Harper Lee's Pink Penitentiary: to Kill a Mockingbird, Go

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HARPER LEE’S PINK PENITENTIARY: TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD, GO SET A WATCHMAN AND FEMINISM

BRENDA BUCHANAN

Bachelor of Arts in Telecommunications Kent State University May 1985

submitted in partial fulfilment of requirements for the degree MASTER OF ARTS IN ENGLISH at the CLEVELAND STATE UNIVERSITY DECEMBER 2020

We hereby approve this thesis For BRENDA BUCHANAN Candidate for the Master of Arts degree for the Department of ENGLISH And CLEVELAND STATE UNIVERSITY’S College of Graduate Studies by

Thesis Chairperson, Dr. Julie Burrell

Department & Date

Thesis Committee Member and Director of Graduate Studies, Dr. Adam Sonstegard

Department & Date

Thesis Committee Member, Dr. Brooke Conti

Department & Date

Student’s Date of Defense: August 5, 2020

HARPER LEE’S PINK PENITENTIARY:

TO KILL AND MOCKINGBIRD, GO SET A WATCHMAN AND FEMINISM

BRENDA BUCHANAN

ABSTRACT

For a book as popular and canonical as To Kill a Mockingbird has been for the last sixty years, there is a surprising dearth of scholarship about the novel. The work that does exist, has focused on race and the character of Atticus Finch, instead of his young tomboy daughter, Scout, who is the narrator of the story. The more recent release of Go

Set a Watchman in 2015, the first manuscript Harper Lee ever submitted for publication and a stilted precursor of To Kill a Mockingbird, also portrayed racial injustice in the

South, but from the perspective of an independent single woman in the 1950s. I argue that Go Set a Watchman has presented an opportunity to study both of Harper Lee’s novels in a feminist light, particularly upon the basis of the oppression women were subjected to under the Cold War propaganda that required traditional gender roles within the family as a weapon against the spread of Communism. Both novels were written during the late 1950s and using that era as context, I show the struggle against Cold War femininity in Go Set a Watchman and how the same criteria adds gender to the intersectionality with race and class in To Kill a Mockingbird.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ABSTRACT ...... iii CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION ...... 1

1.1.The Watchman Cometh ...... 7

II. THE COMMIE PINKO PENITENTIARY ...... 13

2.1 The Coffee: Delicate Feminist Sandwiches ...... 18

III. PINK SLIPS: DOWNSIZING THE PATRIARCHY ...... 28

IV. AN “OVERALLS” CONCLUSION...... 43

BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 49

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

Who was the “her” they were talking about? My heart sank: me.

I felt the starched walls of the pink cotton penitentiary closing in on me.

(Lee, Mockingbird 155)

Harper Lee’s debut novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, is a beloved American classic.

Published in 1960, it shot straight to the top of the bestseller list, garnered the Pulitzer

Prize for its author and sixty years later, remains in print and in classrooms across the country. In Scout, Atticus & Boo by Mary McDonagh Murphy, a fiftieth anniversary celebration of the book, celebrities, historians, and authors speak about what the book meant to them. Talk show host and producer Oprah Winfrey “wanted to be Scout” and she could “feel myself also experiencing or learning” about racism, “my eyes opening as her eyes were opening to it” (202). News anchor Tom Brokaw remembers reading the book in college and considers Harper Lee “in that pantheon, I think, of people who helped us get liberated from racism in this country” (63). Author James McBride does not see Lee as “very brave… Martin Luther King… Malcolm X… James Baldwin were brave. I believe by calling Harper Lee brave you kind of absolve yourself of your own

racism” (132). However, he calls To Kill a Mockingbird “a clear vision of what American was at the particular time, when people were filled with hope, ambiguity, love, compassion, anger, rage, everything” (135). To Kill a Mockingbird’s publication occurred in the middle of the Civil Rights Movement adding an urgent relevancy to a compelling, complex, wonderfully crafted story about a small Southern town.

However, for all of its emblematic status as a testament against racial inequality and injustice, To Kill a Mockingbird has only received “modest attention from the academic community” (Petry xv), belying its place of honor in literature. In 1994,

Claudia Durst Johnson published the first book length monograph about the novel, noting that the “critical assessment of To Kill a Mockingbird forms one of the most astonishing chapters in American literary history” (Threatening Boundaries, 20). In the thirty-three years since it had been published, “it has never been the focus of a dissertation” and the novel has been “the subject of only six literary studies, several of them nor more than a couple of pages long.” There were more critical readings by “two legal scholars in law journals than by all of the all the literary scholars in literary journals” (20). Alice Hall

Petry, in the introduction to her 2008 book of essays, On Harper Lee, speculates upon the reasons for the scarcity of critical writing. One is its status as “required reading in so many public schools,” which places the novel into the “young adult fare” category. The fact that it is the only book that Harper Lee wrote or its phenomenal success “among the general public” caused the academy to “shy away perhaps on the grounds that a novel... will become popular only if it appeals to a low common denominator.... hence not worthy of scholarly consideration” (xv-xvi). Just because the book was canonical did not necessarily mean it was appreciated by literary scholars.

To Kill a Mockingbird began showing up in the educational curriculum as early as three years after its publication, creating an audience for pedagogical analysis of the novel for classroom consumption. Edward Schuster, in a 1963 article, uses To Kill a

Mockingbird as a “popular” specimen for his subject, “Discovering Theme and

Structure.” He recounts how his students’ interpretations “stress the race prejudice issue to the exclusion of virtually everything else” (506), but he does not consider it one of the thematic motifs since it “tends to be concentrated in one section of the novel rather than...throughout the book” (508). He selects “Jem’s physiological and psychological growth” as the number one theme. The secondary thematic motif “is centered around what Miss Lee calls the ‘caste system’ in Maycomb” (507), a motif that is found in several places in the story, but mostly notably at “Aunt Alexandra’s ‘missionary circle’ and all their talk about J. Grimes Everett and the Mrunas” (507).

Critics broadened the scope of discussion on the all-female Missionary Circle scene by adding racism into the mix with the classist motif originally attributed to the gathering. In 1973, in “The Romantic Regionalism of Harper Lee,” Fred Erisman cites the female-centric Missionary Circle as an example of the caste system, as did Schuster, but adds racism into the mix, by noting that the “whites require deferential behavior from the blacks”(124). Noting “one of the good ladies” who interrupts their paean to Christian fellowship to remark that “there is nothing more distracting than a sulky darky” (124),

Erisman points out their religious hypocrisy but misses the opportunity to add gender distinctions to the form and function of their racism. Still, in 1973, feminist criticism was in its early days, and it would take nearly twenty years to more fully address the topic of gender in To Kill a Mockingbird.

By the 1990s, gender theory would gain a “much needed complexity of analysis” that included “race, class, nationality, and sexuality” (Rivkin and Ryan 93).

Intersectionality would “highlight the need for multiple grounds of identity when considering how the social world is constructed” (Crenshaw 1245) which encouraged the inclusion of gender into the race and class issues that To Kill a Mockingbird criticism had focused on. In Claudia Durst Johnson’s 1991 article “The Secret Courts of Men’s Hearts:

Code and Law in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird,” she expands the cultural view of the “community of Maycomb as a whole, with a hidden code as well as an open one and largely based on physical difference (gender, race and age) as well as class” (132).

Among the women of Maycomb, Scout is introduced to the “perniciousness of this society that arises from its system of dual, contradictory codes” (136) when the missionary ladies “abide by the customs of gentility” yet “cuttingly and cruelly censure

Atticus in his own house in the presence of his nine-year-old daughter and his sister”

(136-137). Three years later, Johnson’s Threatening Boundaries would visit sexual roles as a subtext to the Gothic tradition present in Mockingbird. Scout, being raised in the same manner as her brother, by a single father, “finds oppressive, exclusionary, and puzzling the general view of what a girl and a lady should be” (53). Johnson’s conclusion regarding sexual roles leads her back to a summary of the Missionary Circle: “Scout seems to have accepted the inevitability of being a ‘lady’... dictated not just by her sex, but particularly by her class, she prefers the male world” (56). Atticus and Jem are the two people whom young Scout loves the most and therefore emulates, not realizing that her desire to belong to their world does not make her an equal in that sphere.

Moreover, as critics of the novel began to analyze Scout’s tomboyish ways and how it changed her views on gender, they began to read Scout as a feminist character. In 1997,

Dean Shackelford, in “The Female Voice in To Kill a Mockingbird”, elaborates on what attracts Scout to the “male world’:

To Scout, Atticus and his world represent freedom and power…

More important, Lee demonstrates that Scout is gradually becoming a

feminist in the South… she seeks to become empowered… without

resorting to trivial and superficial concerns such as wearing a dress and

appearing genteel (8).

