Sunday Review: Harper Lee’s two novels

Some thoughts

By William Silveira

Publishing is a field of endeavor that is suffering from lack of readers. But HarperCollins Publishers has managed to pull profits not only from a book that was published 50 years ago, but also from another book, written by the same author (and initially rejected by publishers), that preceded the book published 50 years ago.

    No doubt some of the interest in these books was created by the stellar publicity efforts of HarperCollins in its debut of the more recently published book. But was the rest driven by the inherent merits of the books themselves or by something else? I am referring to the two novels by the Southern writer Harper Lee: To Kill A Mockingbird, first published in 1960, and Go Set A Watchman, published in 2015.
    Both Watchman and Mockingbird are told from the point of view of Jean Louise Finch. (True to Southern convention, she carries the nickname, Scout.) In Mockingbird, she is the precocious, tomboyish 8-year-old daughter of Atticus Finch, a small-town Alabama lawyer. In Watchman, she is Atticus’s 26-year-old daughter. She has finished college and is now residing in New York City. Mockingbird is set in the early Depression years of the 1930’s. Watchman is set in the early 1950’s – at the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement.
    The Finch family is an old staple of southern literature – particularly of that genre known as the Southern Renaissance. They are the genteel descendants of an old, pioneering, and successful plantation family. The money is mostly gone, but not their good manners and sense (at least in Atticus) of noblesse oblige. The African Americans in Mockingbird are sympathetically portrayed as hardworking, loyal, and victims of monstrous racial prejudice by the white folks (except the Finches?). In Watchman, African Americans are portrayed as having a sullen hostility toward white society. The old camaraderie with the Finches of the 1930’s has been laid low by NAACP agitators in the early 1950’s and Brown v. Board of Education. (Don’t you know, honey, they were happy before these outside agitators came in?)
    In both of these novels Harper Lee, through the character of Scout, struggles with the problems of a white society full of racial bigotry where family, religion, and community (with your fellow white man) assume an outsize role in the lives of the residents. Unfortunately, Scout comes out as an emotional prisoner of that rotten borough. Scout is not a bigot, but she is unable to reject the world that nurtures and cradles bigotry. Ultimately, it’s more important to accept the moral failures of the South and accept its denizens with love, despite their faults, than to attempt to change them or get out.
    In Watchman, Scout is horrified that her father and her boyfriend are attending meetings of the local White Citizen’s Council. They resent “outsiders” who come to the South to challenge and change their ways and their traditions. Scout hates the bigotry of these groups, but is sympathetic to their dislike of outside interference in their world. Unfortunately, it took the “interference” of the Civil War to end slavery. And it took the modern civil rights movement to end American apartheid. And that was started by black people in the South, not by white Southerners.
    While it is perhaps cruel and unkind to say so, I think Harper Lee’s paean to the old South in these novels is best summed up in the ironic lyrics of Tom Lehrer in “I Wanna Go Back to Dixie,” particularly the last two lines, “Be it ever so decadent, / There’s no place like home.”
    “Southern Renaissance” labels a group of writers of Southern literature in the 1920’s and 1930’s. They were in contrast to the historically revisionist school of literature of the post-Civil War era, which glorified life in the pre-Civil War South. A prime example of this the post-Civil War genre is Margaret Mitchell’s novel Gone with the Wind. (It’s ironic that this vastly popular book – and later, movie – could still resonate with the American public, although its literary genre was vastly passé.) The writers of the Southern Renaissance took a more realistic view of what Southern society was. It is my view that Harper Lee was strongly influenced by this group. However, like these writers, she cannot leave behind sentimentality for the old South. And she cannot resolve the inherent contradiction of upholding a racist social structure and yet hating bigotry.

Copyright © 2015 by William Silveira