Parent to Mockingbird: Harper Lee and a Novel Deferred

In a letter to Betty Hester from October 1, 1960, Flannery O'Connor quickly dismissed the new southern novel that had taken the country by storm:

I think I see what it really is — a child's book. When I was fifteen I would have loved it. Take out the rape and you've got something like Miss Minerva and William Green Hill. I think for a child's book it does all right. It's interesting that all the folks that are buying it don't know they're reading a child's book. Somebody ought to say what it is ...1

At first this would not seem to be a particularly insightful remark. After all, To Kill Mockingbird is a book about a child's experience of life, told retrospectively through a child's frame of mind. But when O'Connor suggested that adult readers "did not know" they were reading a child's book, and that perhaps someone should tell them, she was also suggesting a critique of Mockingbird that emerges in sharper relief as we consider Go Set a Watchman in relation to it. If To Kill a Mockingbird reads like a fairy tale — soothing readers' sense of harsh reality by rounding off its sharp edges — then Go Set a Watchman reads more like a horror story: one that attempts to depict American reality with at least a few of its sharp edges purposefully exposed.

In reference to the heavily guided revision process that transformed her manuscript for Watchman into Mockingbird, Lee commented ambivalently: "I was a first time writer, so I did as I was told."2 One manuscript was published in 1960 to worldwide and lasting acclaim; the other in 2015 to much astonished disappointment. While Watchman might have been "parent" to Mockingbird,3 it was also the manuscript that Lee wrote on her own, without the guidance of a New York editor, and therefore the one in which we might see her ambitions as a writer most authentically reflected.4

As critics and fans of Mockingbird have noted, Go Set a Watchman is both a difficult read and a badly written novel.5 In spite of its flaws, the manuscript, drafted roughly between 1957-1959, offers a significant kind of story for its day: that of a southern white woman going through an identity crisis provoked by a confrontation with Jim Crow, but without the heroic liberal sentiment for which Lee became famous so soon afterwards.6 Even though it is quite clearly a novel about a young woman, almost every critical response to Watchman takes Atticus Finch as its focus. Despite the various degrees of energy that critics and scholars have devoted to describing how and why Go Set a Watchman is a terrible book, only one assessment among dozens mentions the one aspect of the story that, to my reading, constitutes its most shocking fact: the beating that Jean Louise receives from her uncle, and the alignment it helps illuminate between Mayella Ewell of Mockingbird and Jean Louise Finch of Watchman.7

In the essay that follows, I consider the ambitions of Watchman as a social problem novel with the drama of a young woman's political allegiance and racial imagination at its center. Taking Lee's comment to heart, I treat To Kill a Mockingbird as the successful "offspring" of the unpublished Go Set a Watchman in order to explain why Mockingbird could succeed so profoundly where Watchman was doomed to fail. This pairing of success and failure is tied, I argue, to how racial attitudes and family dynamics attach to the white professional class in Go Set a Watchman, and then get displaced onto poor whites in To Kill a Mockingbird. In this displacement, Jean Louise Finch of Watchman reappears transformed into Mayella Ewell of Mockingbird; in related fashion, Atticus Finch of Watchman reappears transformed into Bob Ewell. And the authoritarian dynamic that characterizes each woman's relationship to the men of her family, including the overt violence she suffers and the racial animus demanded of her, follows suit.

One way to think about the stakes of this transformation is to consider how each novel implies what a solution to Jim Crow might look like. In Watchman, because Jim Crow enforcement has been depicted as stemming from white elites who hold various degrees of political power, one can imagine federal cases, laws, and policies that might be imposed on the south in ways that would successfully dismantle at least the de jure regime of Jim Crow. By contrast, in Mockingbird, because Jim Crow's enforcement appears to be stemming from the innate racial animus of poor whites — operating outside the reach of state power — the solution that emerges at that novel's conclusion suggests that the source of the problem just needs to die out. When Bob Ewell is killed by Boo Radley, and the sheriff convinces Atticus that Radley should not be indicted, we are meant to understand Ewell's death as an optimistic sign of social progress ahead. By contrast, in Go Set a Watchman, the source of inequality and racial apartheid is not located in the pathologies of the white poor, but instead in the will to power of the professional elite. As such, in her first manuscript Harper Lee appears as a novelist whose burgeoning political imagination had not yet been reshaped by the demands, and subsequent effects, of literary success — that is, by a nation's preference for fairy tales when it comes to stories about race and class.

A Certain Kind of Violence

Go Set a Watchman begins as the story of a white woman, 26-year-old Jean Louise Finch, returning home to Maycomb, Alabama, from New York City, to visit her aging father, Atticus Finch, a prominent local lawyer.8 Unlike To Kill a Mockingbird, where the narration unfolds in the present day but its action takes place in the 1930s, Watchman is firmly and self-consciously set in the time of its composition, the late 1950s. After settling in to her ordinary home routines, including Sunday church with her family, Jean Louise at first thinks nothing of it when her father and his associate (also her suitor) head off to a "political meeting" at the courthouse that Sunday afternoon. While they are gone, Jean Louise learns that the meeting is for the county chapter of the Citizen's Council, a network of segregationist groups throughout the south that actively sought to maintain the de jure and de facto regime of Jim Crow. Since her father had structured Jean Louise's moral compass for her whole life (had been, in the language of the story, her inner "watchman"), and since Jean Louise could not align herself with the beliefs in racial difference that characterized her region (born "color blind," as the novel puts it), the realization of her father's unexpected moral descent throws her into an existential tailspin, which accounts for most of the story that follows.