In the Missionary Circle, Scout is “ridiculed for frequently wearing pants” and mocked by the women who ask “if she wants to grow up to be a lawyer”. When she is no longer the topic of conversation, Shackelford concludes that Scout equates the ladies’ racism with their gentility and finds the “female role is too frivolous and unimportant...to identify with” (7). Labeling Scout as a feminist based on her aversion to conventional feminine clothing is dubious at best, yet addressing the Missionary Circle as a commentary on women’s roles is a step forward in the analysis of gender in the novel.

As the 21st century approached, critics using queer theory as analysis began to interpret Scout’s gender discontent as an indication that she was a lesbian. “In 1999, the

Publishing Triangle caused a stir when it included To Kill a Mockingbird as one of the one hundred best lesbian and gay novels” (Fine, “Structuring” 61). In 2007’s “Structuring the Narrator’s Rebellion in To Kill a Mockingbird”, Laura Fine asserts that “Lee provides a structure in which her protagonist/narrator may safely violate various kinds of societal boundaries, while finding space for her potentially illicit desires” (62). In a 1998 article,

“Gender Conflicts and Their ‘Dark’ Projections in Coming of Age White Female

Southern Novels”, Fine had positioned Tom Robinson as another double for Scout - “Lee may project Scout’s illicit desire onto Tom Robinson’s supposed desire for a white person” (Fine 128, note 2). Molly Blackford, author of 2011’s “Mockingbird and

Modern Women’s Regional Writing: Awakening, Passing and Passing Out” examines the Missionary Circle as the place where Scout begins to learn how to “pass” as a lady.

The narrator “reveals her intimate knowledge of ladies’ lipstick colors and nail polish”, while communicating “Scout’s fear and vague attraction to the ladies” when describing the women as smelling “heavenly” (287-288). Speculation about Lee’s own sexuality and her close friendship with Truman Capote--the inspiration for Dill--and his overt homosexuality only heighten the tendency to add queer theory to literary criticism of To

Kill a Mockingbird.

The sparse criticism for To Kill a Mockingbird begins with Scout as a secondary character and proceeds five decades later to her sexuality. Yet the one constant in the discussion are the women of the Missionary Circle and their interaction with each other and Scout’s impressions of them. Their classist and racist opinions are certainly a part of

Lee’s showcase against injustice, but it is also a stage for all that is feminine and fearful to Scout, who is used to the masculine environs of her brother and father. The Missionary

Circle brings Scout face-to-face with her impending feminine doom and the perpetrators of the crime.

The Watchman Cometh

Just as her admirers feared that Harper Lee would go to her grave without ever writing another novel, came the news of her “second” novel in February of 2015. Go Set a Watchman, at first touted to be a sequel to To Kill a Mockingbird, was in reality the first novel that Lee submitted to publishers in 1957. It was rejected twice and Lee began working on a second novel. According to Casey Cep in Furious Hours, Lee’s agent considered the second one better than the first and “sent that manuscript to Lippincott, too” who had already received Go Set a Watchman:

It [Watchman] featured what [her agent Maurice] Crain called in his cover

letter the “childhood stuff” of Scout Finch, which was “wonderfully

appealing” and he thought would make a better start than the one you

have.” Lippincott agreed, turning down Go Set a Watchman but

expressing interest in the new book (175).

Editor Tay Hohoff suggested edits, which Lee executed. She eventually ended up abandoning further work on Go Set a Watchman to incorporate Jean-Louise’s childhood memories into the second novel which became To Kill a Mockingbird. The manuscript for Go Set a Watchman was discovered in her sister’s law offices in 2011; the novel

Lee’s fans had waited for all of those years had been hiding in plain sight. Yet, for all of the excitement surrounding the 2015 publication of Go Set a Watchman and its pre-sale numbers, the novel was not reviewed well due to its uneven writing and plot, and was excoriated by Mockingbird fans for its portrayal of the now elderly Atticus as a racist.

If To Kill a Mockingbird suffered from a dearth of literary criticism due to its overwhelming popularity, it is not surprising that there has been even less for Go Set a

Watchman considering its lackluster writing. Like Lee’s blockbuster, most of the scholarly criticism for her “second” novel has come from law journals, with few exceptions. Two articles in 2018 on the Post 45 Yale website, discuss both novels. “The

Other Finch Family: Atticus, Calpurnia, Zeebo, and Black Women’s Agency in To Kill a

Mockingbird and Go Set a Watchman” offers “what may be a first in Harper Lee criticism — a reading focused on a black character” (Stow), Calpurnia, and the possibility that she and Atticus were lovers before, during, and after his marriage to Mrs.

Finch. The second article, “Parent to Mockingbird: Harper Lee and a Novel Deferred”, makes Go Set a Watchman the focus of its discussion on the comparison of the grown

Jean-Louise of Go Set a Watchman with the “white trash” young woman, Mayella Ewell of To Kill a Mockingbird, studying “the authoritarian dynamic that characterizes each woman’s relationship to the men in her family, including the overt violence she suffers and the racial animus demanded of her” (Watson). Both Stow and Watson use race and class in their discussion of Calpurnia and Mayella, but they overlook their intersectionality with gender. While it is hard to compare just five years of scholarly work on Go Set a Watchman, to the sixty-year scarcity of work available on To Kill a

Mockingbird, it appears that the criticism is still headed down the same black and white path.

In this thesis I will argue that the publication of Go Set a Watchman provides the opportunity to examine To Kill a Mockingbird based on the Cold War era it was written in. The anti-communist propaganda that influenced the 1950s promoted a treatise of femininity that touted the role of housewife and mother as a woman's patriotic duty. My reading of the novels as products of this era reveals their reflection of gender and its

politics in relation to the racial politics of the post-World War II United States. During the Cold War era, the paternalist attitudes that perpetuated racial liberalism also undercut any feminist gains that had been made during the Depression and World War II. In spite of four waves of feminism, paternalism has also skewed the trajectory of the scholarly work on To Kill a Mockingbird and more recently Go Set a Watchman, by making

Atticus the universal center of the discussion while treating his daughter and the women in the story as mere satellites in his orbit. One must study Lee’s main female character in the Cold War narrative of Go Set a Watchman to better understand the position of feminism and its intersectionality with race and class in To Kill a Mockingbird.

Due to its more recent publication date, it is easy to overlook the fact that Go Set a Watchman was written during the Cold War era in which it is set and told from an unconventional woman’s point of view, whose story is more about her struggle against fitting in than it is about her struggle with her father’s racism. Watchman is set in the

1950s, when femininity and family emerged as important weapons in the arsenal against communism, and when women were expected to “embrace domesticity in service to the nation in the same spirit they had come to the country’s aid by taking wartime jobs” (May

99). In Go Set a Watchman, Jean Louise is plagued by the pressure to marry, sharing this insight into the institution with her fiancé:

I learned it from watching sleek Madison Avenuey young marrieds - you

know that language, baby? It’s lots of fun - but the application’s

universal. It begins with the wives being bored to death because their men

are so tired from making money they don’t pay attention to ‘em. But

when their wives start hollering… the men just go find a sympathetic

shoulder to cry on. (48).

Jean Louise’s cynicism about marriage is very cosmopolitan, but Lee’s description is a fairly universal scenario during the 1950s.

In the later novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, however, Lee abandons “that language” of marriage and domesticity to present a child’s argument against the woman’s role in marriage. Scout, who becomes "engaged at six years old to her friend, Dill, offers this critique of a relationship: “He had asked me earlier in the summer to marry him, then he promptly forgot about it. He staked me out, marked as his property, said I was the only girl he would ever love, then neglected me” (46). Scout’s view on marriage in To Kill a

Mockingbird precludes the typical tomboy outcome of beloved literary characters such as

Jo March or Laura Ingalls, who in spite of their boyish qualities, grew up to marry and have families. Likewise, in Go Set a Watchman, Jean Louise’s angst about still being single at 27 even though she clearly enjoys her independence gives us the other side of the story: the tomboy who does not return to the feminine fold when she grows up.

