{"id":2499,"date":"2015-07-18T18:44:15","date_gmt":"2015-07-19T01:44:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lindacollison.com\/?p=2499"},"modified":"2015-07-25T13:48:13","modified_gmt":"2015-07-25T20:48:13","slug":"set-watchman-kill-mockingbird","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/madhatdesign.com\/newsite\/set-watchman-kill-mockingbird\/","title":{"rendered":"Go Set a Watchman"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"go-set-a-watchman-and-to-kill-a-mockingbird\"<\/em><\/p>\n

Harper Lee\u2019s To Kill a Mockingbird<\/em> influenced me greatly as a young reader. While Atticus was the hero of that book, I identified with young Scout, a tomboy (as I was) who revered her father (as I revered my own.) The book gave me a different perspective of racial inequality and injustice, but more than that, it was a story of the coming-of-age of a white girl in the deep South, raised by Atticus, her principled father and Calpurnia, his housekeeper\/cook\/nanny. I saw her insular town in Maycomb County, Alabama, through her eyes and learned of Southern manners, respect, ignorance, prejudice, bigotry, hypocrisy, incest and rape through her eyes \u2013 which is to say, through the author\u2019s eyes. The fact that the story was told by a white girl does not diminish its importance. In fact, white people were instrumental in African Americans gaining their rights. Some of those white people were women.<\/p>\n

Had Go Set a Watchman<\/em> been published it would have set the world on its ear, back in 1960, less than a decade after Brown vs Board of Education and eight years before Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. It was radical for its time \u2013 too radical.<\/p>\n

Go Set a Watchman<\/em> was written before Lee\u2019s Pulitzer Prize winning \u201cfirst novel\u201d and was rejected. To me, it is a much more honest book, more straightforward, less crafted. From a writer\u2019s point of view, it shows signs of being an early work, particularly the second half when Scout tends toward diatribes. Some reviewers have called it \u201cflawed.\u201d Of course it\u2019s flawed, as are most books, particularly first books.<\/p>\n

The art of writing — the craft of writing — is a process. Books don\u2019t just spring perfectly formed, from a writer\u2019s forehead. Stories have a way of morphing themselves and in fiction, even more so. A story \u2013 the same story \u2013 can be told from many different viewpoints. Stories are our parallel lives. They are all happening simultaneously, they are all true.<\/p>\n

The best fiction isn\u2019t about issues; the best fiction is about individuals. In telling one person\u2019s story you tell a vital part of the human experience. Harper Lee allows Scout to do a little too much preaching in To Set a Watchman<\/em>, but it does reveal the main character\u2019s passionate idealism, which was ahead of its time. Harper Lee was at the vanguard of the great era of social change the sixties would bring.<\/p>\n

On one level Go Set a Watchman<\/em> is the story of a young woman\u2019s separation from her father. Everyone sees the obvious racial theme but who\u2019s talking about the other underlying theme?<\/p>\n

In 2015, feminism is dead — or at least in a deep coma. In another version of the same story (Go set a watchman to kill a mockingbird ) an older Jean Louise returns home from New York — not a perfect place but a place where she has become an independent person. She comes back to the home she loves and the father she respects and she finds that he \u2013 and her boyfriend, the man who expects to marry her \u2013 are not<\/em> the men she thought they were. She is ashamed of them. This is a theme not often explored in literature \u2013 daughter against father, daughter separating to become her own person, and turning down marriage in the process.<\/p>\n

Had Go Set a Watchman<\/em> been published it would have set the world on its ear, back in 1960, less than a decade after Brown vs Board of Education and eight years before Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. It was ahead of its time.<\/p>\n

Still, it\u2019s greatest value to me, is the story of a young woman coming of age whose father has greatly disappointed her. Atticus is a man of his time. He\u2019s not evil, he\u2019s just a man, as is Hank, whose hand she refuses. Scout is her own woman and is guided by her own watchman. Scout is the hero of Go Set a Watchman<\/em>, not Atticus. Apparently a lot of people were disappointed in that. I for one, thought it was an honest novel, with an autobiographical ring of truth that first novels often have. There are infinite ways this story could be written. Maybe someone can write it from Calpurnia’s point of view.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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