware that what she is saying or portraying is hurtful and humiliating to the people she is depicting. In all of its unrefined, possibly unfinished glory, “Go Set A Watchman” seeks to draw a line, to call out every bit of inequality into the open. It sometimes excels in accomplishing this task, but, disappointingly, also sometimes falls short.
Even so, how one views this novel certainly has an impact on how it is read. Though the press has been running rampant with articles about the “sequel” to “To Kill A Mockingbird,” the publisher’s origin story claims that “Watchman” is actually a rejected first draft of “Mockingbird”.
By thinking of the book this way, one does not have to let the differences between the two novels shade their view of “Mockingbird”. That being said, it is still, a bit surprisingly, a complete book deserving analysis and examination in its own right. Most of the prose in the book is stunningly well written; however, there are pretty extensive issues with pacing, structure, and character development.
The book has no real climax similar to the trial scene in “To Kill A Mockingbird,” and the characters were not well-developed or explained. I have a sneaking suspicion that, if one had not read “Mockingbird” first, the characters in the book would not make very much sense at all.
In debatably the strongest and most developed scene, Scout speaks to herself about a sermon she heard the day before: “Mr. Stone set a watchman in church yesterday. He should have provided me with one. I need a watchman to lead me around and declare what he seeith every hour on the hour. I need a watchman to tell me this is what a man says but this is what he means, to draw a line down the middle and say here is this justice and there is that justice and make me understand the difference.”
If only we all had a constant watchman, declaring once and for all what is right and what is wrong.