One of the troublesome issues with Go Set a Watchman criticism is their comparison of

Atticus and other characters to those who also appear in To Kill a Mockingbird, making connections between their development that transcends the chronological authorship of the novels and creates a family tree that should only have one branch leading to Harper

Lee. For many years, Lee’s childhood as a tomboy, her friendship with “Dill” (aka

Truman Capote), and the Maycomb county courthouse that really exists in Lee’s hometown of Monroeville have all been a part of the To Kill a Mockingbird lore. The adult Jean Louise in Go Set a Watchman has childhood memories that evoke Scout but

contain several discrepancies with those shared by the adult Scout in To Kill a

Mockingbird. Conversely, this version of Jean Louise in Go Set a Watchman comes with several more autobiographical ties to Lee. Both had an older brother who died in his thirties. Both left home after college to live and work on her own in New York City. Both would return home five years later to help care for their father, who had developed arthritis and found that her old home had been replaced by an ice cream stand. (Cep,

171). Even though both main characters share the same name and nickname, for clarity I will use the name Jean Louise for the Go Set a Watchman character and the nickname

Scout for the To Kill a Mockingbird character.

In order to demonstrate the significance of the Cold War era and its demand for traditional gender roles in Lee’s portrayal of her female characters, I will use two strikingly complementary scenes, similar in their style and for their lack of male participants. In speaking of the critical history of To Kill a Mockingbird earlier, I mentioned the women-only Missionary Circle scene, which was first viewed as a microcosm of the community’s caste, race, and later, gender systems. This gathering of

Maycomb women met to discuss the missionary work of the church and “it was customary for every circle hostess to invite her neighbors in for refreshments” (Lee,

262). It is Scout’s opportunity to practice being a lady and Lee’s presentation on the hypocrisy of women. In Go Set a Watchman, the scene I will analyze is the Coffee, a small gathering of Jean Louise’s contemporaries who come to visit while she is home from New York City. By adding the lens of gender to the race and class politics in these scenes, I will show how Lee’s biting commentary on Cold War femininity in Go Set a

Watchman adds a new dimension to the “starched pink cotton penitentiary’ Scout

mentions in To Kill a Mockingbird, imbuing it with more meaning than merely the constriction of having to wear a dress while enjoying male pursuits.

CHAPTER II

THE COMMIE PINKO PENITENTIARY

It has been blamed on the education which made American girls grow up

feeling free and equal to boys - playing baseball, riding

bicycles, conquering geometry and college boards, going away to college,

living alone in an apartment in New York… testing and discovering their

own powers in the world. All this gave girls the feeling they could be and

do whatever they wanted with the same freedom as boys. It did not

prepare them for their role as women (Friedan 75).

“It” is the Feminine Mystique, a term coined in 1960 by Betty Friedan to describe the crisis of identity women were suffering by the end of the 1950s, as they had been herded into marriage and motherhood out of duty to their country. In postwar America, policymakers and popular culture “pointed to the traditional gender roles as the best means for Americans to achieve the happiness and security they desired” (May, 87). The

Feminine Mystique was published three years after To Kill a Mockingbird, but the research that Freidan conducted for her book occurred around the same time in which Lee was writing Go Set a Watchman. The women Friedan surveyed were college educated

like Lee, but the majority, like Freidan, had chosen marriage instead of a career upon graduation, whereas Lee did not.

Whereas Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird would spur conversations about racial injustice in America and serve as an inspiration for generations of young men and women to pursue law as their career and become active in the fight against racism, Friedan’s book would spark the beginning of America’s second wave of feminism. It would be the

2015 publication of Go Set a Watchman what would expand the public’s understanding of Lee’s social critique beyond the borders of racism in the south to include the Cold War gender oppression exposed in The Feminist Mystique. The all white female Coffee scene in Lee’s Go Set a Watchman is a re-enactment of all that containment entails and our opportunity to turn the critical focus on the gender issues played out in this novel. Before analyzing that scene in depth, I will briefly historicize gender roles during the era as critical to understanding Lee’s critique of Cold War femininity.

While racism is not the focal point of this chapter’s discussion, it is important to offer a glimpse of how race was conceived in Cold War propaganda because this serves as a parallel to similar propaganda regarding gender roles. As the state department was

“laboring to draw a stark contrast between American democracy and Soviet terror”, gain allegiance of “the newly independent nations of Asia and Africa,” and “claim leadership of the ‘free world’”, the American government was compelled to “ameliorate black discontent” and control the “image of race relations abroad” (Dowd Hall 1249). This

“Cold War racial liberalism” created the appearance of improvement in civil rights, but the federal government, other than through the judiciary, “took no effective action throughout the 1950’s” (1249). Any strides that African American men and women had

made in earning power, labor representation, and other freedoms during World War II were retracted in postwar America. Meanwhile, “the right wing red scare” helped to

“narrow the ground on which civil rights advocates could stand” (1249).

In the international arena, the Cold War attempted to contain both nuclear weapons and communism; while in the domestic field it used the nation’s fear to also contain liberal causes, and white upper and middle-class women in the femininity of traditional gender roles. Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era by

Elaine Tyler May provides a comprehensive view of containment that “describes the way in which public policy, personal behavior and even political values were forced on the home” (16) and made women both purveyors and prisoners of the system. The pressure of this oppression against women came to a head in 1963 with the publication of The

Feminist Mystique which gave women “a turning point from an immaturity that has been called femininity to full human identity” (Friedan, 80).

At its most artificial level, America touted its pride in its white female citizens based upon their appearance of femininity and sexual attractiveness, forcing the women who had donned slacks and coveralls to work in factories during the war, back into dresses and petticoats as housewives. American journalists who accompanied Vice

President Nixon to the Soviet Union in 1959, “viewed the appearance and situation of

Soviet women as anything but feminine” as “workers and political activists” who

“desexualized themselves” and displayed “few of the physical charms of the women in the West” (May, 21-22). The explanation for the difference between the women of the two countries was based on the fact that American women did not have to be “‘hard working’ thanks to the wonders of American household appliances” and the luxury of not

having to “busy themselves with the affairs of men, such as politics”. Therefore they had the time to spend on becoming “sexually attractive housewives and consumers under the

American capitalist system” (May, 22). Not that women had ever been relieved of treatment as sexual objects, but now they were supposed to be grateful for what that power granted them - a husband, children and a “career” as a housewife.

Meanwhile, Cold War policy also had an insidious side that used fear to insure compliance in the anti-Communism campaign that grew more real each day as post-war

Russia continued to take over weaker nations, China became a Communist country, and

Russia tested their first atomic bomb in 1949. When the North Korean Communists invaded South Korea in 1950, President Truman sent troops to prevent them from prevailing, risking American lives to keep communism from spreading any farther.

Nuclear war was a legitimate threat that could destroy America, but many also believed the country could be destroyed through “internal subversion”. To protect from the occurrence of either situation, “the nation had to be on moral alert” (May, 91) and that meant adhering to “widely accepted gender roles that defined men as breadwinners and women as mothers” because violating these rules would “cause sexual and familial chaos and weaken the country’s moral fiber” (112). Sex should be contained within the marriage and husbands must stay satisfied, lest they “who were slaves to their passions could be easily duped by seductive women working for the communists” (91). Even worse though, would be the “sexually frustrated mothers” who would turn their sons into

“potential homosexuals, ‘perverts’, or easy prey for communists” (111). Women, who were expected to follow their husband’s unquestioned authority, ended up bearing most of the responsibility for any failure within the family.

When Nixon said that American women did not have to work hard due to the marvelous American home appliances, he neglected to mention that appliances were actually intended to help housewives “achieve higher standards of cleanliness and efficiency, while allowing more time for child care” (May, 165) thereby adding even more pressure to the Herculean tasks they were expected to complete each day:

The 1950’s version of the “super woman” was the wife and mother who

could fulfill a wide range of occupational roles - early-childhood educator,

counselor, cook, nurse, housekeeper, manager and chauffeur - all within

the home. (May 176)

Add entertainment director, hostess and sexual goddess to the list and one begins to understand the frustration women like Friedan felt during the 1950’s, leading to the creation of her thesis in The Feminine Mystique: “our culture does not permit women to accept or gratify their basic need to grow and fulfill their potentialities as human beings, a need which is not solely defined by their sexual roles” (77). When Lee began to write Go

Set a Watchman in the mid-1950’s, she had already rejected marriage to gratify her

“basic need to grow” and in her specific case, to be a writer.

Lee, like Friedan, and many women of the Cold War era were college educated, but many colleges had refashioned “women’s education to fit domestic tasks”, geared their programs to “traditional women’s fields” (May, 81) and for many women, the goal was not graduation, but marriage. Friedan turned down a fellowship because “a boy said:

‘Nothing can come of this, between us. I’ll never win a fellowship like yours” and went on to marriage and a family (The Feminine Mystique, 68). Lee chose independence and a career, but it wasn’t an easy road; while her friends became successful and started

families, she was “living off peanut butter sandwiches” (Cep, 170). In Go Set a

Watchman, her main character, Jean Louise Finch considers taking “the easy way out… to marry Hank and let him labor for her” (Lee, 15), but is terrified of being unable to fulfill the role of the 1950’s super woman: “I am not domestic. I don’t even know how to run a cook. What do ladies say to each other when they go visiting? I’d have to wear a hat. I’d drop the babies and kill ‘em” (80). Whether or not a woman chose to conform to the cult of femininity during the Cold War, her choices still left her fairly powerless within the patriarchal society of the 1950s.

