Go Set a Watchman: Why Harper Lee's new book is so controversial

To Kill a Mockingbird is one of the best-known books in America. It's an inspiring story about standing up to injustice even if doing so is difficult and unpopular; an accessible coming-of-age tale; and a convenient way to teach high school English students about the Jim Crow South. It's also the only novel that its author, Harper Lee, had ever published — until a sudden announcement in February 2015 heralded the publication of Go Set a Watchman, a new Lee work featuring the same characters as To Kill a Mockingbird.

A lot of people are suspicious about the discovery of the new manuscript. There are questions about whether Lee actually wanted it to be published, or whether she even wrote it at all — and if so, when. These questions have only become more urgent since the book's release on July 14, due to its "reveal" that Atticus Finch, the anti-racist hero of To Kill a Mockingbird, is a virulent racist in Watchman.

So does America now need to exile To Kill a Mockingbird from its summer reading assignments? Or should readers continue to read Mockingbird as if Watchman had never existed? How you think about this, it turns out, depends on who you think is responsible for creating a novel's meaning — and how comfortable you are with America's complicated racial legacy.

What is Go Set a Watchman, and why is it coming out now?

Go Set a Watchman is either the sequel to To Kill a Mockingbird, a rough draft of it, or something in between — it depends on whom you ask.

Until July 2015, Harper Lee had published only one novel: To Kill a Mockingbird. The book was an instant success when it was published in 1960; it was quickly made into an iconic 1962 movie starring Gregory Peck, and Lee, feeling the pressure to live up to her first book, never published another novel again.

In February 2015, a statement issued by Lee's publisher — purportedly on her behalf — announced that a manuscript had been "discovered" attached to another draft of Mockingbird. That manuscript was claimed to be Go Set a Watchman — the novel Lee initially submitted to editor Tay Hohoff, which ultimately became To Kill a Mockingbird.

The way the publisher tells it, Hohoff liked Lee's writing. But as Hugh Van Dusen, who's now Lee's editor at HarperCollins, said in an interview in February, Hohoff "said to her, This isn’t what you want to write; you want to write something about Scout when she was a girl." Lee worked extensively with Hohoff to rewrite the book, and the result was To Kill a Mockingbird.

But there's a lot of skepticism surrounding this account. The discovery was very sudden: Even Van Dusen hadn't heard about the discovered manuscript until just before it was announced. And after years and years of Lee saying she'd never publish again, it seemed very suspicious that she would have agreed to put out a new novel.

Why are people skeptical of the publisher's story?

Lee suffered a stroke in 2007, and she's currently suffering from dementia. It's not clear that she would be able to give informed consent about the publication of a new novel. The state of Alabama actually launched an elder-abuse investigation into Lee's situation earlier this year. It didn't find evidence of coercion or abuse, but it's impossible to rule them out with absolute certainty.

Harper Lee in 2007. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty)

It seems all too plausible that lawyers could take advantage of Lee — especially for the sake of generating more profit for her estate. After all, the news of Go Set a Watchman's release was a boon to the publishing industry: The novel would have a ready-made audience in the millions of Americans who read Mockingbird in school (it's routinely among the most-assigned books in high school English classrooms) or at least managed to crib together an understanding from SparkNotes and the Peck movie.

And in the #BlackLivesMatter era, it was particularly timely to publish a follow-up to Mockingbird, which is remembered mostly as a civil rights classic. This is the secret to its staying power in classrooms. Its portrayal of the Jim Crow South is historically relevant. Its young protagonist gives students someone to relate to as she discovers how unjust her society is; Atticus Finch, the protagonist's father and a lawyer who defends a black man falsely accused of rape, is a morally uplifting portrait of a just man confronting an unjust society. (It doesn't hurt that recollections of the book are often refracted through the Peck movie, which focuses on the book's racism plot.) Finch loses the trial, but the book makes it clear that what matters is that he stood up for what he believed in.

