Name: ______________________________ Date: _______

Directions: Read and annotate the article. Answer the Open Response question at the end. You will receive two grades: one for your annotations and one for your Open Response paragraph.

Review: Harper Lee’s ‘Go Set a Watchman’ Gives Atticus Finch a Dark Side Books of The TimesBy MICHIKO KAKUTANI JULY 10, 2015

We remember Atticus Finch in Harper Lee’s 1960 classic, To Kill a Mockingbird, as that novel’s moral conscience: kind, wise, honorable, a man of integrity who used his gifts as a lawyer to defend a black man falsely accused of raping a white woman in a small Alabama town filled with prejudice and hatred in the 1930s. He was the perfect man — the ideal father and a principled idealist, an enlightened, almost saintly believer in justice and fairness. In real life, people named their children after Atticus. People went to law school and became lawyers because of Atticus.

Shockingly, in Ms. Lee’s long-awaited novel, Go Set a Watchman, Atticus is a racist who once attended a Klan meeting, who says things like “The Negroes down here are still in their childhood as a people.” Or asks his daughter: “Do you want Negroes by the carload in our schools and churches and theaters? Do you want them in our world?”

In Mockingbird, a book once described by Oprah Winfrey as “our national novel,” Atticus praised American courts as “the great levelers,” dedicated to the proposition that “all men are created equal.” In Watchman, he denounces the Supreme Court, says he wants his home state “to be left alone to keep house without advice from the N.A.A.C.P.” and describes N.A.A.C.P.-paid

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lawyers as “standing around like buzzards.”

In Mockingbird, Atticus was a role model for his children, Scout and Jem — their hero, the most potent moral force in their lives. In Watchman, he becomes the source of pain and disillusionment for the 26- year-old Scout (or Jean Louise, as she’s now known).

While written in the third person, Watchman reflects a grown-up Scout’s point of view: The novel is the story of how she returns home to Maycomb, Ala., for a visit — from New York City, where she has been living — and tries to grapple with her upsetting realization that Atticus and her longtime boyfriend, Henry Clinton, both have abhorrent1 views on race and segregation.

Though Watchman is being published for the first time now, it was essentially an early version of Mockingbird. According to news accounts, Watchman was submitted to publishers in the summer of 1957; after her editor asked for a rewrite focusing on Scout’s girlhood two decades earlier, Ms. Lee spent some two years reworking the story, which became Mockingbird.

Students of writing will find Watchman fascinating for these reasons: How did a lumpy tale about a young woman’s grief over her discovery of her father’s bigoted2 views evolve into a classic coming-of-age story about two children and their devoted father? How did a distressing narrative filled with characters spouting hate speech mutate into a redemptive novel associated with the civil rights movement?

How did a story about the discovery of evil views in a revered parent turn into a universal story about the loss of innocence — both the inevitable loss of innocence that children experience in becoming aware of the complexities of grown-up life and a cruel world’s destruction of innocence (symbolized by the mockingbird and represented by Tom Robinson and the outsider Boo Radley)?

The depiction of Atticus in Watchman makes for disturbing reading, and for Mockingbird fans, it’s especially disorienting. Scout is shocked to find, during

1 disgusting; repulsive2 intolerant of others; prejudiced

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her trip home, that her beloved father, who taught her everything she knows about fairness and compassion, has been spending time with raving anti-integration, anti-black crazies, and the reader shares her horror and confusion. How could the saintly Atticus — described early in the book in much the same terms as he is in Mockingbird — suddenly emerge as a racist? Suggestions about changing times and the dividing effects of the civil rights movement seem insufficient when it comes to explaining such a radical change, and the reader, like Scout, cannot help feeling confused and distressed.

In Watchman, an adult Jean Louise feels disillusioned with the present-day Atticus, now 72. (“I’ll never believe a word you say to me again. I despise you and everything you stand for.”) Scout’s disillusionment in Watchman oddly parallels that of Jem in Mockingbird, after Atticus fails to get Tom Robinson acquitted, and Jem realizes that justice does not always prevail.

Somewhere along the way, the purpose behind the writing also seems to have changed. Watchman seems to want to document the worst in Maycomb in terms of racial and class prejudice, the people’s hostility and hypocrisy and small-mindedness. At times, it also alarmingly suggests that the civil rights movement stirred things up, making people who “used to trust each other” now “watch each other like hawks.”

Mockingbird, in contrast, represents a determined effort to see both the bad and the good in small-town life, the hatred and the humanity; it presents an idealized father-daughter relationship and views the past not as something lost but as a treasured memory.

One of the emotional threads in both Mockingbird and Watchman is a plea for empathy — as Atticus puts it in Mockingbird to Scout: “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view.” The difference is that Mockingbird suggested that we should have compassion for characters like Boo and Tom Robinson, while Watchman asks us to have understanding for a prejudiced man named Atticus.

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Open Response:

How does Watchman contrast from Mockingbird its portrayal of Atticus and the town of Maycomb? Use relevant and specific information from the text to support your claim.

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