The Coffee: Delicate Sandwiches of Feminism

Go Set a Watchman is the story of Jean Louise Finch’s visit to her family and fiancé in her small southern hometown where she is expecting two weeks of relaxation but instead discovers her father’s racist leanings, is pressured by her fiancé to get married, and is coerced into her aunt’s plans to subject her to a female social gathering, which she finds “infinitely horrifyin’” (Lee 33):

Coffees were peculiarly Maycombian in nature. They were given for girls

who came home. Such girls were placed on view at 10:30am for the

express purpose of allowing the women of their age who had remained

enisled in Maycomb to examine them (32).

Jean Louise had lost touch with “nearly everyone she grew up with” and found her aunt’s guest list “preposterous”, yet, out of guilty gratitude for her aunt’s continued care of her aging father, she attends the Coffee.

Lee’s description of the Coffee implies that it will be an expository event in the novel where the reader sees Jean Louise through the eyes of Maycomb’s females when in

reality Lee exposes the women’s embodiment of the 1950’s traditional gender roles through Jean Louise’s satirical commentary and their ensuing conversations. Jean Louise greets them “one by one” as they enter, noting their attire and presentation: “They wore gloves and hats, and smelled to high heaven of attars, perfumes, eaus and bath powders. Their makeup would have put an Egyptian draftsman to shame” and their shoes and dresses came from big city stores (168). Their outward devotion to femininity and fashion consumerism makes them not only the perfect foils for Lee’s main character, but provide stock representations of the quintessential woman of Cold War America.

Lee then breaks down the women into sub-categories, based on their current place in the life cycle of a woman and her interpretation of their lives. The Newlyweds come first, chattering “smugly of their Bobs and Michaels” (19). They were smug because they had been victorious in their hunt for husbands. Most guidelines considered twenty-one as a “healthy age for marriage… moreover, it was the woman’s responsibility to achieve it”

(May 98). A woman’s guidebook offered “a rational, scientific formula: ‘a girl who reaches the middle twenties without a proposal...should try to discover why marriage hasn’t come her way and perhaps take steps to make herself more interesting and attractive’” (98). Lee’s representation of the Newlyweds reveals how young women were taught to “devote their lives from earliest girlhood to finding a husband”, or to “catch a man” (Friedan, 2) as if it were competitive sport – the only one women were allowed to participate in during the 1950s.

However, being married was not the acme of achievement for women, they must also bear children; it was their duty to their country and also their manifest destiny. In the postwar United States, motherhood was “the ultimate fulfillment of female sexuality and

the primary source of a woman’s identity” (May, 135). These women, in the early mothering stages of babies and toddlers, Jean Louise dubbed “the Diaper Set, which distressed her beyond measure” (Watchman, 19). Lee, who would never have children, shares the young mothers’ conversation montage about the trials and tribulations of toilet training and thumb-sucking, activities that seem banal subjects until you view them through the psychological responsibilities of motherhood in the Cold War era. Freudian psychology had become the prevalent school of thought during the 1950s and 1960s, and in psychoanalysis, mothers were suddenly “blamed for everything” (Friedan, 220). Based on Freud’s childhood stages, such as oral and anal, issues with thumb-sucking and toilet training, along with excessive mothering could lead to the feminization of sons.

Paradoxically, it was not mothers with careers who emulated male behavior that harmed their boys, it was the “very paradigm of the feminine mystique… a woman … who attaches her son to her with such dependence he can never mature” (Friedan 328). The conflicting message would bring much stress and fear upon these mothers during their child rearing years and in all aspects of their lives as the feminine mystique “derived its power from Freudian thought” and his “theory of femininity” (110-111).

Then, after the children went to school, the housewives and mothers began to search for other activities to fill their time and emptiness during the hours the children were gone from the home. These women, whom Lee dubbed “the Light Brigade” (Lee,

169) were in their early to mid-thirties and “devoted most of their free time to the

Amanuensis Club, bridge and getting one-up on each other in the matter of electrical appliances” (169). The competition that had existed between women in the marriage market, now redirected its energies into a game of one-upmanship fueled by the rampant

consumerism and female buying power that characterized Cold War America. Women had “seventy-five percent of the purchasing power in America” which gave them a

“sense of identity, purpose, creativity, the self-realization, even the sexual joy” they lacked, but gained “by buying things” (Friedan, 245). Referring back to the 1959

“Kitchen Debate” between Vice President Nixon and Soviet premier Khrushchev, Nixon argued that “domestic consumer goods were the most meaningful measure of American superiority over the Soviet Union” (May, 156), thereby turning the hand that rocked the cradle into the hand that drove the capitalist economy. Their spending allowed them to “reap rewards for domesticity by surrounding themselves with commodities” that would “ease their burdens” (157) as housewives, but still did not fill the emptiness that would find its name in the publication of The Feminine Mystique, four years later.

Yet, not all of the women in the group are married or mothers, there are three single independent women, like Jean Louise, but Lee chooses to set them apart from her main character, naming them “the three Perennial Hopefuls”:

They were the jolly Maycomb girls of excellent character who had never

made the grade. They were patronized by their married contemporaries,

they were vaguely felt sorry for, and were produced to date any stray

man who happened to be visiting their friends” (Watchman, 169).

The significance of the adjective describing these women - “jolly” - one that denotes an emphasis on inner attractiveness, such as a sense of humor or intelligence over the outer signifiers of beauty and thinness. One imagines that if Jean Louise had chosen to stay in

Maycomb, single and with a career, she would have qualified as a member of this group, but due to a past snub from one of the girls, she shows no affiliation to the women,

commenting about the offending one- “Now we are both lonely, for entirely different reasons, but it feels the same doesn’t it?” (169). Lee treats these characters as if they had no choice but to remain single and to remain in Maycomb and that somehow makes them inferior to the cosmopolitan New Yorker Jean Louise, whose single state and career were of her choosing. Lee indicates, however, that Jean Louise is fearful of feeling inferior because these women seem to have made peace with their lives and she is still struggling trying to decide whether or not to marry Hank.

One of the tools Lee uses to define the groups of women is through soundbites of different conversations happening in the living room that result in a richly condensed montage of humor and exposition. The Diaper Set begins with, “When Jerry was two months old he looked up at me and said... toilet training should really begin when… he was christened he grabbed Mr. Stone by the hair and Mr. Stone… wets the bed now.”

(168-169). This clever paragraph results in the essence of what the young mothers’ lives look like. Lee’s humor is relaxed and smooth as the drawl in her Southern idioms, but has a bite to it, unveiling the sometimes unpleasant truths that lie beneath the dialogue’s honeyed tones, which is what makes her commentary of social issues so indelible. There is a paragraph for the Light Brigade : “poor thing, if I were in her place I’d take… shock treatments, that’s what she had” (169), and one for the Perennial Hopefuls: “times I’ve told Mr. Fred I like my tomatoes… boiling hot” (170). As the different women begin to mingle, Lee edits in more soundbites, for a montage featuring all of the groups together.

Lee’s narration offers a metaphor for this montage of conversation soundbites, likening it to the “running down the keys of a giant harpsichord” (171) as Jean Louise begins to serve the refreshments and it is here the women’s words begin to reveal some of

the anxiety they experience in their lives along with the racist and classist dissonance they perpetuate. The conversations include mention of Mr. Healy, an inebriated white man who is killed by a car driven by an inebriated African American, the possibility of some woman getting a divorce and “everybody in our class except that horrid girl from

Old Sarum” (171), the poor part of Maycomb. Then it goes “back up the scale”:

That’s the one Yankee thing he picked up in the… War of the Roses?...

That was all I could do after she got through… the rye. I just couldn’t help

it, it made me feel like a big… A-men! I’ll be so glad when that’s over…

the way he’s treated her... piles, and piles of diapers, and he said why was

I so tired? After all, he’d been… in the files the whole time, that’s where

it was” (171)

The traditional Southern prejudices surface in the conversations as does the resentment toward their own lives. The comment, “why was I so tired?” was evidence of a traditional male misconception that believed that the job of housewife and mother was much easier than going to work each day.