Toward the novel's conclusion, Jean Louise confronts her father in a long and painful argument that reads like an aggressive deposition or a cross examination of a hostile witness. Despite her best efforts, Jean Louise does not succeed in persuading Atticus out of his bigotry, but neither does he persuade her out of her egalitarian worldview. In despair, Jean Louise leaves her father's house to seek solace with his brother, Dr. Jack Finch. But, to her horror, Jack is even more committed to the preservation of the Jim Crow order than Atticus, and when she finally loses her temper and threatens to leave Maycomb for good, Jack suddenly backhands her twice across the face. In the manuscript's painful conclusion, Jean Louise is successfully "cured" by this show of force (and a subsequent tumbler of whiskey), and returns to her Alabama fold, apparently reorganized into her true southern self and at inebriated peace. The manuscript ends abruptly, without making it clear whether Jean Louise ever goes back to New York City again.

Despite the various degrees of energy that critics and scholars have devoted to describing how and why Go Set a Watchman is a terrible book (which, according to at least one, should never have been published), the unexpected public beating Jean Louise receives from her uncle escapes mention in nearly every critical assessment of the book. Perhaps as a consequence, responses to Watchman uniformly fail to notice the alignment that such patriarchal violence evokes between Jean Louise Finch and Mayella Violet Ewell, two otherwise quite different characters.

Though they come from different class backgrounds, Mayella of Mockingbird is roughly the same age as Jean Louise of Watchman and, like Jean Louise, she lives with the absence and familial obligation created by a deceased mother. When Mayella's father catches her making a pass at Tom Robinson, a black man, he beats her viciously for it. When Mayella later perjures herself on the witness stand by accusing Tom of a crime he did not commit, she is also protecting herself from the apparently compulsive violence of a monstrous father, and from the punishment that would be inflicted on her for acting on desires that contradict the racial ideology of Jim Crow.

The beating that Mayella suffers at the hands of her father is no minor incident in the story; it is, rather, the exculpatory evidence that ought to free Tom Robinson. When Sheriff Heck Tate arrived at the scene of the supposed crime, he noticed that Mayella had injuries along the right side of her face, a fact that Atticus draws out during Tate's examination at trial. By pointing to Tom Robinson's "withered" left hand, Atticus proves that Tom is physically incapable, due to the location of her injuries, of having beaten Mayella on the day in question. And as Atticus forcefully asserts in his closing summation, the beating that Mayella testifies that she received from Tom Robinson in the course of being raped in fact came from her father after he witnessed Mayella make a pass at Tom, which Tom — rightfully terrified — rejected.9

Thus, patriarchal violence exerted against young women who try to assert their independence — assertions acted out specifically as matters of disregarding racial codes — emerge as pivotal scenes in both Watchman and Mockingbird. In Mockingbird, Atticus Finch is the opposite father figure to Bob Ewell in every respect. Whereas Atticus's middle-class professionalism goes hand-in-hand with liberal politics and virtuous child-rearing, Ewell's rural white poverty appears to go hand-in-hand with violent racism and vicious child beating. But in Watchman, the authoritarian figures of Atticus and Uncle Jack reveal that the white professional men of the Finch clan are hardly less thuggish at heart than Bob Ewell of Old Sarum.10

When confronted with Atticus's tone under cross-examination, Mayella strikes back as if her own life depended on it:

"Who beat you up? Tom Robinson or your father?"
No answer.
"What did your father see in the window, the crime of rape or the best defense to it? Why don't you tell the truth, child, didn't Bob Ewell beat you up?"
When Atticus turned away from Mayella he looked like his stomach hurt, but Mayella's face was a mixture of terror and fury. Atticus sat down wearily and polished his glasses with his handkerchief.
Suddenly Mayella became articulate. "I got somethin' to say," she said.
Atticus raised his head. "Do you want to tell us what really happened? (M 251).

But Mayella "did not hear the compassion in the invitation," as the grown Scout narrates it, and instead frantically doubles down on her lie: "That nigger yonder took advantage of me." The grown Scout narrating Mockingbird reflects that if Mayella hadn't been so "poor and ignorant" Judge Taylor would have charged her with contempt right then and there — implying that in his show of mercy, Taylor recognized the expression of an essential, and thus unaccountable, moral character determined by an inextricable cohesion of familial blood and class status. The narrating Scout further observed: "I never saw anybody glare at anyone with the hatred Mayella showed when she left the stand and walked by Atticus's table" (M 252).

In Mockingbird, Mayella is the white woman forced to conform to her father's racism, and by giving testimony she knows to be false, she causes the suffering, and eventual death, of Tom Robinson. But in the narrative terms and temporal setting of that novel, she and her father represent an otherwise powerless and dying "breed": an almost subhuman vision of poor whites. In fact, when Boo Radley kills Bob Ewell, the sheriff sanctions the murder after the fact, eclipsing the juridical authority of judge and lawyer altogether, and leaving nearly every reader and viewer satisfied that the right ending has been achieved: a mockingbird has been spared. And despite liberal belief in rule of law, most readers, like Atticus and Scout, do not mind seeing Bob Ewell killed without due process. On the contrary, the event seems like a moral victory.

