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Harper Lee, Atticus Finch and Go Set a Watchman: What the world is saying

Atticus Finch in court.jpg
In the 1962 movie version of "To Kill a Mockingbird," Gregory Peck played Atticus Finch, a heroic lawyer who takes a stand for justice. In "Go Set a Watchman," Atticus Finch has taken a turn toward segregationist sympathies. (File)
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John Hammontree | jhammontree@al.comBy John Hammontree | jhammontree@al.com 
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on July 20, 2015 at 1:45 PM, updated July 20, 2015 at 1:46 PM
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It's a testament to the power of Harper Lee's words and the South's place in the American imagination that a novel written 60 years ago has suddenly become the book of the moment. The evolution of Scout, Atticus and Harper Lee, herself, has sparked a furious discussion about race relations in the Deep South and throughout the world.
Initial reactions to Go Set a Watchman noted with some horror that Atticus Finch was revealed to be a segregationist. In the week since its publication, several thought pieces have emerged about the danger of building idols, the difference between truly seeking equality and the desire to prove your own moral superiority and the South's role as a mirror for race relations throughout the country.
For many writers, the crux of the book was using Atticus and Scout to explore our own prejudices.
Below are excerpts from much of the thoughtful content produced about the book. What revelations did the book hold for you?
In some ways, Watchman is structured like a mystery novel, with the decanonization and subsequent autopsy of Atticus Finch as the central conundrum around which the story unfolds—a story that turns out to be about Jean Louise's struggle to fathom her own racial (and other) views, not just her father's.
-          The Atlantic: Go Set a Watchman: What About Scout?
But a fictional character can remain unchanged, so why not leave Atticus be? With so many real-life characters tumbling off their pedestals (Bill Cosby comes to mind), why knock such a noble literary hero off his?
-          Chicago Tribune: Why not leave Atticus be?
And Jack makes a forceful argument that running away to the North and thinking you're better for it is a kind of naivete. "It takes a certain kind of maturity to live in the South these days," Jack suggests to Scout.
Lee's father Amasa Coleman Lee, who some call an inspiration for Atticus, first supported segregation and then reportedly had a change of heart while Lee was writing "Mockingbird," becoming a supporter of integration. Lee was said to be very proud of her father for changing his mind.
Atticus Finch is a fictional embodiment of the notion that humans are flawed and embrace contradictory thoughts or engage in actions at odds with former behaviour, the very essence of what makes humans human.
What we have had before us in Atticus Finch is the character middle school English class has taught us to love as our only hope if we are not ourselves politically powerful, a powerful ally who believes in the letter of the law.
-          Huffington Post: Atticus Finch Meets Black Lives Matter
For some audiences, however, Atticus has always been a fantasy, among the first of a durable cinematic character we've come to know well: the white savior. It's a hero type that shows up in far more recent movies as popular and critically praised as "The Blind Side," "The Help" and "Dances With Wolves," in which a white character rescues people of color from their plight.
In fact, there is a well-established body of scholarship on To Kill A Mockingbird that draws attention to flaws in Atticus's character. Pryal's 2010 paper on a "failure of empathy" in the novel argues that Atticus never lives up to his own advice that to understand somebody, you have to "climb into his skin and walk around in it." She points out that Atticus's defense of Tom Robinson, a black character accused of rape, is not about understanding Tom Robinson.
In nineteen-sixties Birmingham, as in Scout's Maycomb, the two Atticuses could coexist, and did. History delivered Southerners of that era into an immoral world where segregation shaped everything.
-          New Yorker: The Atticus we always knew
The importance of this new Atticus is that he is layered and complex in his prejudices; he might even be described as a gentleman bigot, well meaning in his supremacy. In other words, he is human, and in line with emerging research into how racial bias has evolved in our society. He is a character study in the seeming contradiction that compassion and bigotry can not only reside in the same person but often do, which is what makes racial bias, as it has mutated through the generations, so hard to address.
-          New York Times: Our Racial Moment of Truth
As a guide to the complexities of Southern politics, and to the political transition of white Southerners from the Democratic to the Republican Party — a shift that has remade American political life over the last half-century — "Watchman" is actually a more revealing source than Ms. Lee's celebrated novel.
-          New York Times: Atticus Finch Offers a Lesson in Southern Politics
The depiction of Atticus in "Watchman" makes for disturbing reading, and for "Mockingbird" fans, it's especially disorienting. Scout is shocked to find, during her trip home, that her beloved father, who taught her everything she knows about fairness and compassion, has been affiliating with raving anti-integration, anti-black crazies, and the reader shares her horror and confusion.
For many teachers, this presents a conundrum in how the fictional character is taught in classrooms. How will the new book affect or change the way "To Kill a Mockingbird" is taught in middle and high school English classes?
-          New York Times: How Should Schools Deal With the New 'Atticus Finch'?
By the end of the novel, Atticus, again in his wise, paternal, benevolent way, is saying to Scout, here called Jean Louise, you know, you kind of had to kill me. And what he means by that - it's a very Freudian kind of reference - you've got to slay the father in order to develop your own conscience.
-          NPR: Atticus' Halo Comes Apart In 'Watchman'
Truths can be hard, and truths about race in this country are often the hardest — especially when the revelations are about those we love. If racism is helped along not only by cross-burners in sheets, but those whom you have loved and emulated, it feels like too much to bear. The urge to look away is powerful.
