Jean Louise, “color blind” since birth, is both understandably outraged and deeply wounded by what amounts to a complete loss of faith in the one person “she had ever fully and wholeheartedly trusted.” Since Atticus holds a similar position in the hearts and minds of so many readers, it’s unsurprising that this revelation has met with early criticism, but this deserves to be tempered by a reminder that there’s a paternalism in Atticus’ behavior in Mockingbird that doesn’t exactly scream civil rights activist. Having returned to Maycomb, Alabama 20 years after Robinson’s trial, she’s shaken to the very core to learn that her beloved and revered father, who once proffered the mantra “equal rights for all, special privileges for none”, is reading pamphlets entitled The Black Plague and espousing bigoted pro-segregation propaganda at citizens’ council meetings. “They must never descend to human level.” Mockingbird is a classic coming-of-age story, but Scout’s education in that book has nothing on that she undergoes in Lee’s much-anticipated ‘sequel’.
“Our gods are remote from us, Jean Louise,” her uncle counsels the now 26-year-old in Go Set a Watchman. Atticus Finch, the lawyer who risks his and his family’s safety in his defence of Tom Robinson, an innocent black man accused of raping a white woman, has been idolised by readers since the novel’s publication in 1960, but by no-one more so than his own daughter Jean Louise Finch – ‘Scout’ – in whose 6-year-old eyes he could do no wrong.
Harper Lee’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel To Kill a Mockingbird stands as a touchstone of heroism in the face of bigotry and injustice in the United States’ Depression-era Deep South.
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