Further, this moral victory stems from the fact that Ewell is killed not only for what he's done, but, to the extent that what he's done is depicted as part and parcel of his type, for what he is as well. In other words, in To Kill a Mockingbird, the Ewells demonstrate how people of this kind do what they do merely because of what they are: white trash. Here, the racial regime of Jim Crow seems to be held in place by a "people" who are marked as such not just by their poverty, but also by something like a force of nature — that is, the mystified monster of racial animus. By contrast, Go Set a Watchman offers a more insightful picture of those who more powerfully, and more chillingly, enforced Jim Crow: the professional managerial class — educated figures of postwar modernity, thoroughly rational, and anything but a dying breed.

To Kill a Mockingbird and Essentializing Poverty

In both Watchman and Mockingbird, the young Scout and the grown Jean Louise each encounter an ideology of "families" that quietly reifies and naturalizes class differences, by translating their available signs as evidence of blood, rather than of political economy. This logic of "families" appears as a series of tautologies against which both Scout of Mockingbird and Jean Louise of Watchman are repeatedly hurled: the Cunninghams are the way they are because they are Cunninghams; the Ewells are the way they are because they are Ewells; the Haverfords are the way they are because they are Haverfords; and the Finches are the way they are because they are Finches. The companion logic to all of these, and the ideology they work to reinforce and legitimate, is that "Negroes" are the way they are because they are "Negroes."

In Mockingbird, the logic of behaviorally determinative white bloodlines affects nine-year-old Scout's sense of self only briefly and is quickly soothed by her father. Early in the novel Atticus succumbs to pressure from his sister to teach the children how they ought to behave because they are Finches. The tacit paradox of being told to choose to behave in a way that one is already supposed to naturally be produces a cognitive dissonance in the children, and a traumatizing sense that their father is suddenly no longer the man they have known:

"Your aunt has asked me to try and impress upon you and Jean Louise that you are not from run-of-the-mill people, that you are the product of several generations' gentle breeding [...] and that you should try to live up to your name — [...] She asked me to tell you you must try to behave like the little lady and gentleman that you are. She wants to talk to you about the family and what it's meant to Maycomb County through the years, so you'll have some idea of who you are, so you might be moved to behave accordingly," he concluded at a gallop.
Stunned, Jem and I looked at each other, then at Atticus, whose collar seemed to worry him. We did not speak to him. [...] For no reason I felt myself beginning to cry, but I could not stop. This was not my father. My father never thought these thoughts. My father never spoke so. [...] Through my tears I saw Jem standing in a similar pool of isolation, his head cocked to one side. (M 177-8).

A moment later, Atticus snaps out of it. The narrating Scout recalls:

I knew he had come back to us. The blood in my legs began to flow again, and I raised my head. "You really want us to do all that? I can't remember everything Finches are supposed to do ..."
"I don't want you to remember it. Forget it." (M 178-9).

Seeing the way he has confused and hurt his children, especially Scout, Atticus appears to wake up to the error of compromising his own sense of right and wrong in order to reproduce a tribal logic. He also demonstrates how not to raise (or produce) a racist. Nonetheless, though there is a kind of snobbish fun poked at such racial determinism throughout Mockingbird, and in the passage above Atticus appears to relieve his daughter of its burden, an alternative explanation for the material inequalities that shape people's lives never clearly appears.

In Mockingbird, the people most deeply attached to such mystified, essentialized ways of thinking about race are the ignorant and contemptible poor whites of Old Sarum, represented most powerfully by Mayella and Bob Ewell. In this depiction of the Jim Crow south, the white poor, in their pathological child-rearing and inherited ignorance, produce the individual sources of racial animus responsible for the kind of violence that organizes both a lynch mob and a southern jury. To Kill a Mockingbird thus re-affirms the racism of the white American south as an essential familial trait by projecting it onto the poor whites: a psychological disposition but also an inheritable one. The group psychology of poor whites marks them as a people, distinct from the comparatively good whites of Maycomb — and the mystification of anti-black racism implies a moral justification for their poverty.

The gesture also attenuates any possible solutions for the violence of Jim Crow, by depicting its agents as merely doing what they are, and by being of a kind that will simply keep reproducing itself if allowed to do so. As such, people of inferior white blood appear to operate outside the realm of moral agency — not to mention political economy — thus raising the question of how they might psychologically change at all. Since consensus around the "Negro problem" understood racism as solvable only by changing white attitudes toward black people, this depiction of poor whites as intractably racist implies that the nation may simply be better off without them. Identifying such people as the source of Jim Crow order suggests that racial domination will die only once they disappear. The message of Mockingbird is thus twofold: that the state is powerless to intervene in the causes of Jim Crow, and that middle-class liberals are justified in despising — or worse — the (white) poor.11

