20150715.0701

**The following text contains spoilers.**

I read Harper Lee's Go Set a Watchman yesterday. It is a short novel, quickly read, and while much of what I would initially say of it will be said in the context of my freelance piece on it (already begun but still in need of more work, to which I will devote myself today as other duties allow), there are some things in the novel that will not find their way into my write-up. I am not typically a literary Americanist, and even the training I do have in United States literature treats areas other than that in which Lee's work is usually considered to fall. As such, it is not likely I will be publishing any formal papers on Lee (the freelance work is not formal academia). I therefore feel no qualms about moving toward a discussion of the text here, namely one of the points it makes with Atticus Finch.

In the eminently familiar To Kill a Mockingbird, Atticus Finch is presented as an idealized, if alternate, form of masculinity. He is resolute in his convictions, including those that pull him away from the violence typically associated with the "normal" masculinity to which he is an alternative. (It is worth noting that he has a peculiar capacity for that violence, as the interlude with the rabid dog indicates.) Further, he is markedly gentle, in accord with his general non-violent attitude, and attendant to the needs of the communities in which he exists and with which he associates. Decades of readers have been able to look to him as a useful model to follow.

One of the prevailing complaints about Go Set a Watchman is how it fails in carrying forward that idealization. The text reveals Atticus to share some of the more insidious racist beliefs of his time--and, unfortunately, ours--as well as to have been a member of the KKK. The revelation is shocking within the novel and outside of it; in both cases, the upright pillar that Atticus had been is shaken and cracked not by age but by the fact that its very foundations, previously thought solid, are instead in uncertain soil that erodes away, perhaps slowly, but nonetheless fatally. If Go Set a Watchman is to be taken as a sequel to To Kill a Mockingbird (and a point against that assertion appears in the write-up I am conducting; it is not hard to find for those who are paying attention and remember what they had read before), then the ideal Atticus represents in the former novel is undone in the second. His performed masculinity is ultimately a deception, ultimately a failure.

If it is, however, the "traditional" masculinity to which it is opposed in the earlier novel is also a failure. After all, Atticus wins out over the Ewells and the pressures of his community despite his lack of success with Robinson. He is not persuaded away from his convictions; he is not obliged to change who he is against them all, and the retention of integrity is surely a victory for him. If he is a failure, how much more so must be those whom he defeated in that area in which he bested them? His masculinity triumphs over older, more "traditional" forms, marking it as a "superior" form of the ideation.* Yet his own masculinity is proven to be false, a failure; that which he bested, the more mainstream conception of masculinity, is therefore all the more abject--again, if Go Set a Watchman is, in fact, a sequel to To Kill a Mockingbird.

The problem that Atticus encodes can be explicated further, certainly, and that explication used to further discuss the critiques of performative gender that pervade the novels; Scout/Jean Louise struggles against assumptions of femininity in both works, after all. It can also be deployed in something like the Robertsonian criticism familiar to medievalists; much is made of church attendance and membership in both novels, and Atticus can easily be read as serving as a (now-abortive) Christ figure. How much can be attributed to Lee's deliberation is, of course, uncertain, but it is not the case that an author has to intend a thing for that thing to inhere in the work, where exploration of it can work to the benefit of all.

*Yes, I am aware of the problems in such a formulation. Ad baculum and all that. However, "traditional" masculinity tends to prize the idea of might making right; by its own airs, it must accept the value of what bests it. As that tradition still obtains, I think I am justified in deploying it in my argument here, particularly given the informality thereof.