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| Lee awarded Presidential Medal of Freedom, November 5, 2007, The White House (Photo by Eric Draper) |
Harper Lee’s work is typical of
New South authors such as William Faulkner, addressing the issue of race
head-on. In this story, the young woman Jean Louise Finch returns to her home
town in Alabama to discover her family and friends are part of a society
determined to slow down the progress of racial equality. Her father, uncle and
would-be fiancée attempt to explain to her the subtleties of New South
sociology, leaving Jean Louise questioning her own identity and place in the
only real home she has ever known.
Structurally, Go Set a Watchman has some serious
flaws. The time frame skips from the main timeline to Scout’s (Jean Louise’s)
early childhood, back to the main, then to her awkward adolescence, and back
again. This kind of flashback style is certainly acceptable when it brings the
pieces together at some point, but that is not the case here. Also, the speaker
shifts without warning, making some sections confusing. The early childhood
sections became the setting for To Kill a
Mockingbird, which worked nicely, childhood clarity bringing a power to the
narrative, especially the vicious actions of some adults. But there is
something about Watchman that I think
is missing in Mockingbird.
The “subtleties” I mentioned
earlier are a catalyst to thinking about race in the New South. Not in the
stark way that is presented in To Kill a
Mockingbird, with an innocent black man being pursued by a mob of white
supremacists and defended by an elite hero. No, there is a gray-ness about the town
of Maycomb presented in Go Set a Watchman.
Jean Louise is aware of a backwardness in the black population around Maycomb.
The only appearance of blacks in the novel, apart from servants, is a bunch of
joyriding kids making a lot of noise.
There is an appreciation of the history of the
Southern people since The War, and a rarely-seen perspective. Atticus, his
sister Alexandra, and their brother John, are aging, in their seventies. Signs
of wisdom to a student of narrative such as Lee. They present the fact that the
people who fought the War were not slave owners and most had never seen one.
There was a different principle at issue for these men. Reconstruction came,
then more wars, and now a change has come from the U.S. Supreme Court, most
likely the one in Brown v. The Board of
Education of Topeka and subsequent related desegregation cases.[2]
In the opinion of Lee’s sages, this could usher in a new Reconstruction, with blacks
in charge instead of Yankees.
Vague? Gray? Perhaps not in our twenty-first
century minds. We want to sympathize with the outraged Jean Louise. But there
is an attractive spirit of independence in the attitudes of her ancestors just
one generation removed. Though the idea of keeping a whole race in submission
is not attractive at all, the idea of keeping an entire region—all races
included—in submission, in effect rendering all slaves, is deplorable. Has this
happened, or do we still retain the freedom of self-determination? Upon this
topic, I think much thought and discussion is warranted. And Go Set a Watchman does as good a job of
stimulating it as any 1950’s Southern novel could.
[1] Joe Nocera, “The Harper Lee ‘Go Set
a Watchman’ Fraud,” The New York Times, July
24, 2015, accessed August 27, 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/25/opinion/joe-nocera-the-watchman-fraud.html?_r=0
[2] Richard A. Schwartz, “1950’s
Civil Rights Developments,” Florida
International University, accessed August 27, 2016, http://comptalk.fiu.edu/1950s_civil_rights_developments.htm.
