Given recent events, it is timely to ask why we ever accepted To Kill A Mockingbird's hero, Atticus Finch, as a two-dimensional paragon of moral purity in the first place. After all, was he not a man of his times? How could such a man in the deep south not be affected by the prevailing attitudes about race and segregation?We are told that Mockingbird is a rewrite of Watchman. I will be interested in reading Harper Lee's original painting of Atticus for myself (I am not on the publisher's list of advance reviewers, if you can believe it. The book is scheduled for publication on Tuesday, July 14.)
Are the Atticus's of Watchman and Mockingbird truly inconsistent with each other? Mockingbird's Atticus is six-year-old Scout's Atticus. He is seen through a child's eyes, strong and heroic, bravely standing up to a mob mentality that would railroad an innocent black man to his rendezvous with death beyond all reason.
Watchman's Atticus is 26-year-old Jean Louise's Atticus. How differently does this grown-up young woman see her father since those days? How much has Atticus changed over the years with age? Is he different twenty years on, or does Jean Louise simply see him differently? Or did the character evolve in Ms. Lee's mind in a zig-zag of cultural criticism?
Unlike the TIMES reviewer, I have not had the opportunity to explore these questions with Ms. Lee's book for myself yet. But to me, the Tale of Two Atticus's is at least potentially the legitimate stuff of American Literature. And if it makes my head explode, maybe that's because it's good writin'.
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