As children we wanted Atticus Finch as our dad, as adults we wanted to be a parent like Atticus: just, fair, tolerant and always willing to hear different points of view. In Harper Lee’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, To Kill a Mockingbird , we follow the coming-of-age tale told from the perspective of seven-year-old Scout Finch and her older brother Jem as their father and lawyer Atticus takes their hand through life and the challenges it throws up in the deeply divided American south. Especially when Atticus is appointed to defend a black man, wrongly accused of raping a white girl. The novel was written in 1960, but the issues it raised of justice, tolerance, race and prejudice are relevant even today, and hence perhaps the universal appeal of To Kill a Mockingbird — the book has sold more than 40 million copies and counting.
Lessons for Scout
Scout grows up with Atticus’ wise words ringing in her ears. “If you can learn a simple trick, Scout, you’ll get along a lot better with all kinds of folks. You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view,” he tells her gently, “…until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.” Or when he explains to her why it’s important to do the right thing by defending Tom Robinson: “I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand…. It’s when you know you’re licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see through it no matter what.” Then again, as he prepares the children for the trial of Tom Robinson, which is bound to be ugly, he tells Scout: “I couldn’t go to church and worship God if I didn’t try to help the man…. The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience.”
In the book, we were given “lifelong” friends such as Scout, Jem, Dill Harris (fashioned on Truman Capote, childhood friend of Lee or Nelle as she was known in Monroeville, Alabama, where she lived) and the shy Boo Radley, of course, the children’s reclusive friend.
As we all know, Lee didn’t publish another novel for 55 years and then came out with a prequel, Go Set a Watchman , in 2015, throwing her readers and the publishing world into a quandary. This was set two decades later but had been written earlier than To Kill a Mockingbird . It is a rough, darker draft of her famous novel, if you will.
A new Atticus
Scout is now 26 and no longer answers to her nickname, preferring to be called Jean Louise Finch. She is returning home to the fictional town of Maycomb, Alabama, from New York, where she works, to visit her 72-year-old father battling rheumatoid arthritis and other ills. Scout has grown up exactly as we thought she would, bold and opinionated, still in dread of dresses, much to Aunt Alexandra’s disapproval.
But it is Atticus who shocks her and To Kill a Mockingbird fans. Arranging her father’s papers into a pile one Sunday afternoon, Jean Louise spots a pamphlet titled “The Black Plague”. This is not Atticus as portrayed in To Kill a Mockingbird, both the book and the film, where he was played by Gregory Peck in an Oscar-winning role; here he is racist, a segregationist who asks his daughter: “Do you want Negroes by the carload in our schools and churches and theatres? Do you want them in our world?”
Go Set a Watchman , though jumpy and disjointed in parts, is fascinating because it shows us the way to Mockingbird , and we will, of course, never know how and why the portrayal of Atticus was softened. If the Atticus in Mockingbird is a paragon of virtue, the Atticus in Go Set a Watchman is a human being with failings. The present isn’t comfortable any more, and Atticus’s beloved line — “Gentlemen if there’s one slogan in this world I believe, it is this: equal rights for all, special privileges for none” — a thing of the past.
Go Set a Watchman is a more complex book than Mockingbird , and perhaps far more reflective of the world around us. But as Scout’s favourite Uncle Jack tells her, “Every man’s island, every man’s watchman, is his conscience”, just like her father did when she was little, and that’s Harper Lee’s biggest legacy: inculcating a deep sense of right and wrong in every individual. Thank you, Harper Lee.
(Sudipta Datta is a Kolkata-based journalist.)
Also Read:
Harper Lee, who wrote one of America's most beloved literary classics, "To Kill a Mockingbird," and surprised readers with a second book about racial injustice in the U.S. South after living a largely reclusive life for decades, died at the age of 89 on Friday. > Read more
Harper Lee, the elusive novelist whose child’s-eye view of racial injustice in a small Southern town, To Kill a Mockingbird, became standard reading for millions of young people and an Oscar-winning film, has died. She was 89. > Read more
‘Go Set a Watchman’ sparks a row, from readers’ dismay to a book store’s decision to refund money to its customers. > Read more
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Harper Lee passes away |
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