[I try to keep
this blog pretty positive, as befitting a critical
optimist perspective, but once
a year it’s time to air some grievances. Leading up to one of my favorite crowd-sourced
posts of the year, so share your own non-favorites, please!]
On what Harper
Lee’s classic novel fails to do, and where it succeeds.
In this We’re History piece on
the controversies or criticisms surrounding two of the most prominent books
published in 2015, Harper Lee’s Go Set a
Watchman and Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between
the World and Me, I argued that many of the unhappy
responses to Lee’s sequel/prequel were driven by the ways in which the new
novel changed
the character of Atticus Finch. After all, Atticus has been one of the most
beloved characters in American literature since To Kill a Mockingbird’s original 1960 publication (and even more so
since Gregory Peck’s
Oscar-winning portrayal in the 1962 film version), to the point where many
parents have even named
their sons Atticus in honor of the character. And Lee’s second novel didn’t
just portray Atticus as having grown more conservative or racist with age, an
all-too-common shift that would perhaps be easier for readers to accept—it also
revealed that he had been affiliated
with the Ku Klux Klan and other racist organizations throughout his life,
radically revising the original novel’s depiction of his racial and social
positions.
Or at least,
that’s how the new Atticus and novel felt to many readers. I’ve long been
troubled by the widely
accepted narrative that To Kill a
Mockingbird is one of America’s best novels about race and racism—not only
because there there are so
many better ones that should be much more widely
remembered and read, but also and more importantly because (as I also argue
in that We’re History piece) Mockingbird
isn’t really about African American histories or identities at all. To be
clear, Lee’s novel doesn’t necessarily pretend to be about those subjects—the
book is first and foremost about narrator and protagonist Scout Finch’s
maturation, and secondly about her relationship with her (in her young eyes)
idealized and inspiring father; because her father is a white lawyer in a Jim
Crow world where (as Lee erroneously depicts it) African Americans have no
advocates from within their community, he ends up defending an African
American man falsely accused of rape, but that’s a minor plotline within the
frame of this secondary character. If readers have amplified that plotline into
a defining American story of race and justice, something Lee’s novel quite
simply is not, that’s ultimately more telling of the absence of fuller
stories and histories of those issues from our collective memories.
If we were able
to stop viewing Lee’s novel as one of our central literary portrayals of race,
it would open up other and to my mind more productive ways of reading Mockingbird. For example, the novel is
particularly interesting as a depiction of a young girl struggling with
narratives of gender and social expectations, linking Scout to characters like
Frankie from Carson
McCullers’ The Member of the Wedding (1952) or Cassandra from Elizabeth
Stoddard’s The Morgesons (1862). And,
for that matter, to an African/Caribbean American young female protagonist like
Selina in Paule
Marshall’s Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959). Issues of race, along with
region and class and religion and sexuality and other factors, certainly impact
each of those protagonists’ experiences and identities, which would allow for a
more nuanced analysis of such themes than the celebratory anti-racist narrative
that has developed around Lee’s novel. So as usual—as always, I hope—I’m not
arguing for abandoning this non-favorite text, but rather for reconsidering it
in ways that would be more accurate and more productive than the idealizing
vision we’ve held for so long.
Next
non-favorite tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other non-favorites you’d share?
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