Scout Comes Home Again

From the moment that its discovery was announced, Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman has been awash in controversy. Questions abound. Conspiracy theories circulate. Who found the manuscript and when? Did Lee, now eighty-nine and living in a nursing facility, approve its publication? Which manuscript is it—the first draft of To Kill a Mockingbird or the manuscript of the race novel that Lee from time to time said she wanted to write after Mockingbird? And then comes the book itself, with the surprising revelation that Atticus Finch, the upholder of law and courtroom justice in Mockingbird, is now, eighteen years later, a leader of the segregationist Maycomb County Citizens’ Council and spearheading efforts to resist the federal mandate for school integration resulting from Brown v. Board of Education. If that’s not shocking enough, we also learn that Atticus is a former member of the Ku Klux Klan.

It certainly could be argued that the characters of Go Set a Watchman are not the same characters, other than in name, as those in Mockingbird. One could reasonably maintain, particularly if Watchman is Mockingbird’s abandoned first draft, that in revising her manuscript into a new novel Lee created an entirely new set of characters as well, whatever similarities those characters share with their previous manifestations. Adding some credence to this perspective is the fact that events in Mockingbird as they’re later recalled in Watchman don’t always match up perfectly, including Atticus’s courtroom defense of Tom Robinson. In Mockingbird, Atticus takes the Robinson case not because he wants it but because Judge Taylor appoints him; once assigned, he does his best, despite knowing he’s going to lose, trusting he’ll win on appeal. In Watchman, Atticus volunteers his services, even though he rarely takes criminal cases, because he knows the accused is innocent and will be found guilty without a vigorous courtroom defense; at the trial, despite “an instinctive distaste” for what he’s doing (apparently, the fact that he is defending a black man), he mounts a strong case and wins.

Even with the inconsistencies, however, much of the material from the two narratives does coincide closely, allowing us without much difficulty to read the novels in tandem, which is what a vast audience is doing—returning to Maycomb to find out what happened to Scout, Dill, Jem, Calpurnia, and others. Reading Watchman alongside Mockingbird, in fact, gives Watchman a significance that it lacks by itself (the novel’s structure is often clunky and its prose mostly pedestrian), with the paired novels giving us insight into the segregated South’s complicated racial dynamics from the mid-1930s to the mid-1950s, particularly the pressures toward racial solidarity within the white community. Those dynamics are best revealed in Scout (as twenty-six-year-old Jean Louise, visiting home from New York City) and Atticus, both of whom in the face of repeated challenges must define their fundamental positions on race and take stands for or against the system of segregation. Their individual struggles, as we move from Mockingbird to Watchman, give their lives a consistency not always immediately apparent, and that consistency includes Atticus’s turn to the Klan and the Citizens’ Council.

If one reads Mockingbird alongside Watchman—rather than relying on recollections of the 1962 film—Atticus’s political stances in Watchman are less surprising than one might think. The Atticus of Mockingbird has been widely lionized, to the point of idolization (no doubt in part due to Gregory Peck’s portrayal in the film; Peck, it should be noted, had a significant say in the script’s final shape), as a man of honor and integrity who is leading the South slowly forward toward racial justice. As admirable and courageous as the film’s Atticus is, this lionization goes way too far in construing the novel’s Atticus in our memory as some sort of social reformer. Atticus’s concern for justice and fair play does not extend into the social realm, but instead remains...