Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird influenced me greatly as a young reader. While Atticus was the hero of that book, I identified with young Scout, a tomboy (as I was) who revered her father (as I revered my own.) The book gave me a different perspective of racial inequality and injustice, but more than that, it was a story of the coming-of-age of a white girl in the deep South, raised by Atticus, her principled father and Calpurnia, his housekeeper/cook/nanny. I saw her insular town in Maycomb County, Alabama, through her eyes and learned of Southern manners, respect, ignorance, prejudice, bigotry, hypocrisy, incest and rape through her eyes – which is to say, through the author’s eyes. The fact that the story was told by a white girl does not diminish its importance. In fact, white people were instrumental in African Americans gaining their rights. Some of those white people were women.
Had Go Set a Watchman been published it would have set the world on its ear, back in 1960, less than a decade after Brown vs Board of Education and eight years before Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. It was radical for its time – too radical.
Go Set a Watchman was written before Lee’s Pulitzer Prize winning “first novel” and was rejected. To me, it is a much more honest book, more straightforward, less crafted. From a writer’s point of view, it shows signs of being an early work, particularly the second half when Scout tends toward diatribes. Some reviewers have called it “flawed.” Of course it’s flawed, as are most books, particularly first books.
The art of writing — the craft of writing — is a process. Books don’t just spring perfectly formed, from a writer’s forehead. Stories have a way of morphing themselves and in fiction, even more so. A story – the same story – can be told from many different viewpoints. Stories are our parallel lives. They are all happening simultaneously, they are all true.
The best fiction isn’t about issues; the best fiction is about individuals. In telling one person’s story you tell a vital part of the human experience. Harper Lee allows Scout to do a little too much preaching in To Set a Watchman, but it does reveal the main character’s passionate idealism, which was ahead of its time. Harper Lee was at the vanguard of the great era of social change the sixties would bring.
On one level Go Set a Watchman is the story of a young woman’s separation from her father. Everyone sees the obvious racial theme but who’s talking about the other underlying theme?
In 2015, feminism is dead — or at least in a deep coma. In another version of the same story (Go set a watchman to kill a mockingbird ) an older Jean Louise returns home from New York — not a perfect place but a place where she has become an independent person. She comes back to the home she loves and the father she respects and she finds that he – and her boyfriend, the man who expects to marry her – are not the men she thought they were. She is ashamed of them. This is a theme not often explored in literature – daughter against father, daughter separating to become her own person, and turning down marriage in the process.
Had Go Set a Watchman been published it would have set the world on its ear, back in 1960, less than a decade after Brown vs Board of Education and eight years before Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. It was ahead of its time.
Still, it’s greatest value to me, is the story of a young woman coming of age whose father has greatly disappointed her. Atticus is a man of his time. He’s not evil, he’s just a man, as is Hank, whose hand she refuses. Scout is her own woman and is guided by her own watchman. Scout is the hero of Go Set a Watchman, not Atticus. Apparently a lot of people were disappointed in that. I for one, thought it was an honest novel, with an autobiographical ring of truth that first novels often have. There are infinite ways this story could be written. Maybe someone can write it from Calpurnia’s point of view.
You will be interested in the Telegraph review: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/bookreviews/11735560/harper-lee-go-set-a-watchman-review.html
When I see some of the reviews of Harper Lee’s newest novel I wonder if they read the same book I did.
I liked the book and hope it earns her a second Pulitzer.
Two lessons stand out: do not be an iconoclast-people are human and if you see them as perfect, they will disappoint you. I think it is ironic that the people who hate the book do so because they hate to see their image of Atticus humanized. Their very own icon is knocked from its pedestal, and the issue they struggled with is the very same one Jean Louise wrestled with.
The second lesson: conscience is an individual’s response. Sure, you can be influenced by others but it is you who decides who you are (character) and who you will be. So think for yourself!
And as I think about it there is a third lesson: love overcomes everything if you give it a chance.
The language was a bit jarring for me but I think it was vital to the story.
Great book Miss Lee. Thank you for writing it. And I hope the negative comments some people write do not drive people away from your novel.
Larry, thanks for your astute remarks; I see we are very much in agreement on this.
Great review Linda. I loved how you worked in how feminism isn’t an issue anymore. For 26-year-old Scout (now preferring Jean Louise) it is a strong, underlying motivator. At my age, 73 soon 74, I recall my young adult years and the radicalism required to gain equality for women and blacks; supposedly free people, but denied the same opportunities as white males. My daughter, born in 1964, has enjoyed the results of the laws that emerged as a result of forceful personalities like Jean Louise Finch.