Some critics suspect that the timing of a new novel from Lee was just too perfect — that Go Set a Watchman isn't actually a draft of To Kill a Mockingbird at all, but an attempted sequel pieced together by others. Adam Gopnik, writing at the New Yorker, makes the best argument in support of this:

The book as a book barely makes sense if you don’t know "Mockingbird." If "Watchman" is a first novel, even in draft, it is unlike any first novel this reader is aware of [...] It would not be surprising if this novel turns out to be a revised version of an early draft, returned to later, with an eye to writing the "race novel" that elsewhere Harper Lee has mentioned as an ambition.

So the controversy about what Go Set a Watchman really is isn't just a controversy over its history and how it came to be published. It's a controversy over who gets to decide what makes a book — and whether this book should change the way people understand To Kill a Mockingbird.

Atticus Finch is a racist, and reviewers are shocked

That's why the book's publication has sparked another controversy. While some parts of Go Set a Watchman are recognizable from Mockingbird — Quartz has a list of passages that survived the rewriting process pretty much intact — the plot and characters were totally transformed in the editing process that presumably turned one novel into the other.

In particular, reviewers have been horrified, and more than a little betrayed, to learn that the Atticus Finch of Go Set a Watchman is a vocal supporter of segregation. NPR reviewer Maureen Corrigan compared the change to "turning Ahab into a whale-lover."

ATTICUS! How could you?!?? (Universal History Archive/UIG via Getty images)

It's ironic that the reception of Go Set a Watchman has been dominated by shock and dismay over the discovery that Atticus Finch is a racist, because the book is literally about Scout — who now goes by her given name, Jean Louise — making the same discovery.

It's important to remember that this book is set in the mid-1950s — in the wake of the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education that ruled segregation of public schools was unconstitutional. Jean Louise has been living in New York, and quietly assumed that her family back home is just as anti-segregationist as she is. Instead, she discovers that Atticus and her love interest, Henry Clinton, are both leading figures in Maycomb's Citizens' Council — local groups that sprang up to defend segregation. They're hostile (if not downright paranoid) toward the Supreme Court and the NAACP, which they worry are trying to incite the local black population. And Atticus, for his part, genuinely believes that African Americans are mentally childlike and unable to lead themselves or society. (Many reviews of Go Set a Watchman have made a big deal out of the revelation late in the book that at one point in the past Atticus had attended a Klan meeting, but that's eventually explained away. Atticus is portrayed as a virulent racist, but not as a Klan member in any meaningful way.)

Go Set a Watchman is about realizing your childhood heroes aren't perfect

Go Set a Watchman is a portrait of a particular historical moment when the South knew it was under siege by the forces of integration, and suspected it had already lost, but hadn't yet been forced to accept that defeat. It can be bitterly funny, and also genuinely difficult to read. In one scene, Jean Louise visits her childhood cook Calpurnia and is alarmed to realize that Calpurnia is using her "company manners" — the exaggerated, servile dialect she puts on for white strangers. Jean Louise is distraught that the woman who raised her now just sees her as "white folk," and asks Calpurnia directly: "Do you hate us?"

But thematically, Go Set a Watchman is literally about what happens once you realize Atticus Finch isn't the paradigm of civil rights you thought he was. It's the story of a young woman coming to terms with knowing that the father she had revered as a god is merely a man, and that the morals she thought she'd inherited wholesale from him are actually her own.

Jean Louise is an integrationist. Atticus is a legalist. He'll still take a case to represent a black defendant — in this case, one he knows to be guilty. But it's because he knows that he can secure a plea bargain, whereas if the NAACP represents the accused, it'll make a bigger deal out of the case.

Atticus's racism is typical of a certain strain of Southern liberals

That's a pretty accurate portrayal of one strain of Southern white liberalism, according to historian Kimberley Johnson of Barnard. According to Johnson, in the pre-Brown South, white liberals were relatively few. "To go against this reigning ideology of white supremacy was super dangerous, not only politically but also financially," Johnson says. (In Go Set a Watchman, a character from a working-class background makes exactly this point; Jean Louise, from a solidly middle-class background, totally dismisses it.)

