While researching To Kill a Mockingbird as a graduate student 16 years ago, I faxed several questions for Harper Lee to McIntosh & Otis, Lee’s literary agency in New York. After summarizing what little was known about the book’s genesis, I asked directly if any early drafts of the novel survived, whether Ms. Lee could give me any information about the original manuscripts, and whether her editor at Lippincott, Tay Hohoff, had anywhere commented in detail about the drafts. To my surprise, Lee responded. What she said, in brief remarks conveyed through McIntosh & Otis in March 1999, was “No to all counts.”
Though I don’t believe Harper Lee had simply forgotten about Go Set a Watchman, I also don’t blame her for her reticence about the manuscript she sold to Lippincott in 1957, or for distancing herself until quite recently from her first attempt at a novel. As the impact and controversy surrounding the publication of Go Set a Watchman indicate, To Kill a Mockingbird and Atticus Finch are sacred icons. An entire category of readers is now simply refusing to read Watchman for fear of the harm it will do to a literary saint. A larger number of readers, however, seem ready to welcome the complex new work into our recently intensified national dialogue on race.
There is another category of readers who should be newly interested in both of Lee’s books: professors of American literature and culture studies, who have tended to ignore Lee. Despite the enormous popularity of To Kill a Mockingbird, comparatively few scholarly articles have been written about it, comparatively few college courses include it on their reading lists, and there has not been a sustained or serious critical conversation about the novel among scholars. The publication of Go Set a Watchman offers good reasons for having this conversation now.
Racial events and ideology of the 1950s leach into Lee’s depiction of 1930s history.
Tay Hohoff asked Lee to move her novel’s setting from the late 1950s to the 1930s, and to tell the story from a child’s perspective. The case history suggests this was because she viewed Lee’s original manuscript as too volatile, telling unpalatable truths about race in the 1950s. The product of Hohoff’s requested rewrite, of course, was To Kill a Mockingbird. Lee’s recent comment on this professional relationship — “I was a first-time writer, so I did as I was told” — implies that she in fact had wanted to explore those truths.
Early in the new novel, an aging Atticus Finch asks his 26-year-old daughter, Scout, what the New York press is saying about the South in the violent aftermath of the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. “Well, to hear the Post tell it, we lynch ’em for breakfast” she replies, adding, “I haven’t paid any attention to it except for the bus strikes and that Mississippi business. Atticus, the state’s not getting a conviction in that case was our worst blunder since Pickett’s Charge.”
The “Mississippi business” Scout refers to, of course, is the story of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old boy from Chicago who was brutally murdered by two white men in August 1955 for allegedly whistling at a white woman in Money, Miss. Scout’s claim that the acquittal of Till’s murderers constituted a calamitous defining moment (a claim Atticus agrees with), and that the Northern press “went insane” over it, captures the South’s general paranoia and instability on the verge of the civil-rights movement. But the passage also conveys specifics about what was on Harper Lee’s mind as she composed the first draft of To Kill a Mockingbird, offering hard evidence that Lee’s initial impulse, her reason for becoming a writer, was a desire to confront and appraise the reactionary bigotry of her community in the post-Brown era.
A cursory reading of To Kill a Mockingbird reveals evidence of this desire. Racial events and ideology of the 1950s leach into Lee’s depiction of 1930s history, orienting sections of the text not to the Depression era in which the novel is set but to social conditions of the civil-rights era. To Kill a Mockingbird joins the national debate about segregation stimulated by the Brown decision, for example. The novel strives to counteract the propaganda of the White Citizens’ Councils, anti-integration societies that appeared after the Brown decision for purposes of intimidating the small number of black registered voters and fomenting white resistance to school integration. As fundamental a presence in the novel is the structural and ideological detail of Till’s lynching, which seems unquestionably to have provided a model for aspects of Lee’s fictional Tom Robinson trial and lynching.
The stunning assertion at the core of Watchman, and the cause of the distress now afflicting devotees of To Kill a Mockingbird, is that Atticus Finch is a racist and segregationist. Two decades after having “accomplished what was never before or after done in Maycomb County” by winning acquittal for a black man on a rape charge against a white witness for the prosecution, he joins the board of directors of the bigoted Maycomb County Citizens’ Council. He explains it to his daughter this way: “Honey, you do not seem to understand that the Negroes down here are still in their childhood as a people.”
The political awareness of Watchman and the gravity of its exposure of Atticus as a white supremacist should prompt scholars to reconsider their dismissive view of Harper Lee as an artist and re-evaluate their assessment of her Pulitzer Prize-winning work as little more than a saccharine children’s book. Mockingbird may in some ways be a “sweet book,” as I’ve heard it called, but this is after all a curious designation for a work about rape and race and death, a novel in which state-employed prison guards pump 17 bullets into the body of a black male for allegedly attempting to climb a barbed-wire penitentiary fence using only one arm. Ta-Nehisi Coates’s recent warning in Between the World and Me, that the “regressions” of racism “all land, with great violence, upon the body,” was made also by Lee.
It may be justifiable to fault Harper Lee for writing what is for some a “feel good” racial novel in which blacks essentially lack agency and the only hero is a white man who serves all too readily to vicariously assuage white racial guilt. We now know, however, that the immaculate Atticus of Mockingbird is viewed through the eyes of a young daughter who was eventually to grow up and feel betrayed by him. Mockingbird detractors have long wished that Lee had written a different kind of novel; the ironic and fortunate circumstance is that she did, and we now have it.
Mockingbird detractors have long wished that Lee had written a different kind of novel. We now have it.
In Go Set a Watchman, not only is Atticus’s heroism severely undermined, but Lee’s authorial surrogate Scout receives comeuppance from Calpurnia for presumptuously crossing the color line to console her former caretaker when her grandson has a tragic accident. Scout declares that she can no longer bear even to look at her once-venerated Atticus, but Calpurnia can no longer bear Scout’s arrogations of white privilege. Scout, shocked and hurt when Calpurnia rejects her pity and puts on “company manners” before her, pleads with the woman who raised her from the age of 2: “Cal, Cal, Cal, I’m your baby, have you forgotten me? … What are you doing to me?” Calpurnia’s response is both edifying and apt within the acrimonious racial context of Go Set a Watchman: “What are you all doing to us?” she replies.
Read together, Lee’s two novels complicate each other in beautiful and profound ways, offering a compelling case of textual revisions made during a politically contentious period and valuable possibilities for comparative study. Asking students to weigh the difference, for example, between vigorously defending the rights of a black man — as Atticus famously does in Mockingbird — and affording all blacks full humanity — as Atticus clearly does not in Watchman — can elicit opinions about an issue that has arisen frequently in history and literature, that has attended such figures as Harriet Beecher Stowe and Abraham Lincoln, and that is relevant now. Are the heroic Atticus of Mockingbird and the anti-heroic Atticus of Watchman different people? Not necessarily. Students should be pressured to articulate the many meanings of this paradox.
Had Harper Lee kept to her original civil-rights manuscript and been allowed to direct her energy toward developing Go Set a Watchman, we might have had a greater book than To Kill a Mockingbird. As it stands, we have a thought-provoking and powerful new novel that deserves to be read and discussed in culture-studies classrooms beginning immediately.
Patrick Chura is a professor of English at the University of Akron and author of Thoreau the Land Surveyor (University Press of Florida, 2010) and Vital Contact: Downclassing Journeys in American Literature From Herman Melville to Richard Wright (Routledge, 2005).