Yet, the topic of marital discontent does not filter, at least explicitly, into the conversation they have with Jean Louise because part of being a woman in the 1950’s was accepting the limitations of their life as a blessing and that meant presenting a happy front, especially in front of single women who must be presumably so unhappy without a husband and children to fulfill them. Moreover, they have nothing in common with Jean

Louise for the same reason. Lee chose to engage the women in the conversation of a familiar interest around the topic of the death of Mr. Healy. Hester Sinclair, a member of the Light Brigade asks Jean Louise, “Didn’t that boy have something to do with you

all?”(172). The African American man driving the car was the grandson of the Finch’s housekeeper and Jean Louise’s surrogate mother, Calpurnia and Jean Louise confirms this information. The ensuing conversation about the punishment for “that boy” and

Hester’s hope for “a good trial…a good nigger trial, I mean” (172) opens the door for Lee to reinforce her main character’s disgust with the racism she finds still exists in her hometown.

Even so, this is not the racism of Jean Louise or Hester’s childhood, it is the racism of a new generation, one that went to war overseas to defend democracy and came home facing the threat of nuclear annihilation. The older generation represented by Aunt

Alexandra saw African Americans as lacking in morals, as she shares her views on race with the younger women – “that’s just the way they are and they can’t help it. Calpurnia

[the Finch’s retired African American housekeeper] was the best of the lot. That Zeebo of hers… Calpurnia made him marry every one of his women… that’s Christianity to them” (173). However, the women of the 1950s view African American practice of

Christianity as a façade of morality, “the oldest trick known to mankind” (174) used by

African Americans to enhance their public image during their battle for civil rights.

Heather’s expression of this opinion leaves Jean Louise to wonder “where Hester had picked up her information. She could not conceive of Hester Sinclair’s having read anything other than Good Housekeeping save under duress. Someone had told her.

Who?” (174). The answer lies within the Cold War era traditional gender dynamics.

Like a dutiful wife, Hester is voicing the political convictions of her husband -“I was just sayin’ what my Bill says. Bill, he’s a deep reader” (174) she explains. Bill is a World

War II vet who has seen the world, and it is Bill’s belief that the African Americans

running the “thing up north are tryin’ to do it like Gandhi did… communism”

(174). Hester informs Jean Louise that the Communists are “just like the Catholics” who go down to African countries and “practically go native themselves to get converts” and it is the same way with the Communists who will “do anything no matter what it is to get a hold of this country”. They are everywhere - “ there’s a cell right up the road in

Tuscaloosa” (175) and in response to Jean Louise’s disagreement with her husband’s theories, Hester comments that “anybody who thinks different’s either a Communist or might as well be one” (176). Even though McCarthyism had ended by the late 1950’s, the basic paranoid sentiments of the movement also mimicked those of organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan and southern Citizen’s Councils like the one attended by

Atticus and Hank earlier in the story.

Lee, by presenting the reasoning of Cold war propaganda through the voice of a woman who only repeats her husband’s political ideas because a woman’s political job is to “inspire in her home a vision of the meaning of life and freedom” (Friedan, 57), holds up for scrutiny their acquiescence to the “protection” of the white male patriarchy and their acrimonious relationship with women who chose a career and single life instead.

Hester, by parroting her husband’s theories, reveals her ignorance by accepting his word rather than developing opinions of her own, but those theories contain the same ignorance and prejudice assailing the women who do not choose the housewife/mother career path. Women who are single by choice are unpatriotic because they are not willing to do their duty by accepting traditional gender roles. Hester’s dialogue implies that Jean

Louise thinks differently therefore she might as well be a Communist, an enemy to the

American way of life. And she lives in New York - in the North - whereas Claudine

McDowell tells her “they have no manners” after Jean Louise mentions that when

“someone pushed her on a bus” (180) she pushed back. Jean Louise has almost become one of the outside agitators, making her somehow lesser than or even a threat to the other women in the room.

Consequently, it is that feeling of being lesser than and lonely that constitutes the pressure Jean Louise has been putting on herself to succumb to marriage and conform to the Cold War standards of femininity since her return to her hometown. She may have mastered the world outside of Maycomb that frightens the other women, but Jean Louise is equally terrified of the world that lies within the town, the world populated by these women and their husbands and children. Their racist views that Lee painstakingly points out are repugnant to her, but those feelings are exacerbated by her discovery of her father at a Citizen’s Council meeting. Jean Louise may be as smug about her intelligence and independence as the Newlyweds are about their new husbands, but feels completely deficient in their company. “They talk incessantly about the things they do, and I don’t know how to do the things they do” (173) and that makes her feel incredibly inadequate. She may be a smart, savvy New Yorker, but she “couldn’t bring off one of these affairs by myself” or change diapers or toilet train a child or the hundreds of other things housewives and mothers do daily. Although Lee did not lose her mother at two like her main character, she was also the youngest child in the family and did not grow up doing housework or helping to care for younger children just like her main character.

Lee concludes the Coffee with a paragraph that switches the narrative back to first person, allowing Jean Louise to despair about the ways in which her father lied to her:

This is what a man says but this is what he means, to draw a line down the

middle and say here is this justice and there is that justice and make me

understand the difference. I need a watchman to go forth and proclaim to

them all that twenty-six years is too long to play a joke on anybody, no

matter how funny it is (182).

Taking into consideration the previous revelations about Atticus and the women she grew up with, the paragraph summarizes Jean Louise’s rage against the racist machine but reading it in the context of Cold War oppression of women, the “joke” played upon her and by association, her author, was that even though their fathers indulged their tomboyish behavior and independence well into adulthood, society still demanded their conformity to traditional gender roles. “Hell is eternal apartness” (225) is how Lee describes the loneliness of being different. What she does not understand is that the paternalistic view of race instilled in her by her father also included a paternalistic view of gender that, for all of the pride she takes in her independence, consequently keeps her under the thumb of the white male patriarchy that raised her to believe that she was one of their own.

CHAPTER III

PINK SLIPS: DOWNSIZING THE PATRIARCHY

Although the nation may value strength, independence and assertiveness

in young girls, it does not esteem such qualities in adult women (Abate

xix)

Harper Lee strove to make these qualities acceptable in Jean Louise Finch, her main character in Go Set a Watchman but hindered her story with a strident tone and uneven storyline whereas in To Kill a Mockingbird, her main character Scout Finch was not only proficient in these areas, she was able to discover these qualities hidden beneath the feminine layers of the adult women in her life. It is Go Set a Watchman, Lee’s foray into the exploration of the Cold War era gender role choices of her main character Jean

Louise that grants us added insight into the gender roles in To Kill a Mockingbird.

Although set during the 1930s Great Depression, To Kill a Mockingbird was also written by Lee during the late 1950s and Scout, the main character is young tomboy rather than grown independent woman.

Lee never uses the word “tomboy” in To Kill a Mockingbird, but there is no doubt in the mind of the reader that her narrator, Scout Finch, is one. Michelle Ann Abate, the author of Tomboys: A Literary and Cultural History writes:

The traits most Americans are likely to name as constitutive of this code

of conduct include a proclivity for outdoor play (especially athletics), a

feisty independent spirit and a tendency to don masculine clothing and

adopt a boyish nickname (xvi)

Scout fits this description perfectly. Her mother died when she was two, and these characteristics grew from the emulation of and the encouragement from the two people she loved most, her widowed father and older brother. Atticus accepts Scout’s tomboyish ways because his only childhood and subsequent parenting experience was of the male variety and it was just easier to treat Jem and Scout in the same way, even going as far as getting them both air rifles for Christmas.

Tomboys have been a cultural staple for centuries and during the1930’s, their literary popularity soared in stories like Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House series which recalled tough times from the past and “offered important life lessons for adolescent girls growing up amidst the trials of the Great Depression” (Abate 143). These lessons included participating in work once consigned to the male gender. Indeed, the “shared breadwinning and equality of the sexes” (May 40) that could have grown out of the

Depression’s shifting of gender roles and the entry of more women into the job market to keep their families financially solvent never came to fruition due to New Deal policies that blatantly “discriminated against African Americans, white women, southerners and rural laborers” (41) to prevent them from taking jobs away from white men. Oddly

enough, for many of the adult women of the 1950s who came of age during the 1930s and who participated in Glen Elder, Jr’s study, Children of the Great Depression, revealed that “the more role reversal their parents had experienced, the more likely the daughters were to aspire to normative roles with traditional power relationships in the families they established themselves” (qtd in May, 53). This nostalgia for the American Dream would only intensify during World War II.