As a result, many white liberals were upper or middle class — and defined by that status. "What made them liberal was an old-school gentility and also class," says Johnson. "There was a certain percentage of Southerners who, while they might have agreed with the notion of keeping African Americans in their place, had a disdain for the crudeness of the KKK and the tacky people who were associated with it." That's Jean Louise's first reaction at the Maycomb Citizens' Council meeting: She's shocked to see Atticus sitting alongside people the Finches call "trash."

To these liberals, things like lynching were an embarrassment. "It made it look like the government wasn't actually in charge," Johnson says. They might have agreed about the inherent criminality of black people, but they wanted to uphold the rule of law even more.

But it doesn't feel that way. Because if Go Set a Watchman is a novel about disillusionment, does that mean that Atticus's heroism in To Kill a Mockingbird is the illusion?

Can they really coexist? (John Lamparski/WireImage)

What does this mean for the Atticus Finch of To Kill a Mockingbird?

Some critics argue that Go Set a Watchman introduces a useful complication to our understanding of To Kill a Mockingbird, because it points out that good people can believe bad things, and that people can do good things for bad reasons. Alyssa Rosenberg wrote in the Washington Post:

"Go Set a Watchman" is part of the process of divesting ourselves of the idea that, as Ta-Nehisi Coates put it, "we believe racism to be the property of the uniquely villainous and morally deformed, the ideology of trolls, gorgons and orcs." If racism can belong to Atticus Finch — and if it became his property through the same processes that made him a hero — it can belong to anyone.

But other critics have argued that the Atticus of To Kill A Mockingbird shouldn't be sullied by association with the Atticus of Go Set a Watchman. For one thing, in To Kill a Mockingbird, the adult Scout (who narrates the novel) reinforces the heroism of her father, as Albert Burneko wrote for Deadspin:

Part of what makes Atticus such a powerful character is that, even though Narrator-Scout casts a gently ironic eye toward many of Kid-Scout’s ways of understanding the world, Atticus, in both of their eyes, is a hero. This is a key to that novel, I think, or have always thought: Jean Louise changed and grew up, and her understanding of Atticus broadened and deepened, but her admiration remained, because he really was a hero.

Burneko is making a literary-theory argument: that the answer to "what is this character really like?" is one only the reader can answer. Generations of readers have created their own ideas of what Atticus Finch is really like by reading, discussing, watching the Peck movie, etc. And the author can't take that away from them. As Burneko writes:

If Harper Lee is saying this Atticus is a Klan-rallying bigot—her lawyer would like us to believe she is, anyway—she might be wrong! She literally does not know him as well as you do. She knows him only slightly better than an absentee sperm donor knows the in-vitro-fertilized child raised by someone else.

In the world of Go Set a Watchman, the Tom Robinson rape trial went very differently

But while "the reader knows best" is one answer to the question of "what is Atticus really like?" it's not the only answer. Another answer would be to take the publisher at its word and assume that Watchman is in large part an early draft of Mockingbird — which the Quartz article showing identical paragraphs seems to bear out — and ask what changed. Because the two versions of Atticus Finch aren't really the same person.

Lee has said that Atticus was based on her own father, a lawyer, so it's easy to assume that Atticus's morals must have been drawn from real life. But reading Go Set a Watchman makes it clear that the plot and characters of To Kill a Mockingbird weren't just drawn from life — they emerged during the editing process. Go Set a Watchman isn't just set several years after To Kill a Mockingbird — it actually portrays a different reality.

This Alabama courthouse performs scenes from To Kill a Mockingbird for visitors. This is about to get awkward. (G.M. Andrews/The Washington Post via Getty)

Go Set a Watchman is set in a world where the crucial event in To Kill a Mockingbird didn't happen. In a flashback, Jean Louise remembers a case that readers recognize as the central trial in To Kill a Mockingbird: that of a black man with only one usable arm, charged with raping a white girl. But here's how the case is described in Go Set a Watchman (emphasis added):

Atticus took his career in his hands, made good use of a careless indictment, took his stand before a jury, and accomplished what was never before or afterwards accomplished in Maycomb County: he won an acquittal for a colored boy on a rape charge.

In other words, in the world of Go Set a Watchman, Atticus got Tom Robinson off.

