The Death of Harper Lee
To Kill a Mockingbird and Go Set a Watchman are both misunderstood literary powerhouses
When I was about 4 or so, my aunt and I were walking into an almost-empty church. We were going to rehearse a song we were scheduled to sing at the next service. We happened upon a couple of people working in a small room there.
My aunt told them about our impending rehearsal, then added “Ignore us.”
What does that mean, I asked.
“It means ‘pay very close attention’ to us,” she said.
It’s a constant feature of childhood: either to distract a child or for their own benefit, adults lie. It’s a universal experience, but it seems to be one that literary critics and teachers often miss.
I was 14 years old when I first read To Kill a Mockingbird. The class discussions, as far as I can recall them, were about the plot details and debates about who the “mockingbird” in the story was. We watched the movie, where Gregory Peck getting spat on elicited the most reaction from the class.
In the novel, we saw the unfairness of the South’s apartheid regime, the inflexible hatred showered upon the Black citizens of Maycomb. All of that was well realized and clear in both the book and film.
What I remember with much more clarity, though, were the parts of the book that didn’t make sense.
For example, I was pretty sure that the Ku Klux Klan was more than a benign “political organization” despite Atticus describing it as such, disarmed by the moral power of a stern talking-to. Do you remember the death of Tom Robinson? He goes mad upon incarceration and tries to climb over a prison gate, when he is killed by guards. That sounds more like the testimony you’d hear after an “officer-involved shooting.”
That’s probably not what happened.
Seventeen years or so after that first reading, I found myself drawn back to Maycomb County with the controversial release of Go Set a Watchman. This novel grew out of the original draft of TKAM, and the tempest surrounding it had as much to do with its contents as with the dubious circumstances of its publication.
Interestingly, in this version of the story, Atticus actually wins in the Tom Robinson trial, where Tom, a disabled Black man, is accused of raping and battering Maella Ewell. Rather than being the animating core of the novel, this episode is given short shrift in a paragraph-long memory from a 26-year old Jean-Louise Finch (“Scout” in the original). What raised readers’ hackles was the revelation that Atticus is a member of a Citizens Council, the white supremacist organization for respectable folks.
Atticus, likely remembered via Gregory Peck’s powerful performance in the film adaptation of TKAM, is a fallible old man in this story. Nearly crippled with arthritis, his morality thoroughly compromised, he’s a pitiable shadow of the humane crusader from the first story.
But was that Atticus — in the book — just a figment of our collective imagination?
In 2015, Malcolm Gladwell took a stab at answering this question. In a New Yorker essay, he first critiques his legal chops. Atticus, according to Gladwell, doesn’t really marshal any evidence that Tom was not guilty, going so far as to assert that maybe he wasn’t. This criticism doesn’t really hold up: in the novel, Attitcus asks both Ewells whether a medical examination had been conducted on Mayella (the answer is no).
In fact, eugenicist ideas are present throughout TKAM (this never came up in class). Poverty, poor hygiene, and moral inferiority are all credited to one’s lineage. Catherine Nichols explored this idea in Jezebel:
out of the first six pages of Mockingbird, five of them are details of the Finch family pedigree. The book never frees itself from the idea that each person is only as good or bad his family tendencies. The Ewells are trash, the Haverfords are jackasses…
More broadly, though, Gladwell targets the limits of Southern accommodation. Atticus’ strategy, Gladwell notes, is to prey on the jury’s prejudice towards the lowly-born Ewells, and this disgust with white trash permeates the novel. He aims to preserve the Southern social order, with whites sharing aristocratic pretensions on top, pitiable but innocent Blacks next, with white trash vermin on the bottom.
Uncle Jack Finch says as much in Go Set a Watchman while debating Scout:
The South was a little England in its heritage and social structure. Now, what is the one thing that has beat in the heart of every Anglo-Saxon — don’t cringe, I know it’s a dirty word these days — no matter what his condition or status in life, no matter what the barriers of ignorance, since he stopped painting himself blue?
Sympathy with the Confederacy runs throughout both TKAM and … Watchman. During my initial reading , I took for granted that Confederate sympathies or symbols were just harmless cultural totems and not political incitements. I was a Dukes of Hazzard fan, after all.
When Atticus reflects on the hopelessness of defending Tom Robinson, that it’s worth fighting — even for a lost cause — Scout remarks that he sounds like the Confederacy’s last surviving veteran in Maycomb.
As a state-appointed defense lawyer, Atticus speaks of what we, the readers, see as a noble but doomed goal. But for him, the frame of reference is secession and preservation and extension of a slave society.
Thomm Hartman, writing in The New Republic, notes how the Stars and Bars are, without irony, considered a symbol of liberty:
The only other time in American history when an entire region of America was converted from a democracy into an oligarchy was the 1830–1860 era in the South. It’s why Republicans are so fond of the Confederate flag and Civil War memorial monuments.
The “freedom” that these people revere is the freedom to dominate the Other.
Such people have no interest in democracy and the sooner we stop pretending that they do, the better off we’ll be.
The pro-Confederacy, anti-New Deal, anti-Civil Rights language in …Watchman echoes the think tanks and politicians that hold similar views today. Northerners and Republicans (who at the time connoted progressive liberals) are spoken of as alien figures, if not targets of hatred, in TKAM.
