Literary criticism

I haven't read the "new" Harper Lee novel, Go Set a Watchman, and based on the reviews I probably won't. Still, it's good to see that something with literary value has pushed the latest excrescence from EL James, Grey, off the top of the bestseller lists. As an aside, though, how cynically clever is Ms James? Tell the same tawdry tale (young woman sells herself to older man in exchange for pricey gifts -- this is feminist porn?) from a different point of view, slap a new cover on it and hey presto, a new bestseller.

I mean, just imagine the same thing being done by Charles Dickens, each of whose novels is packed with fully-drawn characters. If he'd just rewritten Great Expectations from the viewpoints of Estella, Miss Havisham, Magwitch and Jaggers the lawyer, he'd have filled a whole bookshelf without ever having to find a new story.

But I digress. I actually want to write about Ms Lee's new book, and the fuss it's causing. The saintly Atticus Finch of To Kill a Mockingbird is portrayed in Watchman as a older man who's more than a little bit racist.  This has led to all kinds of frenzied exegesis, as critics and readers alike ponder how we all may get a bit cranky as we get older. Some are even saying that what changes between the two books is the perspective of Finch's daughter, Scout, who sees her father in a more nuanced way as she herself advances into adulthood.

If it's true that Watchman was written before Mockingbird (and there seem to be some academics who doubt this, but it's the accepted story for the most part) then most of this analysis is poppycock, and any supposed development in Atticus's character is largely inadvertent. Harper Lee based Atticus on her father, AC Lee. As a younger man, and at the time Watchman was written, AC was an old-style Southern segregationist, and so that's how Atticus is portrayed in the book. Later AC became much more liberal, and that was the basis for the Atticus Finch of Mockingbird.

It would be ridiculous to think that Harper Lee deliberately based the evolution of Atticus Finch from liberal to racist on her own father's evolution in exactly the opposite direction!  The Lord protect us from critics (and from EL James, while He's at it).