Our opening post is from Judy M. Cornett of the University of Tennessee College of Law:
My heart was lighter on July 14th, after I finished reading Go Set a Watchman, than at any time since the novel’s publication was announced in February. I had been afraid that it wouldn’t be authentic – it is -- or that it would be terrible – it isn’t. The Harper Lee who wrote To Kill a Mockingbird is here, with her keen sense of observation, her sometimes caustic wit, and her flawless rendition of Southern speech. Despite lingering doubts about its origin and its recent discovery, this is the novel Harper Lee had to write before she could write To Kill a Mockingbird. Unlike TKAM, with its tightly woven narrative, GSAW is frank, raw, and immediate.
The motif of returning to her roots to discover herself sets Jean Louise in opposition not only to her community’s current mores, but also to herself. Her discovery of her father’s opposition to desegregation throws Jean Louise into a tailspin. She feels like “a flounder flopping at low tide.” She struggles to understand what has changed – is it Maycomb or is it her? The community she remembers did not hold racist views. Indeed, she is a product of that community. She questions how a community that now holds these views could have nurtured her.
The conflict between Jean Louise and Atticus exemplifies the loss of innocence that inevitably accompanies life experience. Jean Louise judges Atticus and the newly virulent racism of her hometown, but she does not renounce him or Maycomb. She learns that belonging to a community requires moving past judgment to reconciliation.
The question for Jean Louise is what does it mean to be from Maycomb, but not of it? Is there a way to renounce the community’s – and her father’s – racism without renouncing the people she loves, and even herself? The novel suggests that this is the dilemma for all progressive Southerners. As her Uncle Jack points out, “[I]t takes a certain kind of maturity to live in the South these days.”
And “these days,” far from being past, are here and now. Far from being dated, GSAW engages issues that still matter today. Atticus’s invocation of the Tenth Amendment as a ground for resisting Brown vs. Board of Education is echoed today in opposition to “Big Government” generally. And Uncle Jack’s argument that slavery was “incidental” to the Civil War is still a staple of those who oppose relegating the Confederate flag to museums. GSAW suggests not only how the Old South became the New South, but also how the New Deal has become, in some quarters, the Bad Deal.
Those who idolize Atticus Finch have been disappointed by the novel because the lawyer who sought legal justice in a courtroom for one black man in the 1930’s can oppose social justice for all black people in the 1950’s. Their task is to understand the heavy irony in Calpurnia’s assertion that Atticus “always do right” in light of his decision to plead her grandson guilty to “keep him out of the wrong hands,” namely the hands of the NAACP’s black lawyers.
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