Thus, a caste story about American inequality emerges in Mockingbird, where the irrationality of racism is thrown into relief not just by the dramatization of hard evidence losing out to clannish sentiments in the courtroom, but by which white residents of Maycomb are racist. The lynch mob that shows up at Tom Robinson's jail cell is more than a class; it is also a family. The Ewells and the Cunninghams, and the others like them who populate Old Sarum, are set off against people of good breeding like the Finches. And perhaps no two figures in Mockingbird are more intentionally opposed than Scout Finch and Mayella Ewell — second only to Bob Ewell and Atticus — where young Scout appears to be a kind of salvific alternative to Mayella. The white southerner of the future (that is, 1960) does not look like the tormented and vicious Mayella, but instead like the retrospectively narrating Scout: one who starts out as a confused child, but who, due to her good breeding and middle-class values, grows into moral maturity, able to imbue the story of her childhood with a wisdom relevant for the present day. Since the story of Mockingbird unfolds in the 1930s, while the novel is published in 1960, the moral seems to be that the white south is on a kind of natural path toward racial progress, as the white people of good breeding gradually outnumber the poor whites who appear to be the source of anti-black violence and prejudice.

By reading the two novels in contrast to one another, we can also see more clearly how To Kill a Mockingbird relies on its own ideology of (white) racial difference, one that appears even more powerful today. By dramatizing political economy as merely organizing people according to their essential kind, through the logic of families, Mockingbird manages to make economic inequality feel natural, while simultaneously depicting overt racism as morally, even spiritually, wrong. It achieves this resolution through a racialization of American poverty, drawing on a strain of what Alice O'Connor has called "poverty knowledge"—poor whites being poor not due to failures in the economic system, but because of the kind of white people they are.12 This also has the effect of attenuating moral agency for people like the Ewells and rationalizing their poverty, and even their punishment, in one stroke — suggesting that the nation might be imagined as better off once they "die out."

In stark contrast, by the conclusion of Go Set a Watchman, the middle-class liberal hero, in the figure of Jean Louise Finch, appears more like Mayella Ewell of Mockingbird: the adult victim of an authoritarian family regime, one who rationalizes both the racism and the violence of her childhood home for the sake of maintaining a status quo on which she (still) depends for her life.

Go Set a Watchman and Enforcing Racecraft

When the grown Jean Louise Finch arrives in Maycomb from New York City, Go Set a Watchman makes clear that it wants to take on the mystification of southern white racism that dominated the national imagination. In this picture, a collective southern "mind" felt compelled to constantly "protect itself from the encroachments of three hostile factors: the Yankee Mind, the Modern Mind, and the Negro."13 During the same year in which Lee was revising Watchman into Mockingbird, Howard Zinn was working on a book that aimed to dispel both the white stereotype and the idea of racial difference itself, suggesting that to accept the racist attitudes of the white south as "most of all, indissoluble by reason" would be to commit a grave national mistake.14

Jean Louise's character operates in resonant contrast to the stereotype, born with what the novel's third-person narrator describes as a "visual defect":

Had she the insight, could she have pierced the barriers of her highly selective, insular world, she may have discovered that all her life she had been with a visual defect which had gone unnoticed and neglected by herself and by the closest to her: she was born color blind.15

Here, the phrase "color blind" does not indicate an attitude of conservative denial. Rather, we learn that Jean Louise's "color blind" understanding of race indicates something more like simply seeing it as ideology: race not as biologically, or even culturally, meaningful differences that exist essentially between groups, but as the ongoing expression of power relations that naturalizes a hierarchy that serves the elite — and that consolidates its power in large part by fooling everyone that it is real. That is to say, in the "visual defect" of her "color blindness," Jean Louise sees not race, but racecraft.16

After discovering a racist pamphlet in Atticus's evening reading material — the contents of which Jean Louise describes angrily to Aunt Alexandra as making "Dr. Goebbels look like a naive country boy" (W 102) — Jean Louise learns to her horror that Atticus and her suitor Hank are on the Citizen Council's board of directors. She had learned about such Councils not from local knowledge while growing up in Alabama, but in the recent course of living up North:

She knew about them, all right. New York papers full of it. She wished she had paid more attention to them, but only one glance down a column of print was enough to tell her a familiar story: same people who were the Invisible Empire, who hated Catholics; ignorant, fear-ridden, red-faced, boorish, law-abiding, one hundred per cent red-blooded Anglo-Saxons, her fellow Americans — trash (W 104).

Here the narrator and Jean Louise almost merge into one, and imply that what repulses her is not only the racism of the council, but the mark of "trash" its attitude affixes to her family as well. The moment also introduces a competing "watchman" that has taken up residence inside Jean Louise: that of the Northern "expert" view of the white south. But in contrast to Mockingbird, "trash" here is not exactly an ontological designation, or even a clear mark of class status. Jean Louise sees "trash" as not as matter of what people are, but of what they believe and of what they do — in particular, people who reify the illusion of racial hierarchy by enforcing Jim Crow.

