The Lesson From “Go Set A Watchman” No One Is Talking About
While there has been a great deal of controversy around the origin of Harper Lee’s Go Set A Watchman, it’s the novel’s content that might be generating greater shocks for fans of To Kill A Mockingbird.
Atticus Finch — yes, the steadfast lawyer who defended a black man falsely accused of rape in a deeply segregated American South — is a racist.
The man known by most high school readers as the fatherly figure who encouraged Scout to “walk in other’s shoes” attends Ku Klux Klan meetings and bemoans how black Americans are hopelessly behind in the United States of the 1950s. As an old man, he is bitter toward other races, a far cry from the height of his lawyering days.
Predictably, this new characterization has some would-be readers rejecting the novel out of hand. Many Twitter users have claimed they might not read it in order to “keep Atticus on a pedestal.” Some commentators are even calling for a boycott of the book.
Which might just illustrate the point of it all.
We should not be surprised that a literary character has flaws that contradict his better nature, because we are all flawed ourselves. It’s testament to how warped our public discourse has become that we can’t process others’ mistakes without being horrified or insulted.
Forget overt racism — today, a simple off-the-cuff comment can get someone fired from their job or defamed on social media ad infinitum. Even quietly supporting an unpopular cause can be devastating. Just look at the plight of former Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich: after he was outed as a donor to California’s Proposition 8 marriage initiative, he was subject to an overwhelmingly personal social media campaign that smeared his name and forced him to step down after only ten days on the job. And it’s not just a problem in the United States. In France, officials are “reassessing” the legacy of architect Le Corbusier due to the purportedly right-wing views he held while he was alive. If Atticus were a real person, his depiction in Go Set a Watchman would subject him to a similar fate.
The tendency to callously cast people aside once they exhibit a flaw wasn’t always a presence in our daily lives. Abraham Lincoln was a known racist and Martin Luther King, Jr. was a known womanizer in their own times. Yet such outsized flaws came with extraordinary talent and compassion, and we recall the beneficence of these heroes while putting their less savory qualities in reasonable perspective. Why can’t we do the same for the good, but imperfect, people of our own era?
That’s why Atticus Finch is such a wake-up call for all of us. Long held as a paragon of social justice in the literary world, his legacy has acquired a more human side. But is it necessarily tarnished? His racism is inexcusable, but the fact remains that his fictional deeds have passed down very real lessons in compassion and understanding from generation to generation as American society evolves. He is, by the actual standards of life, a good man, a man of duty and of the law, whose one crime is holding mistaken beliefs. And by being a fundamentally normal person, Atticus constitutes a revolution in our fractured social discussions.
We’ve recently seen fit to do away with not just people, but also symbols that may offend or carry a dark side. All around us a campaign of purification is being waged. No matter if something has special meaning or significance to a subset of our country’s population — if it carries baggage in another context, it must be scoured from the public conscience. Now, we have a fictional character that is less than perfect, a stark reminder of America’s less glorious moments. Atticus is as much a symbol as he is a persona. Will we sacrifice him to the ash heap as well?
Filmmaker Mary Murphy recently said that Go Set A Watchman is a product of the age in which it was set. “A truly liberated white Southern man wasn’t something you’d find in these small towns,” she says. “So Atticus, in the book, reflects — sort of — the time, and reflects the culture of the time.” I respectfully disagree. Watchman is a narrative for our own era. In a world which, despite all evidence to the contrary, our society and our leaders attempt to put every human being into little boxes of “bigotry” and “tolerance,” Harper Lee’s new novel challenges us to confront the fact that we are not creatures of utopian perfection. Rather, we are a collection of our darkest hours and brightest promises — something we should all remember the next time liberal opinion drags someone kicking and screaming to the chopping block.
