The Effect of Heavy Editing on Atticus the Dog

With today's release of Go Set a Watchman, I figured it was a good time to talk about how the book's portrayal of Atticus Finch is not the fall of a hero.

In the months leading up to its release, Go Set a Watchman was promoted as the long lost sequel to the national treasure that is To Kill a Mockingbird.  It's set 20 years later, in the 50s, with an adult Scout returning home to Maycomb, Alabama with characters from Mockingbird making appearances, which certainly sounds like a sequel.  Then the early reviews started to come out, shocking absolutely everyone with facts that come to light in Watchman: Atticus Finch is a huge racist.

What? 

But--What?

Yeah. 

While Mockingbird presents issues of racism and the end of innocence by creating an upstanding moral hero for Scout to look up to, Watchman covers the same themes by having an adult Scout realize that her father, who she always considered to be a moral compass, is not as great as she thought he was when she was a child.  So Watchman pretty much ruined everyone's childhood, including Scout's, and has made things awkward for everyone who named their children and pets "Atticus."

Atticus the dog was a little awkward anyway.

For me, there are two ways to rationalize this.  First, take into consideration that Mockingbird is written from a child's perspective, and therefore her father was a great man who did great things and formed her into the person she became.  It's only after she grew up (in Watchman) that she was able to look back and see that things weren't the way she interpreted them at the time or that things weren't as shiny as they are in her memory.  And we, the readers, can go through this horror with Scout, since we too believed him to be a shining example of morality.

This way of looking at it makes sense, and may hold even more of an emotional punch than if Watchman hadn't been released at a point long after Mockingbird had become a renowned part of the American Literary Canon and Atticus had taken his place in our hearts.

But I prefer the second way to look at it: Watchman is not a sequel.  And not in the "Lalala pretend it didn't happen" kind of way.

Looking at the history, Go Set a Watchman was actually written first.  Then Lee's editors told her to rewrite it, focusing more on the charming stories of Scout's youth.  In rewriting, she came at the same themes from different directions, changing the point of view and time period, along with characters' personalities and plot points.  So it's as if Watchman is a first draft of Mockingbird.  (a lot of reviews are calling it a "bad first draft.")  We can see this in the fact that several sections (mostly descriptions of setting) appear verbatim in both books, like they were reused in Mockingbird because they were worth keeping and Watchman was never going to see the light of day.  Furthermore, some facts are altered between Mockingbird and Watchman, most notably the outcome of Tom Robinson's trial.  Yeah!  In Mockingbird, a huge plot point is that he was accused despite lack of evidence, but when it's mentioned in Watchman it's stated that he was acquitted.  That kind of continuity error doesn't make a lot of sense if Watchman really is a sequel.

So it's not that we didn't know Atticus or that we were fooled by an unreliable narrator.  It's that these Atticus Finches are different people with the name held over between the two drafts.

I prefer this way of looking at it, because it shows how much books change in the editing process, and I personally find that more fascinating.  How did these ideas start?  What did this book used to be?  What changed and what was kept?  How did it evolve?  We can actually look at the progression of To Kill a Mockingbird, like looking back through fossil records.  It makes me feel better about the massive overhauls I've done on stories and makes me feel better that even if what I'm writing is crap, there are ideas there that have the potential to flourish.