Please note that the entry below may include some
information that spoils the Go Set a
Watchman for you if you haven’t read it.
After reading Go Set a
Watchman, I’ve been thinking about how I’m going to talk to students about
Harper Lee’s book. I’ve had a few students email me this summer to ask if I had
seen the hoopla or read the book, so I know that many will already have heard
something about it. I also know that others who hated Mockingbird won’t have gone near it. (Now I’m thinking that I could
write an entirely separate post about how Mockingbird,
while one of my all-time favorite novels, just isn’t the right book at the
right time for so many of my students.)
There are a couple of things that I want students to know
and understand about Watchman. For
starters, it was written before To Kill a Mockingbird, and I want
students to see how a part of a book can become inspiration for another,
whether it’s by choice or an editor’s suggestion. This is part of the process
that I try to get students to see every year: something can become inspiration
for something else. A seed, to use the metaphor that I share in class, can be
planted and nurtured in different ways.
The other thing that I want to share with students is my
widened understanding of Atticus Finch, Scout, and Maycomb. I have a shirt that I always wear when the
Tom Robinson trial scene looms near. Boldly asking, “What would Atticus do?” I
know I’ll continue to wear this shirt. My jaw didn’t drop when Scout shared her
frustration that Atticus did something she never would have done, as he
listened to an incredibly racist rant during a meeting of Maycomb’s citizens' council.
But what I didn’t
take away from reading Watchman is
that Atticus became a racist.
What I really want students to understand is that
characters and settings, like people, change. Sometimes it's fast, and sometimes it's slow. And sometimes "change" occurs when we realize something that was there the entire time. Sure, I was hoping Atticus would remain
steadfast in his commitment to doing what is right all the time because that’s
what I had inferred his character to stand for. But what Watchman does is make me think that our understanding of characters
is limited. We attach to certain ones and, like I have done, come to idolize
them—and even Jean Louise admits that she did this to her father.
But Watchman also
made me reconsider what I knew to be true about Atticus: his doing what he
believed is right isn’t necessarily because he was trying to change the
attitudes and views of the citizens of Maycomb. It’s because he’s an attorney
through and through, and it’s the law
that stands above everything else. I found myself re-reading the argument between Scout and her father. I want to read that to my students.
Toward the end of the book, this conversation between Uncle
Jack and Scout still resonates with me:
“Very well, if you won’t let me
tell you what Melbourne said I’ll put it in my own words: the time your friends
need you is when they’re wrong, Jean Louise. They don’t need you when they’re
right—”
Would we think about Watchman
the same way if there weren’t characters that we’ve grown to consider “friends”
who were wrong? Would we have had the same reactions if we saw Maycomb develop
into a town that represented the opposite of what we knew to be true about the
South during the civil rights movement? If Maycomb "changed" as much as we wanted it to, would this book become fantasy?
Not that I agree with Henry, Scout’s intimate friend in Watchman, but this is certainly
something we have to consider, too:
“Have you ever considered that men,
especially men, must conform to certain demands of the community they live in
simply so they can be of service to it?” (230)
This line takes me back to the Robinson trial. It takes me
back to my own frustration that Atticus won
yet lost or lost but won, a debate that I use to engage students in the classroom. Watchman raises these very debates that
I think we’ve all wrestled with. Is the best way to make change that in which we work against everything or work within?
I end this post with yet another moment from Uncle Jack, who
seems to have replaced Atticus as sage:
“Remember this also: it’s easy to
look back and see what we were, yesterday, ten years ago. It is hard to see
what we are. If you can master that trick, you’ll get along.”
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