Everybody’s freaking out that Atticus Finch is a bona fide racist in the newly released Harper Lee novel Go Set A Watchman (HarperCollins). But why is no one upset that in a key scene in the book, beloved Scout is physically assaulted by her Uncle Jack?
In the new book, 26-year-old Scout, now a sexually liberated single woman working in New York City, has returned to her hometown of Maycomb, Alabama, to visit her father, Atticus, who’s in decline and suffering from arthritis. Once back home, she realizes that the town is as bigoted as ever and that its female population is preoccupied with trivial things.
Worse, her father is attending town council meetings that have given virulent racists the opportunity to preach. When she confronts him about his participation, he gives her the predictable blandishments about freedom of speech, but also shocks her with his views of black people as less than human.
She’s mad as hell, tells him what she thinks of him and storms out of his office. It’s the confrontation we suspect will push her to decide to leave Maycomb for good.
Then along comes dear Uncle Jack, Scout’s favourite person next to Atticus and, up to this point, the voice of reason. Atticus has phoned him to report on the argument, and Jack’s not happy with Scout.
She’s packed her bag, put it in the trunk of the car and gets set to get into the driver’s seat when Jack blindsides her with a savage – Lee’s word – slap across the face. Forehand and then again, backhand, for good measure. He draws blood.
“I’m trying to get your attention,” he says.
Seriously?
I’d already assumed the 89-year-old Lee never approved publication of Go Set A Watchman. After To Kill A Mockingbird, she famously said that she’d never write another book because “she got it right the first time.” But this sequence is an even better indicator that Lee never countenanced publication of Watchman.
A writer who’s created a pre-feminist character like Scout – easily the most interesting thing about the new release – would have blossomed into someone fully supportive of women’s equality and safety and who, with her full faculties, would have been embarrassed by having one of the most sympathetic characters in the book using brute force on a female.
The scene is actually more outrageous than Atticus’s racism. The lawyer so ready to defend a black man on a rape charge in Mockingbird becomes a far more complex and believable character in Watchman.
The book is set in the wake of 1954’s landmark Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision, which declared state laws establishing separate public schools for black and white students unconstitutional. With his focus on states rights and the perils of big government, Atticus uses language that helps us understand the mindset of those southerners still set on raising the Confederate flag on state buildings.
In the context of the late 50s, when feminism was unheard of and women were taught to put up with getting slapped around, I also understand how Lee could conceive of a scene in which a woman, even an independent thinker, “comes to her senses” after being knocked senseless.
But where’s the outcry from contemporary readers and reviewers?
susanc@nowtoronto.com | @susangcole