When Jean Louise follows Atticus to the courthouse and secretly observes the Maycomb County Citizens Council meeting, the scene is immediately poignant for any fan of To Kill a Mockingbird: Jean Louise watches from the "colored" balcony, as she recalled watching as a child when Atticus won an acquittal for a young black man accused of raping a white girl. The setting is one of the more striking resonances between Watchman and Mockingbird, a spatial and racial alignment important enough to Lee to be given prominence in two otherwise very different stories. In both, Jean Louise and Scout appear to have a distinctively egalitarian sensibility — stemming from an ability to "see" from the perspective of black southerners, rendered in both texts (and the film adaptation of Mockingbird) when they occupy the physical vantage point of an abstracted black observer. From her spot in the "colored" balcony, Jean Louise is especially repulsed to see her father acting as an equal with William Willoughby, a "two penny despot" who runs the county from an unmarked bureaucratic office and mobilizes the racial sentiments of the white poor (W 113).

After Jean Louise's worst fears about her father have been confirmed, she stumbles out of the courthouse, seeking solace at the site of her old childhood home, only to find that it has been turned into an ice cream parlor run by a Cunningham. Jean Louise reluctantly eats a melting vanilla cone as she sits in her old backyard, which has been transformed into a gravel lot, realizing: "The only human being she had ever fully and whole-heartedly trusted had failed her; the only man to whom she could point and say with expert knowledge, 'He is a gentleman, in his heart, he is a gentleman,' had betrayed her, publicly, grossly, and shamelessly" (W 113). The next moment, Jean Louise, still sitting outside the ice cream parlor that used to be her family home, gets up, goes over to the corner of the lot, and "vomit[s] up her Sunday dinner" (W 119). So begins the main narrative of Watchman, in which Jean Louise tries to cope with, fight against, and ultimately reconcile this traumatizing discovery into a revised sense of her own psychologically coherent "self."

Jean Louise's woes are compounded when Calpurnia suddenly adopts the mask of customary interaction between blacks and whites under Jim Crow, refusing to recognize Jean Louise as anything more than a white resident of Maycomb like her father. She realizes that she has "lost" both her father and the woman who figured as her only source of maternal love (159-161). The loss of familial rootedness sends Jean Louise into an existential wilderness, without a coherent sense of identity:

My aunt is a hostile stranger, my Calpurnia won't have anything to do with me, Hank is insane, and Atticus—something's wrong with me, it's something about me. It has to be because all these people cannot have changed.
Why doesn't their flesh creep? How can they devoutly believe everything they hear in church and then say the things they do and listen to the things they hear without throwing up? I thought I was a Christian but I'm not. I'm something else and I don't know what. Everything I have ever taken for right and wrong these people have taught me—these same, these very people. So it's me, it's not them. Something has happened to me.
They are all trying to tell me in some weird, echoing way that it's all on account of the Negroes ... but it's no more the Negroes than I can fly, and God knows, and God knows, I might fly out the window at any time now (W 167-8).

In other words, the damage of racial ideology emerges in Watchman as not just a trauma of identity for one white southern woman confronting a profound moral betrayal — but also as the crazy-making that results from encountering the hegemony of ascriptive, essentialized difference when one is, despite her family's opposing view, deeply "color blind" to it.

And as the imagery of the passage above suggests, for Jean Louise, individuating herself from her family does not feel like a growth experience that might fit into the form of a bildungsroman. Her options appear not to be between growth or stagnation but more like: adapt or die. Between the realization of a psychic dependence on her father and the resonant insight that she cannot simply adhere to beliefs of her own and remain safely in the fold, Jean Louise's inner life makes the Finch family dynamic look just as authoritarian as the glare of Bob Ewell focusing on Mayella as she testifies from the witness stand in Mockingbird.

Watchman most adheres to the conventions of the bildungsroman when Jean Louise tries to navigate between the introjections of competing authorities: the white Jim Crow south on the one hand, personified by an inner voice of Atticus and family; and the urban, and urbane, New York City on the other. The former derives its authority not just from family relation, but also from a nostalgic perversion of southern history and the racial ideology that attends it. The latter authority (ostensibly of New York City, but functioning more broadly as a kind of "national" point of view) derives from a combination of popular psychoanalytic theory, accepted stereotypes about the "backwards" south, and from an implicit appeal to the picture of the "Negro problem" popularized by Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal. But both introjected authorities competing for power over Jean Louise's sense of self and reality agree about one thing: the contemptibility of working-class whites.

Jean Louise's superego of the north casts the white south as an essentially backwards "people," in need of being brought up to modernity through belief in a kind of national creed. This discourse introduced twelve years earlier by Gunnar Myrdal's American Dilemma established a working theory of American racism as both generated by and producing an irreconcilable psychic schism within white individuals and pathological personalities in its black victims. As Myrdal wrote:

The American Negro problem is a problem in the heart of the American [...] Though our study includes economic, social, and political race relations, at bottom our problem is the moral dilemma of the American — the conflict between his moral valuations on various general levels of consciousness and generality.17

In these terms, racialized inequality stems not from law or policy, but more fundamentally from the bottom up: that is, when higher moral values, and the national identity to which they are attached, clash in the hearts and minds of ordinary (white) Americans, "where personal and local interests [...] group prejudice against particular persons or types of people" dominate their outlooks.18 In Myrdal's conclusion, such psychic dissonance would, by virtue of its paradoxical nature in the context of American values, eventually cease to be.19 When Jean Louise's racial trauma appears as a psychic identity crisis, one that splits the organization of her inner life between authorities of New York City and Maycomb, it resonates with Myrdal's formulation. The inwardness of racism was key to his study's conclusion, and made it especially effective when cited as evidence in support of the "damage thesis" that undergirded the majority opinion in Brown v. Board of Education (1954).20 In this light, the dramatization of racism operating on a white psychological landscape in Go Set a Watchman feels especially apt for its time, and for its intended audience: a moment (not unlike our own) in which Americans had been told by experts that the core problem of racial inequality lived "inside" the moral battleground of white hearts and minds.

