Posted on 07/13/2015 9:18:29 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
The first problem in assessing Harper Lee’s first published novel in the five and a half decades since To Kill a Mockingbird is whether to describe it as her first or second book. This apparently simple question has been contested in the months before Tuesday’s much publicised and heavily embargoed release of a manuscript that reportedly came to light only recently.
Chronologically, Go Set a Watchman is, in Hollywood arithmetic, a sort of Mockingbird 2, depicting the later lives of the Finch family – lawyer Atticus, his daughter, Scout, his son, Jem and their maid, Calpurnia – who appeared in Lee’s 1960 debut book about a racially inflamed rape trial in Alabama. However, in computing terms, Watchman is Mockingbird 1.0 to the Mockingbird 2.0 of the novel that was previously the 89-year-old Lee’s single published work. Some sceptical advance publicity had suggested that the new book was merely an earlier draft of the first one, representing the text before editors and publishers demanded a substantial revision.
As it turns out, however, Go Set a Watchman is of a very different order from “revised” or “alternative” editions of, for example, The Great Gatsby or Ulysses, which sought to restore or record the supposedly original intentions of F Scott Fitzgerald and James Joyce.
Whereas To Kill a Mockingbird is narrated in the first-person by Scout as a young girl looking back a few years to events in the early 1930s, Go Set a Watchman is a third-person narrative, in which twentysomething Scout, now favouring her baptismal name of Jean Louise, returns from New York to visit Atticus, 72 and seriously arthritic, in her home town of Maycomb. Apart from their four-word poetic titles (the new novel’s is taken from the biblical book of Isaiah), the texts are largely independent of each other.
(Excerpt) Read more at theguardian.com ...
I think it’s great.
Big embarrassment for the liberals.
Yes, it is. Hehehehehe!
Fascinating to see liberal New Yorkers who have always lionized (lionessed?) Harper Lee because of her presumed “liberal” attitudes toward blacks contort themselves in explaining the later Atticus’ opposition to forced integration of schools and the so-called “Voting Rights Act”. As if there were something inconsistent in the character’s wanting just and fair treatment of an accused rapist while not necessarily wanting the federal government involved in deciding who goes to school where.
If we knew then what federal intervention would do to public education . . . some people did know but were called racist anyway. Just like issues today.
It’s the truth that dare not speak its name.
Saw a summary of the plot in the Wall Street Journal. The main character is described as “sexually liberated young woman”.... as if that is a good thing. That kind of put me off.
PBS has an American Masters program and her true feelings are shown at that time.
Sexual liberation at that time usually meant women wearing pants.
I’ve always thought Lee was lesbian and that’s why her and Capote understood each other so well and were so close.
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