Tomboyism in real life, reached a national highpoint during World War II as women flocked to factories to contribute to the war effort but now their employment was seen favorably because they were no longer taking jobs away from men but doing the jobs that needed to be done while the men were away. Still, as women began to succeed in masculine jobs, an effort was made to insure they maintained their femininity. As early as 1942, “many factories required women to wear not only safety goggles on the job, but lipstick as well” as the “federal government and private industry soon agreed” that tomboyism should be “culturally contained,” “a word that would come to have profound significance during the Cold War era” (149). Yet, in spite of the effort to quell tomboyism and potential lesbianism, by the “late 1950s and the decade of the 1960s” there was a significant rise in the “release of… tomboy-themed novels and films”, such as “Carolyn Keene’s Nancy Drew mystery series… Debbie Reynolds in Tammy and the

Bachelor… Sandra Dee in Gidget”; however, these “mainstream presentations of it reverted to more conservative traits” (167) in keeping with Cold War standards of femininity.

Even before the Cold War demanded traditional gender roles within the American family unit, tomboys all throughout American literature have been made to outgrow these

tendencies around the time they hit puberty. According to Abate, “the most compelling reason for young women to abandon tomboyish behavior” is “pressure to get married and become a mother” (xix). Both Jo March of Little Women and Laura Ingalls of the Little

House series chafe at the bindings of femininity, but both stories “capitulate” to the requirements of society and both characters are ultimately married. However, in To Kill a

Mockingbird, Lee only shows the reader Scout from age six to nine years old, leaving us in the dark as to whether or not she too will capitulate to traditional gender roles when she grows up. Even when Lee switches narration duties to the adult Scout, we receive no information about her current life. In Go Set a Watchman, after much agonizing by Jean

Louise, Lee still does not allow her main character to capitulate even with all the Cold War era pressure, inspired by the post Depression, post World War II nostalgia, and “achieve the happiness and security” through the return of traditional gender roles.

Considering the autobiographical connection to her portrayal of Scout, the reader could assume that the adult Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird, as her author did, remained single, however, the same assumption could be drawn based on the fact that Scout did not have the presence of a traditional married couple in her life to exemplify the relationship.

Atticus, her father, was a widower. Calpurnia had grown children but there is never any mention of a husband or boyfriend in her life. Her Aunt Alexandra ignored her husband and her Uncle Jack never married. Miss Maudie, who lived across the street, was a widow, and quite likely was having a sexual relationship with Atticus. These adults seem perfectly content outside of the bounds of a heteronormative relationship, yet Scout readily accepts a marriage proposal from her friend, Dill and when he says “let’s get us a baby”, her only reaction is “Where?” (162). Even though she fears “the starched walls of a pink cotton

penitentiary closing in on her” (155) and the end of her tomboy ways, the young Scout seems to be resigned to marriage and motherhood as her inevitable destiny, which the narrator, adult Scout neither denies nor confirms.

Moreover, the paternalism exhibited by Lee’s male characters is not strictly based on race, it is also based on gender, and Scout, a child of her and her author’s environment, displays the same bias throughout the story:

“Grandma’s a wonderful cook,” said Francis. “She’s gonna teach me

how.”

“Boys don’t cook.” I giggled at the thought of Jem in an apron.

“Grandma says all men should learn how to cook, that men oughta be

careful with their wifes and wait on’ em when they don’t feel good,” said

my cousin.

“I don’t want Dill waitin’ on me,” I said. “I’d rather wait on him” (93-94)

The idea that it is all right for girl children to behave like boys before puberty, but it is wrong for boy children to pursue female activities at any age also falls in line with the

Cold War propaganda promoting traditional gender roles and Abate’s theory that the tomboy/sissy dyad does not defy the boundaries of sexuality, but often reinforces “the ones between masculinity and femininity” (xvii). Yet, this dialogue can also be interpreted as a subversive statement as it suggests that men should also learn domestic skills and how to be a caregiver because if you changed the family dynamic, women might be able to pursue a career of their outside of their home.

In To Kill a Mockingbird, the patriarchy did not just rule the roost at home, it also reared its domineering head in the justice system where, to Scout’s horror, ladies are not

allowed to sit on juries (this was not changed in Alabama until 1966). When asked why,

Miss Maudie, their beloved neighbor, could not have served on a jury, Atticus replies, “I guess it’s to protect the frail ladies from sordid case’s like Tom’s… besides, I doubt we’d ever get a complete case tried - the ladies’d be interrupting to ask questions”(252).

Contemplating this answer, Scout thinks to herself, “perhaps our forefathers were wise”

(253). Being a tomboy gave Scout and perhaps Lee, a false sense of security that they too had privileges in the patriarchy that entitled them to all of the perks of the exclusive club. The rules of femininity only applied to them in the future, when they would eventually succumb to the institutions of marriage and motherhood, but even then they believed that they would still belong to the patriarchy as an equal rather than the oppressed.

As in the Coffee scene in Go Set a Watchman, the Missionary Circle chapter in To

Kill a Mockingbird is Lee’s only female-centric event in the novel but it speaks of women in groups that are based on their religion, rather than their life gender role choices. The church women of Maycomb, “be they Baptists or Presbyterians” (262), met to receive reports on Missionary work being done abroad, then enjoyed refreshments and each other’s company for the rest of the afternoon. Scout, having been abandoned by

Jem and Dill, “divided the lonely hours between Calpurnia and Miss Maudie”, and ends up in her “pink Sunday dress, shoes and petticoat” (260-261) to spend time with Aunt

Alexandra’s lady friends at their gathering. Her aunt told her to join them for refreshments, as the business part of the meeting would “bore” her, but she overhears

Mrs. Merriweather’s report from the kitchen where she is staying with Calpurnia. In this

chapter, we see that it is Calpurnia to whom Scout turns for motherly advice, as Scout’s own mother has died.

The loss of a mother, according to Abate, is often “seen as the cause or impetus for tomboyism in many narratives” (xix), which is true in Scout’s case, but Lee supplies her with a mother figure in the form of the Finch’s African American housekeeper,

Calpurnia, whom her father considers to be a “faithful member of this family” (155).1

Atticus tells his sister Alexandra that Calpurnia has who has been harder his children “in some ways than a mother would have been” but she has “never indulged them the way most colored nurses do” (155). Lee, who perpetuates racial and gender paternalism throughout To Kill a Mockingbird, marks the maternal significance of Calpurnia with a nod to Scout’s “mother’s heavy silver pitcher” (261) that Scout asks to carry into the living room. “This coffee pitcher’s a curiosity” Calpurnia says, “they don’t make ‘em these days” (261), attributing a fondness for the late Mrs. Finch to the housekeeper that may very well not exist. Scout is eager to help and learn from Calpurnia, whose “ease and grace” to handle “heavy loads of dainty things” (260) she admires. However, Calpurnia’s lessons stop at the kitchen door because the intersectionality of her race with her gender prohibits her from entering the living room as anything more than a servant and definitely not as the mother figure to a white girl. Scout’s education on how to be a lady is left to the white women in the living room.

1 Alice Childress’ debunks this myth about any familial relationship between African American women domestic servants and their white employers in her book, Like One of the Family. “The family eats in the dining room and I eat in the kitchen… and when you say, ‘We don’t know what we’d do without her’ this is a polite lie… because I know that if I dropped dead or had a stroke, you would get someone to replace me” (2-3)

In Go Set a Watchman, there are no close non-familial female relationships, but in To Kill a Mockingbird, there is Miss Maudie, a widow who lives across the street and a beacon of hope to Scout who knows she has to embrace femininity eventually, but does not want to give up her overalls and male-oriented pursuits to do so. Lee describes Miss

Maudie as “a chameleon lady who worked in her flower beds in an old straw hat and men’s overalls, but after her five o’clock bath she would appear on the porch and reign over the street in magisterial beauty” (47). Miss Maudie “had an acid tongue in her head” but she was one of the women Scout turned to when she decided to “keep aloof from” Jem and Dill “on the pain of being called a g-irl” (46). Most importantly, Maudie talked to Scout like she was an adult, a trait that Scout prized in her father, unlike Mrs.

Merriweather who was “one of those childless adults who find it necessary to assume a different tone of voice when speaking to children” (264). Miss Maudie was well-versed in both the world of men and the world of women offering a middle ground for Scout in a place where she feels outnumbered.

During the 1950s, women with careers would don “hats and frilly blouses” that said “let nobody question our femininity” (Friedan, 182) in an attempt to seem less suspect. But being a feminist does not mean that you cannot enjoy feminine clothing and

Lee makes this point in her earlier description of Miss Maudie and Scout’s description of the ladies’ attire:

The ladies were cool in fragile pastels prints: most of them were heavily

powdered but unrouged; the only lipstick was Tangee Natural. Cutex

Natural sparkled on their fingernails, but some of the younger ladies wore

Rose. They smelled heavenly. (262).

