Posted on 07/17/2015 7:36:20 AM PDT by Kaslin
The controversy over Harper Lee's new "old" novel, "Go Set a Watchman," might be the most bizarre controversy yet in a summer of bizarre and unlikely explosions of national piety.
Atticus Finch, the patriarchal figure of "To Kill a Mockingbird," has been regarded as an unexpected hero in a region that many readers thought was unworthy of heroes -- mothers named their children after him -- and now many feel betrayed because he emerges in the new novel as a man with unexpected blemishes, an authentic representative of his time (the 1950s) and place (a small town in the South). How could he?
The Internet boils with indignation. Talk radio has checked in. The New York Times put a story about it at the top of Page 1. Since both books offer polemics inside the fiction, neither fits into a Procrustean bed of personal pride and prejudice, but offers insights, for the thoughtful reader, into the differences in racial and sexual attitudes and how they have radically changed in the 55 years since "Mockingbird" was published.
Since he's a fictional character in two novels it's important to judge Atticus Finch within the context of both the early book, "To Kill a Mockingbird," and the new one. Some readers are finding that hard to do. One benefit of the controversy is that the books can be read with fresh eyes, and "Mockingbird," especially, doesn't have to be stuck with the hand-me-down adoration. The adoration is as much for the movie with Gregory Peck as Atticus as the writing style of Harper Lee, which has limitations in spite of its innocent charm.
The young daughter Scout, the narrator of "Mockingbird," was a tomboy who resisted learning the genteel manners expected of a young woman of the South. The girl in a coming-of-age story in "Mockingbird" becomes an arrived-at-woman in "Watchman." She has learned to assert opinions independent of her Southern upbringing, and she spurns a conventional marriage because the prospective husband doesn't live up to the idealism she acquired living in New York.
Racial issues in both books become considerably more complicated in the hindsight of history. When "Mockingbird" was originally published in 1960, liberal readers loved Atticus; he confronted racists who dominated the law and the courts and regarded Negroes as inferior. If Atticus was a hero inside the novel, his kind of heroism was rapidly vanishing in the world outside the novel in the wake of the Brown decision mandating the end of segregation in public schools. He shames the racists into silence but is unwilling to see the racism outside his comfortable island of Maycomb, Alabama. He makes gestures that require courage, but it was courage that could not dent the fundamental structure of racism built into the culture.
Like politics, racism was local in "Mockingbird," but the patronizing platitudes of Atticus sound today like simplistic feel-good banality lacking the complexity of authentic moral courage. His thematic voice, even after the guilty verdict for the innocent black man he defended against rape, expresses passive perception as much as outrage.
"You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view," he tells his daughter Scout, "until you climb into his skin and walk in it." This is the bromide often quoted by examiners of the first Atticus, whose tolerance is open-ended for the racist as well as for his victim. He tells daughter Scout she shouldn't hate Hitler because it's not right to hate anyone. He even defends the leader of a lynch mob because he's "basically a good man," who "just has his blind spots along with the rest of us."
When Scout asks her father if he's a "n*****-lover," as she heard him described in her little town, he answers without irony, "I certainly am. I do my best to love everybody."
Readers of "Watchman" are shocked that this Atticus questions the inclusion of Negroes in the formerly white schools, an issue that tore the South apart after the Brown decision, dividing families, permanently rupturing friendships and sometimes splitting church congregations. Hardly any white folks wanted integration; the arguments were over who would bear the disruption of desegregation. The North got its first taste of such racial anger with the arrival of busing in liberal Massachusetts. "Watchman" is the tougher, more realistic but less artful book. The third-person narration lacks the charm of the child's voice in "Mockingbird," but raises more complicated questions of character when the fist hits the nose that thought it was immune from fists.
It's not so important how these two books came to be written, or the order in which the stories are told, but how they speak to us today. The questions of character and culture challenge all of us.
Sure you don’t mean the “white whine” crowd?
The movie (with German dubbing) is frequently aired here in Germany - not that you would need that anymore.
Regards,
He may have been Gerald to his mother but he is Whorealdo to me
So, I have never read the book. I always seem to catch the last half of the movie when it is on broadcast stations and I quickly turn it off because someday I'd like to read it and see the whole movie.