Nonetheless — or, as a result — Watchman struggles to stay committed to this as a framework that could explain how race actually works. This struggle becomes clear most powerfully at the novel's conclusion, when we abruptly learn that the Jim Crow order is not merely a psychological "dilemma" for white people after all, but requires force in order to secure the consent it needs. Prior to this, Jean Louise's competing superegos, or internalized "watchmen" of both North and South, issue primarily racial commands, attempting to enforce her conformity to an ascriptive group identity that collapses all white southerners into one "kind" of people: racists.

In one of Watchman's more striking internal dialogues, New York City is personified as a voice speaking within Jean Louise, one that appears to have already been attempting to either replace or supplement — but not exactly challenge — the introjected authority of Atticus, even before her discovery of his corruption:

New York is saying to me right now: you, Jean Louise Finch, are not reacting according to the doctrines regarding your kind, therefore you do not exist. The best minds in the country have told us who you are. You can't escape it, and we don't blame you for it, but we do ask you to conduct yourself within the rules that those who know you have laid down for your behavior, and don't try to be anything else (W 177-8).

Jean Louise goes on to rebuke this abstracted voice of the North, in a kind of white southern version of double consciousness. Rather than the idealism of the "national" level in the Myrdalian picture as a liberating contrast to the provincialism of white southern folkways, this New York City "level of consciousness" within Jean Louise instead sounds like a cousin to that of her own family. In its commitment to the sort of tautological order made by all racialized forms of identity, the voice of New York issues a familiar command: you better act like what we already know you are. Here, for Jean Louise, there is no possibility of an individuated self, or identity, without the ideology of race through which to first organize and structure it. Her racialized identity is that of a white southerner, and its essential mark is an inborn, and intractable, anti-black racism.

A successful resolution to this problem ought to be Jean Louise setting her own "watchman": becoming an autonomous individual (that is to say, un-raced on the inside) by resisting not only the familial demand that she change her beliefs in order to conform to theirs, but also the ascribed ways of being that are supposed to determine her "national" identity as a typified white "Southerner." But the story consistently depicts such a resolution as fraught at best and traumatizing at worst — or even, finally, impossible. That is to say, despite the author's apparent desire to make Jean Louise's experience legible as a coming-of-age story that would produce individuation, i.e., a healthy separation from the demands of her family and region, we get the repeated sense that the conflicts she faces may not be resolvable that way at all. Rather than offer a method for achieving autonomy, the ostensibly rational, national authority within instead aims to deprive Jean Louise of personal freedom by ascribing to her a determinative way of being quite similar to that which she hears from her family: you are what you already do, and you do what you already are. Caught between these racializing introjections, Jean Louise finds that both options mean a certain kind of death — one that neither she nor the author can finally freely choose. When Tay Hohoff convinced Lee to revise the manuscript specifically by transforming the story of a 26-year-old Jean Louise Finch of the late 1950s, to that of nine-year-old Scout Finch of the mid-1930s, she ensured that what appears unresolvable for Jean Louise of Watchman could be forestalled indefinitely for Scout.

Go Set a Watchman and the Jim Crow of the White Middle Class

By contrast, for Calpurnia in Watchman, Maycomb's racism is less about the psychological dispositions of white people, or the behaviors determined by their bloodlines, and more about the very specific danger of racialized crime and punishment. Though a minor character, Calpurnia appears in Watchman as psychologically equal to Jean Louise, with her own set of complex motivations — arguably more so than in Mockingbird.21 Atticus's second offense, after directing the Citizen's Council, lies in choosing to represent Cal's grandson Frank in his vehicular manslaughter case, after he accidentally ran down a white man. Jean Louise at first misinterprets Atticus's decision to represent Frank, and takes it as evidence of the morally sound father she once knew — but soon she learns that he is acting not morally but strategically, to move in before "those NAACP-paid lawyers." (W, 149)

For Atticus, taking Frank's case is an effort to prevent it from being used as an opportunity to fight de jure Jim Crow in court, what Atticus characterizes as but one tactic among "their" various "bag of tricks": "Above all else they [the NAACP] try to get the case into a Federal court where they know the cards are stacked in their favor" (W 149). The moment not only reflects the growing power and promise of the federal bench, but also further demystifies southern white supremacy, as fiendishly rational operations by professionals in power.