Scout’s appreciation of the women’s finery and their smell indicates that when the time comes, she will not be completely opposed to adopting a more feminine form of dress. Still, Lee implies that Scout will always be a tomboy on the inside. Miss Maudie comments “You are mighty dressed up, Miss Jean Louise. Where are your britches?”. “Under my dress” Scout replies. Her “cheeks grew hot” as she “realized her mistake” and the ladies laughed. But Miss Maudie “looked gravely down at me” (262) letting Scout know the importance of keeping up appearances but staying true to yourself beneath the facade.

The women attending the Coffee in Go Set a Watchman were caricatured by Lee as a commentary on 1950s femininity; however, in To Kill a Mockingbird, Lee only singles out one woman, Miss Stephanie, to represent a stereotype, the one of the spinster; a seemingly innocuous woman who is single because she is unattractive – “fat in the middle with itty bitty arms” (Mockingbird, 75) and bitter because she is unmarried. If

Miss Maudie is the reflection of the woman Scout aspires to be, Miss Stephanie is the precautionary tale of what happens to unmarried women. Scout’s gaffe about her britches presents an opportunity for Miss Stephanie to prey on someone weaker than herself to enhance her popularity and her self-esteem. She asks “Whatcha gonna be when you grow up, Jean Louise? A lawyer?” (262). Scout answers, “Nome, just a lady” and Miss

Stephanie snidely points out “well, you won’t get very far until you start wearing dresses more often” (263). Miss Stephanie stakes out her place in the realm of women as “that

English Channel of Gossip” (11) and often becomes Lee’s instrument of exposition throughout the novel and also a source of amusement. When Miss Stephanie told Miss

Maudie she had discovered Boo Radley “looking in the window at her”, Miss Maudie

retorted “what did you do, Stephanie, move in the bed and make room for him?” (51), adding to another facet of the spinster trope, sexual frustration.

While the Missionary Circle chapter speaks to the Cold War era requirements for traditional gender roles that stress the need for femininity in women, it also addresses the attendant rise of religion during this period in an effort to fight the “godless communists”

(May, 29). By the end of the 1950’s, “religious affiliation became associated with ‘the

American Way’ of life”, the nearly 60% membership in churches “replacing, to some extent, the communal life previously supplied by kin or neighborhood” with “recreation, youth programs and social events” (29). Accordingly, it was the wives and mothers who were expected to keep their families involved in these activities. Mrs. Merriweather, the

“most devout lady in Maycomb” and the leader of the Missionary Society may have

“sobered up” her husband “and made a reasonably useful citizen of him”, but she also sought power outside of the home and found it within the church. She does not engage in discussion with the group of ladies, she proselytizes to them. To Scout - “you are fortunate girl” living in “a Christian home with Christian folks in a Christian town”. To the group, when one of them whispers in her ear about Tom Robinson’s wife who is on her own now that he is in prison, Mrs. Merriweather proclaims “Thing that church ought to do is help her lead a Christian life for those children here on out” (Mockingbird,

264). Mrs. Merriweather’s Christianity extends to only to words of charity, not to actions towards those lower in the social strata based on race and class.

The criticism of Lee’s work are focused on race and class, but in To Kill a

Mockingbird, the scope of the discussion needs to be widened to include the intersectionality of those two theories with feminism which “recognizes the non-

singularity and necessary relatedness” (Rivken and Ryan, 1595) between women, race, class and sexuality. Mrs. Merriweather’s suggestion that “some of the men ought to go out there” and tell Helen Robinson’s preacher to encourage her” to “lead a Christian life”

(264) intimates that the “First Purchase African M.E. Church” – so named because it was

“paid for from the earnings of freed slaves” (134) – in the African American Quarters is not as Christian as the “Maycomb Alabama Methodist Episcopal Church South” (263).

However, Christianity is in action as the preacher at the African American church, which has its own Missionary Society, had already raised money for the family earlier in the novel. Scout, who attended church with Calpurnia that same day because Atticus was out of town on a Sunday, noticed that the preacher spoke the same “Impurity of Women doctrine that seemed to preoccupy all clergymen” (138), but other than this moment, Lee does not comment on the shared gender oppression of African American and white women.

Meanwhile, Lee briefly touches on the intersectionality of gender and class when

Scout asks Mrs. Merriweather “are you all talking about Mayella Ewell?” (264) while they are talking about bringing Christianity to the aid of Helen Robinson. Mayella Ewell, the accuser of Tom Robinson, belongs to a family that has “been the disgrace of

Maycomb for three generations” who were “people, but they lived like animals” (33).

Once Tom was found guilty, Mayella’s role as a white lady who was raped by an African

American man is over, she once again becomes invisible to the upper class ladies of the community, her class overriding the commonality of her gender. Also, the entire white community who seem to ignore the clear indication in her testimony that the true assailant had been her own father do nothing to protect her because her gender and class

does not merit their concern. During the trial, Scout comments that Mayella “must have been the loneliest person in the world” (218), because she, like Scout, was also an outcast from her own gender.

Nonetheless, Lee’s Missionary Society does lay out a simple hierarchy for the women in the novel within their own economic and ethnic groups that hints at the power women were able to wield beneath the radar of the patriarchy, a power similar to how the white housewives and mothers were the driving force behind consumerism in the

1950s. Mrs. Merriweather was given a “trip to the camp grounds” (263) from the male- led church to hear J. Grimes Everett speak about his time among the Mrunas, where in a very paternalistic manner, he tried to save them from “sin and squalor” (264). Mrs.

Merriweather uses the information fed to her from the patriarchy to exercise her own authority over the women in the Missionary Society. Similarly, Scout recalls a conversation she overheard between Calpurnia and Miss Rachel’s cook who had questions about Tom Robinson’s imprisonment. Calpurnia tells the other woman - “You ain’t familiar with the law. First thing you learn when you’re in a lawin’ family is that there ain’t any definite answers to anything” (267). Miss Rachel is an older woman who lives alone and cares for Dill when he comes to spend the summers in Maycomb.

Calpurnia works in a home where a man is in charge and he is an influential man in the community. Just like Mrs. Merriweather, her proximity to a person who is powerful within the patriarchy lends her an air of authority.

As much these women use the strength of their connections to the patriarchy to elevate themselves within their communities, it is Scout’s tomboyism that grants her rights to a place of authority within the patriarchy without granting any man authority

over her. Scout accepts that she must “soon enter this world, where on its surface, fragrant ladies rocked slowly, fanned gently and drank cool water”, but she still prefers her “father’s world” (266):

People like Mr. Heck Tate did not trap you with innocent questions to

make fun of you; even Jem was not highly critical unless you said

something stupid. Ladies seemed to live in faint horror of men, seemed

unwilling to approve wholeheartedly of them. But I liked them. There

was something about them, no matter how much they cussed and drank

and gambled and chewed; no matter how undelectable they were, there

was something about them that I instinctively liked… they weren’t --

“Hypocrites, Mrs. Perkins, born hypocrites,” Mrs. Merriweather was

saying. (266-267)

Heck Tate would have never asked Scout if she wanted to be a lawyer when she grew up like Miss Stephanie had. Jem, whom she loved dearly, had actually berated her for “being a girl, that girls always imagined things, that’s why other people hate them so” (45) which may have also added to her dislike for her own gender. The ladies who did not approve of men were those like her Aunt Alexandra who did not acknowledge the presence of her husband or Mrs. Merriweather who made her husband quit drinking. Both

Scout and Lee loved to cuss, and Lee as an adult was a drinker, and even as though undelectable as those other male habits were, they still preferred the company of men to women because they didn’t speak one way and behave in another.

Lee’s use of a dialogue montage that incorporates Mrs. Merriweather’s speaking into her own thoughts is a skillful technique to define the word “hypocrite” that finishes

Scout’s narrative and begins the older woman’s dialogue, implying that men are more honest and forthright than women. Lee may also be referencing an earlier interaction where Mrs. Merriweather was not so delicately criticizing Atticus’ defense of Tom and

Miss Maudie asked “His food doesn’t stick going down, does it?”(266), chastising the woman for disrespecting the man in whose home she was enjoying refreshments and in the presence of his sister and young daughter. Scout was not paying attention and did not understand the source of Miss Maudie’s retort but knew she was angry - “her brevity was icy… and her gray eyes were as cold as her voice” (266). The lack of histrionics that mirrored her father’s self-control and offered a female alternative to her male reaction to physically fight anyone who disrespected her, were but one of the reasons for her admiration of the older woman.