All my other classes in high school were top notch.
You're so right. But your words won't penetrate the minds of leftists. They live in an unreal world. They're furious with anyone who dares to question their absurd fantasies in which they, themselves, are saintly Atticus Finches ... even if they're never done a genuinely heroic thing in their own lives.
Conservatives, to them, are all knuckle-dragging racists, because that's how we're unfailingly portrayed in popular culture. An unintentionally funny example of this was the tv show, "I'll fly away." My liberal mother-in-law used to insist on watching this drivel at family get-togethers. It was a shameless rip-off of the "To Kill a Mockingbird" story ... complete with Atticus Finch-like lawyer played by Sam Waterston (a less handsome and slightly more modern version of Gregory Peck).
All the black folk in this tv series were saints, while all southern white folk were despicable characters (except of course for the lawyer-character played by Waterston, and the little circle of Caucasians who were close to him) .
I had to laugh at "I'll fly away" because it was so simple-minded. You would think it would insult viewers' intelligence -- including the intelligence of black viewers, because of the storyline's formulaic and patronizing "white liberal savior" theme.
But as this reviewer says of TKaM - my liberal mother-in-law adored it.
Who doesn't!
I remember her! :-)
No, but Gregory Peck was real and the line between the character and the actor melded into one. It is easy to imagine Atticus as an old racist....not so easy to imagine an old, but handsome, Gregory Peck as a racist.
I went to a Southern Lit conference and a speaker pointed out that Atticus was a product of a South that found its basis and inspiration from the English feudal system. Atticus was a gentleman and his honor required that someone step up and defend the least of humanity. It was his duty, much like a knight’s code of chivalry. Ironically, I rewatched “Gone with the Wind” and the stained glass window at the Butler house was a castle with a knight and damsel. Feudal duty required certain behavior, and Atticus lived up to those standards as his personal honor required, nothing more.
I worked in a hopital in the 70’s and yes, every month someone named a kid Kunta as if it was a long-lost ancestor’s name....
Odd, how I’ve never met anyone named, or willing to use the name ‘Kunta’. They would 40+ years old now. Where did they all go?....................
Everybody sees TKAM as a point being made about prejudice.
I see it as Harper Lee revealing herself to us.
It is fiction based somewhat on real events.
People wonder why she didn’t flaunt her fame.
I think it was because the world took a very personal story from a woman revealing her inner self and turned it into their cause. The world stole her story and used it for themselves.
She had to rewrite her original story several times in order to get it published. By doing this, the publishers framed her story the way they wanted it.
In effect, they made Lee’s baby their own.
It is a great story, but I don’t blame Harper Lee for not capitalizing on it.
They were born in KC... Every month the medical records secretary would prepare a batch of birth certificates to be sent to Jeff City and we would guess the pronunciation based on spelling. Kunta was an easy one... I n he ensuing years, I am sure people changed their names to reflect newer heroes. In fact, social work records would discuss people and say “client LeVon (a/k/a Billy Joe, Sammy, Shaque)” as the welfare recipients would change their names with each new agent without benefit of court documents. It was a mess and easily created deeper layers of fraud. A friend of mine almost closed an estate not knowing who the main recipient was until she found out the guy changed his name after getting out of prison and his nuclear family did not even know his legal name. People are going to have a name heyday once those 70’s census records are made public.
The way I read the account from an editor involved with the original goes something like this:
Harper/Collins received her submission of Go Set a Watchman and advised he that they could not publish it but if she submitted a work framing the characters earlier in their timeline it might be more appealing.
She re-wrote the story as TKAMB and placed her characters in the earlier part of her fictional chain of events and it was published as a success. The original Watchman manuscript was filed away and forgotten.
What we now see published was her first attempt at the novelized world she lived in and her view of it.
What we have is the controversy that these characters were sainted and instead, in her fictional world, they were real and people of their times.
Her editor rejected the original manuscript, but suggested a “prequel” as seen from Scout’s eyes when she was a little girl. The reaction to Harper Lee’s newly published book says more about the infantilization of American culture and intellect than about Atticus Finch.
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