Watchman undercuts the Myrdalian message and postwar consensus regarding the nature of "the Negro Problem" by depicting it instead as what it largely was: not the result of an abstract (and therefore politically intractable) psychic "schism," or even an inborn racism, but rather a regime enforced and reproduced by ongoing, sophisticated strategies on the part of whites in power to maintain the exclusion of blacks — and often poor whites — from political life and juridical protection.22 And unlike the Ewells and other lynch mob members in Mockingbird (i.e., the kind of people who were just born that way), by virtue of the change in character that crushes Jean Louise, we see that the Atticus of Watchman is freely choosing to be this way and do these things for the sake of maintaining power among white elites. In other words, in Watchman the ancient southern "mind" gives way to reveal a far less mystical, but far more amoral, elite will to power.

In a move familiar to segregationist rhetoric, during their climactic argument Atticus tries to persuade Jean Louise by frightening her with the image of her egalitarian ideals coming to life in the form of "another Reconstruction," a state of affairs in which — since the whites in Alabama were admittedly "outnumbered" — Maycomb would be run by people not yet equipped for the privilege of full citizenship: "Honey, you do not seem to understand that the Negroes down here are still in their childhood as a people. You should know it, you've seen it all your life" (W 246). The beliefs of Watchman's overtly racist Atticus Finch align with key aspects of postwar racial liberalism — specifically, narratives of psychologization that identified (or rather, invented) pathological and infantilized black personality traits as demonstrating the natural, and inheritable, effect of many generations of white racial animus. Atticus demonstrates the contempt side of the "contempt and pity" coin, and suggests what soon came to be known as the "vicious cycle" of self-perpetuating black pathology as an adequate explanation for the persistence of racially disparate patterns of inequality.23

As Jean Louise concludes her confrontation with her father, she articulates the depth of the betrayal, and its stakes:

"You've cheated me in a way that's inexpressible, but don't let it worry you, because the joke is entirely on me. You're the only person I think I've ever fully trusted and now I'm done for."
"I've killed you, Scout. I had to." (W 252-3)

Though spoken by Atticus, the "I" here is multivalent; it could be Atticus, but it could also be Jean Louise, or it could be the narrator itself. Because the phrase sounds so strange coming from Atticus, it feels more like a moment in which the story makes its own wish known: for this older version of Jean Louise to be killed off so that a new one might appear in its place.24 The moment also likely reflects an author realizing that the material of her story has exceeded the interpretive framework through which she was attempting to tell it.

Jean Louise finally abandons the argument with her father, and seeks refuge with the remaining man of the family who had seemed rational and long been her close friend and confidant: her father's eccentric bachelor brother, Dr. Jack Finch. But Jack surprises her, too, by doubling down on his brother's logic and adding a corrective crash course for her in the "true" motives behind why non-slaveholding (i.e., poor) whites fought for the Confederacy: not to simply preserve slavery and plantocratic rule, but because to fight for the cultural autonomy of their people was a determinant of their Scots-Irish blood: "They fought to preserve their identity. Their political identity, their personal identity" (W 196).25 For Jack, as for Atticus, as for the familial and hegemonic forces angling to hold Jean Louise captive to her designated type, racial conformity and "personal identity" are one and the same. In this climactic showdown, we see why the bildungsroman form could never have freed Jean Louise; though she had sought personal identity as an antidote to (white) racial directives, the moral of Go Set a Watchman is that the two cannot be pulled apart. As such, Lee's early manuscript reveals an effort toward dramatizing a fundamental mystification undergirding the regime of Jim Crow.

In her final argument with Jack, Jean Louise reaches her limit for being lectured to by manipulative, race-obsessed mansplainers, and in her final act of self-assertion expresses as much:

"I'm gonna get in this car and drive it to Maycomb Junction and sit there until the first train comes along and get on it. Tell Atticus if he wants his car back he can send after it."
"Stop feeling sorry for yourself and listen to me."
"Uncle Jack, I am so sick and damn tired of listening to the lot of you I could yell bloody murder! Won't you leave me alone? Can't you get off my back for one minute?"
She slammed down the trunk lid, snatched out the key, and straightened up to catch Dr. Finch's savage backhand swipe full on the mouth.
Her head jerked to the left and met his hand coming viciously back. She stumbled and groped for the car to balance herself. She saw her uncle's face shimmering among the tiny dancing lights.
"I am trying," said Dr. Finch, "to attract your attention" (W 260).

Dr. Finch then hands her a handkerchief and calmly asks whether all her "passion" has been spent. Jean Louise — to our heartbreak and astonishment — nods: "I can't fight them anymore." The "them" here can be read broadly as the inner voices of her clan, but also as a chorus of her various "watchmen," hegemonies both North and South.

Jack then brings her three fingers of whiskey and a chaser of water, which he pays her a dime to drink in one go. We learn that Uncle Jack had never struck a woman before in his life but that he approves of the result; it's a successful cure. When he asks her how she feels, we find that two hard slaps and a triple whiskey have restored her to a questionable feeling of being at home within herself, an obviously false sense of inner peace:

"Different, somehow. I'm sitting right here, and it's like I'm sitting in my own apartment in New York. I don't know — I feel funny." [...] She felt that time had stopped and she was inside a not unpleasant vacuum. There was no land around, no beings, but there was an aura of vague friendliness in this indifferent place. I'm getting high, she thought (W 262).