Scout and Atticus both believe in a kind of limitation of African-Americans, that they are and were at that time a people in their infancy, the idea that we had to go slow because these people weren't really ready for it. They weren't really ready to vote. They weren't really ready to go to school with white children.
In 1992, the legal scholar Monroe Freedman published a controversial essay in which he recast Atticus Finch as less than a hero. Through a close analysis of the text, Freedman deemed Atticus a "passive participant" in "pervasive injustice." Malcolm Gladwell arrived at a similar conclusion in 2009, comparing Atticus to "Big Jim" Folsom, a two-time governor of Alabama who in the 1950s earned a reputation for race liberalism that was only partly justified. Both Freedman and Gladwell deserve plaudits for arriving at their analyses before the world even knew of Go Set a Watchman.
Race is the true protagonist of the American novel. Our most popular classic fictions have known this, from Moby Dick to Beloved; all these books take on race or talk it out, often in other forms; they are less "horror stories for boys" than ghost stories from a haunted conscience. The South's heroes are all either saints or martyrs. Suffering is part of the landscape, as seen in Mockingbird through mean old Mrs. Dubose who hurls abuses and insults at the children from her porch but decides to kick morphine at the last and finds dignity in a natural, if painful, death.
-          Slate: Ghost Story from a Haunted Conscience
Needless to say, when a major book is released, the pressure to produce immediate analysis is intense—whether these judgments are based on actual scrutiny of the text or on early reviews written by critics.
Yet, for me, making Atticus a brightly principled character in To Kill a Mockingbird did a better job of emphasizing racism's horror. Watchman's focus on universal human frailty seemed jaded and stale—less compelling, at least, than the first book's image of virtue flashing forth, then extinguished, again and again and again.
Atticus Finch — and Gregory Peck's Oscar-winning portrayal of him — is the quintessential white savior. But the trouble with white saviors is that the story is not about those whom they're saving. It's about themselves.
The reason the Atticus of Mockingbird is iconic and the one in Watchman feels alien is because as Lee reworked Watchman into Mockingbird, she tapped into a key component of Southern culture: the need for folk heroes and mythic figures. It is through the folklore of the South that the region places a mirror up to its virtues and failures.
As a novel, Watchman lacks Mockingbird's riveting courtroom drama, its page-turning pacing, its genius structure. Still, there are pleasures to be had, as we live through Scout's humorous adolescent misadventures (one involves falsies) in flashbacks.
-          USA Today: 'Watchman': Is Atticus Finch a racist?
Still, I knew by then that my parents weren't perfect; I had realized as I grew older and came to know them as an adult, and even more so after they were gone and I could ruminate freely on who they were, that they were people with faults and insecurities and infuriating blind spots. I learned to love them for the imperfect people they, like the rest of us, are and were. People, apparently, don't want to hear the same about the fictitious Atticus – which, of course, forms the central pathos of "Mockingbird" to begin with.
-          US News & World Report: Et Tu, Atticus?
Ms. Lee's father was indeed a segregationist, according to people who knew him and according to Charles J. Shields, author of the biography "Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee." But while his daughter was at work on "Mockingbird," Mr. Lee had a change of heart that moved him to advocate for integration. Mr. Shields said Mr. Lee's late-in-life shift could explain the transformation of Atticus through the author's drafts from a bigot in "Watchman" to a civil-rights hero in "Mockingbird," and why in interviews after "Mockingbird" she spoke glowingly of her father. "She may have been very proud of him," Mr. Shields said.
Stephen Peck says his father would have appreciated the discussion the book has prompted, but would have been troubled by the decision to publish it. Gregory Peck considered Lee a dear friend. She gave him the pocket watch that had belonged to her father, on whom she modeled Atticus. Gregory Peck wore it the night he won an Oscar for the role.
"Go Set a Watchman" is a distressing book, one that delivers a startling rebuttal to the shining idealism of "To Kill a Mockingbird." This story is of the toppling of idols; its major theme is disillusion.
Instead, "Go Set a Watchman" is part of the process of divesting ourselves of the idea that, as Ta-Nehisi Coates put it, "we believe racism to be the property of the uniquely villainous and morally deformed, the ideology of trolls, gorgons and orcs." If racism can belong to Atticus Finch — and if it became his property through the same processes that made him a hero — it can belong to anyone.
Most of us view ourselves like Atticus — noble, brave, right most of the time. But like it or not, we all have latent prejudices grounded in religion, gender, race, or class. This was a challenge in 1954. It is still a challenge today. For years, readers have held up Atticus Finch as the image of perfection.  When I started the book, I didn't want that image to be challenged, but as I finished it, I realized that we can learn just as much from a character's flaws as his attributes. Even our heroes have blind spots, flaws and reprehensible positions.
-          Washington Post: I named my son Atticus, and I'm happier than ever about it
In "Watchman," the cardboard hero becomes a real person, failing as a legion of otherwise sensible Southern politicians and preachers failed in the twin realms of law and religion as the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and his movement exposed Southern racist violence to a watching world.
-          Washington Post: Stripping Atticus Finch of his aura of perfection
Are we worried about Atticus's reputation because we think Lee has slandered her own creation, or because we want badly to believe in an exemplary white Southerner standing up to his neighbors, even if that means making Atticus more exemplary in our memories than Lee did in "To Kill a Mockingbird"? Do we think the internal logic of "Game of Thrones" suggests that it was likely that Sansa Stark would escape sexual violence, or do we badly want her to be an exception to the show's brutal rule because Turner's performance has made her so compellingly real to us?