The editing process made Atticus Finch look better by making the South look worse

This isn't a minor change. In To Kill a Mockingbird, the outcome of the trial is proof that the South is implacably racist — but that standing up for what's right is its own reward, and that it's something worth doing. In Go Set a Watchman, a sufficiently talented lawyer can actually persuade a white jury to acquit an innocent black defendant. That makes Maycomb look much better. But it also makes Atticus, who claims he's going along with the Citizens' Council in part to moderate them, look a lot more cowardly.

In Mockingbird, racism has a face in the trial of Tom Robinson: the monstrous Bob Ewell, who beats his daughter and later tries to kill Scout. There's no Bob Ewell in Watchman. The white woman who testifies for the prosecution is a 14-year-old, but the sex she had with the defendant was consensual — and since the defendant wasn't charged with statutory rape, this is enough to get the defendant acquitted. (Again, Atticus is a legalist.)

It's no wonder that, in contrast to the institutional racism of the jury in Tom Robinson's case and the individual villainy of Ewell, Atticus looks like a civil rights hero in To Kill a Mockingbird. He's the only person in Maycomb who's willing to call out injustice when he sees it.

If the publisher is telling the truth now, at some point, as Lee worked with her editor, Hohoff, to turn Watchman into Mockingbird, the city of Maycomb was made to look worse — so that Atticus Finch could look better. But why? It would have been possible to refocus the book on Scout's childhood, or even on the trial, without altering the outcome.

We don't know for sure what Hohoff and Lee wanted from their book. But a New York Times article about Hohoff strongly implies that she wanted Mockingbird to be inspirational — and that she had an affinity for white liberal heroism. At the same time that Hohoff was editing Lee, she was writing a biography of a turn-of-the-century liberal crusader in New York, one whose ancestor was an abolitionist killed by a pro-slavery mob.

To Kill A Mockingbird was a hit because it was a comfortable fable for white people

Some critics have argued that it wasn't fair to print Go Set a Watchman as an independent work, any more so than it would be to go through your email drafts folder and hit send on whatever you find in there. This idea, too, has its roots in some form of literary theory: The "real" To Kill a Mockingbird didn't spring fully formed from the head of Harper Lee, it was created through a collaborative process with her editor, Hohoff.

The history certainly bears that out. But the editing process isn't just about creating a literary work. It's about creating a work for the literary market.

To Kill a Mockingbird: stilllll popular. (Melanie Stetson Freeman/The Christian Science Monitor via Getty Images)

In the late 1950s, when working on Mockingbird, Hohoff and Lee appear to have come to the conclusion that a book about a heroic Southern white man was a better book and a better product than a book about a disillusioned Southern white woman. The success of Mockingbird confirms as much. So do plenty of other cultural depictions of the Jim Crow South, in which white protagonists standing up against the racism of white society get to be the heroes of their stories.

That's a comfortable moral position for white people: It lets them disdain white supremacy without feeling implicated in it. It's a less comfortable position for nonwhite people. When I asked Dr. Johnson, the Barnard historian, if she'd read Go Set a Watchman yet or planned to, she replied: "I read To Kill a Mockingbird [in school], I was the only black person in my class, and it was a horrific experience." And while "comfortable" may be a good way to teach history and morality to high schoolers, it doesn't seem like the best way to confront the legacy of actual white supremacy.

No critic appears to like Go Set a Watchman as much as To Kill a Mockingbird, and many of them frankly hate it — in part, it appears, because of its bitterness. But it's hard to say how much of the critical ire is based on literary merit and how much of it is rooted in the fact that Mockingbird is a less uncomfortable book for white people to read. After all, another book that came out the same day as Go Set a Watchman — Ta-Nehisi Coates's Between the World and Me — is receiving some mixed reviews because it's presented as an homage to James Baldwin without doing enough to emphasize that things are better for black Americans now than they were in Baldwin's day.

The people who have rushed to pick up Between the World and Me don't appear to overlap much with the ones who are rushing to pick up Go Set a Watchman, because they don't remember Mockingbird as fondly. But the people who have raced to pick up Watchman have been thrown by the possibility that their hero isn't particularly heroic. As Jean Louise herself demonstrates in the book, that's not a bad thing.

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