Jack tells her to sit right where she is and be quiet. He then proceeds to gently "explain" to her the error of her ways and convinces her that it is her duty as a person and as a daughter of the south to remain in Maycomb, in her social milieu, to work quietly, and to "love who you will, but marry your own kind." (273) He admonishes her to find some "maturity" and "humbleness of mind." Here we see Jack, like Atticus before him and Bob Ewell yet to come, deeply committed to ensuring that a young woman's heart and mind stay, racially speaking, within the family.

By the next page, the second to last of the novel, Jean Louise is suicidal again, but this time it's a self-denigrating feint — ostensibly caused by the intensity of her shame for how she's behaved toward her father and her people. Uncle Jack assures her that "there's been enough focal suicide for one day." The novel ends with Jean Louise heading toward home to Atticus, sharing tipsy banter with Jack from out her father's car window, presumably back to her former self. The novel restores Jean Louise to her home, both geographical and familial, in such a way that the ascriptive voice of race appears to have been the intractable and true "watchman" all along. In her coerced act of "focal suicide," the "visual defect" of not being able to see (or believe) racial difference has been cured for good — transformed into acquiescence to seeing herself as a Finch who behaves, and believes, as a Finch should.

It is an ending that feels unfinished, to say the least. When Jack's attempts at psychological manipulation give way to open brutality and coerced inebriation, the actual authoritarianism that has ruled Jean Louise's family dynamic and inner life is laid bare. Rather than confirming southern racism as stemming from determinative habits and dispositions of certain kinds of white people, the ending to Watchman reveals its true structure: that of a regime held in place by the threat and exertion of multiple forms of strategic violence, carried out by politically powerful elites. In the end, Jean Louise of Watchman is prevented from "individuating" due less to her own neurotic inadequacies and more out of simple fear. Like Jean Louise herself, one wants to throw up on the very site of the Finch family homestead — and one will certainly need a stiff drink in order to live with it. In contrast to Mockingbird, the Finches of Go Set a Watchman show how the racial principles instilled by an authoritarian family are not unique to the poor, and may even be more socially and politically destructive when they appear in the middle class. In this light, we might now read Mockingbird as Watchman's conservative transformation, into a kind of "child's book" for adults regarding American inequality. As a second book, rather than a first, we might also now see in Mockingbird an effort to put meaningful distance between two characters who might better be understood as conjoined twins: Jean Louise Finch, and Mayella Violet Ewell.

Thus, where Go Set a Watchman shows its cracks, I suggest that we can see a kind of light shine through. Despite the novel's flaws, Lee attended carefully enough to her material, and to her convictions regarding race as nothing more than power, that we can read the manuscript's "failure" as about something bigger than Lee herself. Instead of signifying her personal limitations as a novelist, Watchman ought to be read more broadly as demonstrating some of the difficulties facing a postwar (or, for that matter, contemporary) writer who wants her work to demystify the ideology of racial difference but without implicating its role in class inequality. In the revision of Watchman into Mockingbird, particularly through the transformations of Atticus into Bob Ewell and Jean Louise into Mayella, we can see one way of resolving this problem that continues to have traction today: by demonstrating how poor whites could be racialized in a way not so functionally distinct from blacks. In both cases, groups of people are insisted upon as predetermined "kinds" that implicitly justify economic inequality by making it beside the point. As a result, Mockingbird falls in line with the kind of typified white southerner story that Jean Louise tries to resist in Watchman, where the mark of essential difference that makes the white southerner a kind of people is their anti-black racism. Lee compromised in Mockingbird by assigning this pathology only to the poor whites, even though she knew — as evident from Watchman — that this was hardly a comprehensive view of how the enforcement of racial order actually worked in the south. In other words, Lee made a deal with the devil to write Mockingbird and never published again.

One might then argue that Watchman offers the more honest, and more illuminating, picture of the Jim Crow world, where the racial regime of Jim Crow was held in place not by violence ensuing from the innate prejudices of the lower class, but from strategies employed by freely choosing, professional agents invested in the naturalizing of power held by the elite: lawyers, judges, administrators. In this light, as a piece of literary history, the scuttled manuscript of Go Set a Watchman signals challenges facing novelists at midcentury, particularly those with aspirations to make their art responsive to politics. But it also figures as part of a larger story regarding how racial ideology has come to be cast so persuasively as a psychological, behavioral, and even spiritual matter in American life — as anything but what it actually was and continues to be: a political reality and one that might be changed through political means.

 

Rachel Watson is an Assistant Professor of American Literature at Howard University. Her work has appeared in Mississippi Quarterly, Obsidian, Sonora Review, the edited collection Faulkner and Mystery, and is forthcoming in the edited collection Reconsidering Flannery O'Connor. She is currently working on a book that considers the legal and political significance of crime fiction written during the era of Jim Crow and the Civil Rights Movement, in support of which she received an NEH Award for Faculty 2017-18.

 

References

My thanks to Palmer Rampell and Anna Shechtman for their excellent work editing and clarifying the final version; to the two anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful responses to earlier drafts; and to Courtnee Fenner, for her insightful research assistance. For spirited conversations about Harper Lee and helpful suggestions along the way, I am also grateful to Sean McCann, Lisa Siraganian, Deak Nabers, Bob Dreeben, Simon Stow, and Summer McDonald.