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#Post#: 1066--------------------------------------------------
Harper Lee, GO SET A WATCHMAN (2015)
By: agate Date: January 13, 2016, 7:27 pm
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Harper Lee, GO SET A WATCHMAN (2015)
This controversial early version (completed in 1957) of To Kill
a Mockingbird gives us Scout (here usually Jean Marie) at the
age of 26, returning from her home in New York to Maycomb,
Alabama, to visit her family there--her father (the lawyer
Atticus Finch), his sister and brother (her uncle Jack). Her
brother Jem (Jeremy) is now dead, and Hank (Henry Clinton), is
now a lawyer and like a son to Atticus. Hank is also determined
to marry Jean Marie.
We get a view of life in a southern town in the 1950s, and Lee
has captured its conversation and attitudes very competently.
What she is trying to do here, though, is to use local color as
a backdrop for the far more serious matter of the community's
racism--viewed from Jean Marie's now-altered perspective.
Everything down home is fairly pleasant and
straightforward-seeming until Jean Marie turns up at a
"citizens' council" meeting where her father and Hank are in
attendance, and, unbeknownst to them, she hears the speakers
vehemently opposing integration and the Supreme Court.
It comes as a complete shock to Jean Marie to realize that those
nearest and dearest to her are probably racists.
Even though she grew up in close proximity to these people,
loving them, she must never have been aware of their views about
race.
In setting up this situation Lee is flying in the face of all
probability. I find it next to impossible to believe that a
child growing up in a southern town in the 1940s-1950s would not
have realized what her family's racial attitudes were, but that
is by the way. For the purposes of the story, let's assume that
this might have happened. Anything is possible.
Jean Marie's reaction is vehement. She rages at Atticus and her
Uncle Jack and Hank. She resolves to leave, without marrying
Hank--whom she realizes she didn't really love anyway.
Unfortunately, Uncle Jack takes center stage at about this
point, and his pontifications in defense of the traditional
southern-white attitudes can be irritating in the extreme. Lee
seems to want older people in this novel to be sages. Even if
their fundamental attitudes are bigoted and racist, their
"wisdom" will redeem them to the point where the thoroughly
repelled Jean Marie is ready to soften up.
This is where Lee performs some sleight-of-hand that strikes me
as unfair trickery. Having established Atticus and Hank at the
citizens' council meeting that was clearly aimed at perpetuating
racial segregation, she later makes it appear as if Atticus
doesn't "really"--in his heart of hearts-- believe in racism.
Instead, we are asked to believe that he is so wise in the
southern mores that--unlike Jean Marie in her youthful
naivete--he feels he must go along with them in order to--what?
Understand his fellow man better? Help to lead his fellow
citizens out of their bigotry and into a less harmfully
provincial and exclusionary way of thinking? It isn't clear.
What is clear is that Lee hasn't quite made up her mind about
how this story should play out. On the one hand, Jean Marie
herself is firmly opposed to racism. But is she to reject her
entire history, her family, even the man she was going to marry?
Seeds of doubt about Hank have been planted early on, to be
sure, but just what does Jean Marie have waiting for her in New
York if she returns there, probably forever?
A novel written by a woman about a woman in the 1950s perhaps
could not have ended with Jean Marie's walking away from hearth
and home forever, but she comes very close to doing just that.
In fact, if you look at the story without the mushiness
provided by Uncle Jack's lengthy and muddy speeches, that is
what she is doing.
By now her rage has subsided and she is armed with the
understanding her psychologizing uncle has poured into her ear,
complete with a reference to Browning's darkly despairing poem,
"Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came."
The idea of a quest (as in the "Childe Roland" poem) by Jean
Marie--a quest for the truth about herself and her background,
even though it threatens to overwhelm her in its horror--runs
through the story, which would have been a much better story
without quite so much of Uncle Jack. Jean Marie could have
reached her understanding by other means.
However, it isn't really fair to criticize a book in an early
draft, a first attempt at a novel by a writer who went on to
write a much better book. Go Set a Watchman is interesting for
what it isn't but it also shows the Mockingbird characters,
still very much themselves but in a different time.
I don't find it unbelievable that an Atticus Finch who fiercely
defends an African-American at one time might also be the same
Atticus Finch who goes along with southern ideas of white
supremacy. We just didn't see that side of him in Mockingbird.
I do find it unbelievable that a young girl growing up in the
south of that time would never have been exposed to the racial
attitudes of both her father and her childhood friend.
It would be interesting to know if Go Set a Watchman has been
edited at all since 1957.
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