New York City, where Jean-Louise lives, is a different country in Go Set a Watchman.
The Finches of Alabama, however, are a noble people.
Nichols elaborates on this point:
the Finches hold back from exercising their full powers of superiority right back to Simon Finch, who saved his money, kept only three slaves and lived frugally.
Gladwell seems to think that’s he’s uncovered another blind spot in Atticus’ morality, referring to the aforementioned episode about the Klan. Gladwell asserts that surely Atticus would have known about the Klan’s actual lynchings of Jews in the 1920s. Gladwell smugly endorses reformist movements against whatever it was that animated Atticus, confident that he’s killed a giant in several hundred words.
Sure — but isn’t it more likely that Atticus was simply lying to Scout to preserve the genteel image of white supremacy that he’s defending?
Re-reading both TKAM and Gladwell, analysis of the former seems to make the same mistake that most popular audiences make with Great American novels: they take the narrative at its word. Just like The Great Gatsby is filled with despicable characters and commentary on the corrosive American Dream but is remembered for glamorous’ Jazz Age parties, To Kill a Mockingbird is misremembered as a sweet story about good versus evil.
However, TKAM is told from the naive, largely ignorant perspective of a child. Without bringing some skepticism or critical thinking to the affair, readers are easily misled as to what is actually happening in the story.
The issue of perspective is key to understanding these novels. The narrator in …Watchman is omniscient, and allows the reader to see things beyond what Scout/Jean-Louise sees. The Thug Notes video is worth watching in full.
Reading Go Set a Watchman, I realized that the whole story is perhaps more disquieting for different reasons. The tragedy isn’t that the singularly noble Atticus is reduced to a normal, ordinary man infected with the prejudices of his time. What makes the book so devastating is that there is no white knight, no moral exemplar to look up to.
Jean-Louise is herself full of 10th Amendment bluster, sympathizing with the Lost Cause while simultaneously revolted by vulgar racism. These two positions are incommensurable, and yet there is no reckoning in these pages. We see Jean-Louise, but we aren’t Jean-Louise.
The drama is played out in Jean-Louise’s shifting perceptions of her father. If the one good man in Maycomb was in his heart just as bad as the worst men in Maycomb…where does that leave her? What moral compass does she have now?
Her uncle Jack says as much: everyone’s been waiting for Jean-Louise to divorce her morality from her father, to recognize him as a mere mortal. She will one day have to think for herself. The elder Finches also predicted that her values would pull her away from Atticus, but there won’t be any love lost in the family because they are family.
In a section that would surely be gospel at countless Thanksgivings around the country, Jack Finch intones that, actually, it’s Scout who is the bigot!
What does a bigot do when he meets someone who challenges his opinions? He doesn’t give. He stays rigid. Doesn’t even try to listen, just lashes out. Now you, you were turned inside out by the granddaddy of all father things, so you ran. And how you ran….Good grief, baby, people don’t agree with the Klan, but they certainly don’t try to prevent them from puttin’ on sheets and making fools of themselves in public
The drama in Maycomb is an unsatisfying story if you’re looking for heroes.
So what was Harper Lee trying to do with this story? Since the …Watchman version was written first, we cannot dismiss its moral complexities to the failing faculties of a diminished writer. This is the story she originally wanted to tell. What are readers to make of it?
In To Kill a Mockingbird, did Harper Lee write an apologia for accommodationist white supremacy? Or did she write a story whose narrative features obvious gaps and errors that force critical examination of that system? In Go Set a Watchman, did she write a novel urging readers to make peace with the vilest among us? Or did she write a novel showing the moral limits of such a strategy?
In “The Death of the Author” Roland Barthes writes:
A text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination.(emphasis mine)
To me, these stories are not about good guys versus bad ones or about the individual versus the mob. They are about growing up and the hard choices that one must make when confronting what one sees as immoral. There isn’t a happy end, only a noble struggle, and it’s one that every thinking and feeling person must contend with on their own.
In fact, the character Jem, Scout’s older brother, plays a much larger role in TKAM than I had recalled, basically losing his faith — in the law — as the trial proceeds. Earlier, he’s sure he’ll be a sports star and then a lawyer like Atticus, but as he sees what the law can be used for, he becomes disillusioned.
The novel could have ended there and made the same point about what growing up is all about.
But what did Harper Lee have to say? In her own words:
Surely it is plain to the simplest intelligence that To Kill a Mockingbird spells out in words of seldom more than two syllables a code of honor and conduct, Christian in its ethic, that is the heritage of all Southerners.
And much like the teachings in any holy book, the message isn’t as clear or dictated with as much infallibility as many readers think. Readers shouldn’t take what is said by the characters or even in the book itself at face value. Neither book explicitly preaches what the reader should take away from it.
We have to “set our own Watchman,” and that’s a challenge that’s far more difficult and uncomfortable than pat praise of these works would lead you to believe. The one instruction that can be found in Lee’s work seems to be this: no matter who you look up to, no matter what you admire or what you’re told, if you want to really understand this world, pay very close attention.