It is here that Lee interjects Atticus back into the story, replacing the ladies’ socially acceptable displays of racism with the stark realism of Tom Robinson’s death in prison which shocks Miss Maudie, Aunt Alexandra and Scout and slightly alters the paternalistic attitude she had toward women. Atticus takes Calpurnia with him to break the news to Tom’s wife, Helen, leaving Scout in the kitchen with the two women. Miss

Maudie commands Scout - “Stop that shaking” and rouses Alexandra to get back into the living room and attend their guests before the other women become curious about their absence:

And so they went, the row of laughing women… refilling coffee cups,

dishing out goodies as though their only regret was the temporary disaster

of losing Calpurnia. The gentle hum began again: “Yes, sir, Mrs. Perkins

that J. Everett Grimes is a martyred saint, he...needed to get married so

they ran… to the beauty parlor every Saturday afternoon… he goes to bed

with the chickens, a crate full of sick chickens” (270-271).

Lee moves Miss Maudie, Alexandria and Scout from the horrific death of Tom and back into a sea of banal conversation, made humorous by Lee’s technique of interspersing soundbites into a montage of ridiculousness which makes a statement about the juxtaposition of gentility and brutality in the South. It is also a statement about a woman’s world “where on its surface” is much, much more than “fragrant ladies” drinking cool water. (266).

One of the paradigms that exist for “tomboy taming” is the “relocation of a gender bending character to a strict boarding school or the home of urban relatives” (Abate, xx) and in To Kill a Mockingbird, the urban relative comes to the tomboy in the form of Aunt

Alexandra. Alexandra is Scout’s nemesis in her quest to continue her life in overalls and enjoying male activities. When she first arrives in the Finch household, Lee portrays her as a woman dressed to go into battle:

She was not fat, but solid and she chose protective garments that drew up

her bosom to giddy heights, pinched in her waist, flared out her rear and

managed to suggest that Aunt Alexandra’s was once an hour-glass

figure. From any angle, it was formidable (145).

The description makes her sound quite old-fashioned but during the 1950s, “once again” women were “contained in stays and girdles that pinched waists and padded brassieres that make them appear to have large breasts” (May, 108). These are the type of women

Lee, who preferred slacks to dresses, had to battle in her adult life. Before the ladies return to the living room in the Missionary Circle, Lee writes that Alexandra “rose and

smoothed the various whalebone ridges along her hips” (Mockingbird, 270). Yet, it is not these garments that supported Alexandra, it was her love for her family which propelled her back into the living room with Scout and Miss Maudie. Scout sees her “head go up as went through the door” (270) and after their eyes meet across the room as they serve their guests, Scout decides, “after all, if Aunty could be a lady at a time like this, so could she”

(270). For once, Scout had been accepted by other females as one of their kind and found them worthy of her respect and herself worthy of theirs.

By not having to reconcile the tomboy Scout with her impending date with femininity, Lee is permitted to express her frustration about the traditional gender roles that dominating the Cold War era, fueled by a national post-Depression and World War II longing for the security of the traditional family, without having to capitulate to the supposedly happy ending of marriage and motherhood for her main character. The women at the Missionary Circle are not of her generation therefore they are not judging her nor is she judging them as a peers. Furthermore, while she does gain more respect for her own gender, her continued status as a tomboy makes her own paternalism and imagined place in the patriarchy seem like a bad habit she will eventually outgrow.

CHAPTER III

AN “OVERALLS” CONCLUSION

I would like to be the chronicler of something that I think is going

down the drain pretty swiftly, and that is small town middle class

Southern life… there is something universal in it, there is something

decent to be said for it and there is something to lament when it goes,

and it’s going, it’s passing (Harper Lee WQXR radio interview, 1964)

In the only known recorded interview Lee gave about her life as an author and her bestselling novel, she defended her hometown and its values. This is rather perplexing when To Kill a Mockingbird’s notoriety stemmed from its exposition of Southern racial injustice behavior and Lee herself fled up North to pursue her life independently as a writer, eschewing the expectations of small-town femininity in the Cold War era. Even more compelling, is that now we know that Go Set a Watchman was the first novel she wrote and it was clearly a condemnation of small town middle class Southern life during the 1950s, we find ourselves with an intricate tool with which to explore the subtleties and nuances of To Kill a Mockingbird and its intersectionality of race, class, and gender while adding to the sparse critical discussion of Lee’s work.

The narrative of Go Set a Watchman is problematic for the reader as Lee randomly switches to first person in the middle of third person narration yet in To Kill a

Mockingbird, Lee manages to stay the course with first person narrative as an adult telling a story about her childhood, with only a vague reference to the narrator’s current status. All we know about the adult Scout who tells the story of “when he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow” (3) is that her decision to tell the story had come at a time when “enough years had gone by to enable us to look back on them, we sometimes discussed the events leading to his accident” (3). Taking into consideration the young Scout’s autobiographical ties to her author, it can be assumed that the adult Scout is not married and lives in New York City just like Lee did during the 1950s. When that connection is removed, it can simply be assumed that based on her childhood in the mid-1930s, the adult Scout was in her 20s during the Cold War era whose experience as woman during those years play themselves out in the recollections of her childhood.

Furthermore, Lee’s anti-femininity stance in Go Set a Watchman highlights those influences, not because Jean Louise in the story should be considered to be the same person as the adult Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird, but because Lee wrote both books during the Cold War era and experienced the oppression of gender that was propagated by the anti-communist movement in America. The “hell of apartness” Jean Louise feels in Go Set a Watchman is the same feeling adult Scout has in To Kill a Mockingbird when she remembers the ladies laughing at her comment about wearing her britches under her dress because both characters were born from Lee’s loneliness and her longing for home while in New York City.

The comparison of the Coffee scene from Go Set a Watchman and the Missionary

Circle scene from To Kill a Mockingbird illuminates points of similarity in Lee’s style; the montage of conversational soundbites to create a humorous version of what the women are talking about, the comparison of the conversational flow to musical instruments. In To Kill a Mockingbird, Mrs. Merriweather’s domination of the discussion is like an “ancient organ in the chapel at Finch’s Landing” and in Go Set a Watchman, the women’s voices were like “running down the keys of a giant harpsichord” (170). Lee also applies animalistic descriptions of the women that are less than flattering. The ladies of To Kill a Mockingbird emit “soft bovine sounds” while “munching on their dainties”

(265) signifying their tendency toward a herd mentality. he women Jean Louise greets at the door in Go Set a Watchman are dubbed “magpies” (168), birds with a raucous voice or people whom chatter idly. Both descriptions represent stereotypical attributes that men often apply to women and to have them applied by a woman – an independent woman who would not bow to the traditional gender roles assigned by the Cold War era – muddies any simplistic feminist reading of the novels’ two main characters and their struggles to be free of the chains of femininity.

Some secondary women characters in To Kill a Mockingbird’s Scout and Go Set a

Watchman’s are written by Lee as antagonists. In To Kill a Mockingbird, Mrs. Dubose admonishes Scout, “you should be in a dress and camisole, young lady!” (117) and in Go

Set a Watchman, Aunt Alexandra wishes Jean Louise would “try to dress better when you’re home”(21) after Jean Louise arrives home in a blouse and slacks. The male characters do not condemn either of the female protagonists, however, they contribute to their antagonism toward the other women characters. In To Kill a Mockingbird, Jem tells

Scout, “sometimes you act so much like a girl it’s mortifyin’” (42) teaching his younger sister that being a girl is somehow less than being a boy. In Go Set a Watchman as Jean

Louise argues with her father, he notes “Now that I’ve adjusted my ear to feminine reasoning, I think we find ourselves believing the very same things” (241) and she does not blink once at his inference that her intelligence is less than his due to her gender.

When Harper Lee died in 2016, a Bustle.com article hailed her “great feminist life choices” which included her choice of name, haircut, college attendance, moving to

New York and her single life and calling To Kill a Mockingbird “full of feminist ideas that weren’t super popular when it was published in 1960, including the main character, not adhering to traditionally female traits” (Holter), but was Lee really a feminist? In a

1960’s letter she wrote, “It alarms me that women of my own generation decide they are whipped, then go to a psychiatrist – when all they need perhaps is a little more household help” (Cep, 262) which is quite a withering commentary about her own gender. Harper

Lee may have followed her own path but she wasn’t concerned with leading the fight for the rights of other women because that was not her gift, writing was.

Nevertheless, Lee’s acceptance of male paternalism in both race and gender does not negate the importance of her writing as an indicator of how women living in Cold

War America were oppressed by the propaganda professing white femininity as a form of patriotism and the struggle endured by the women who refused to accept its dictates.

However, these conditions had lain hidden beneath the themes of Southern racial injustice during the Depression in To Kill a Mockingbird, until the publication of Go Set a Watchman in 2015 presented the opportunity to compare another one of Lee’s work with her original masterpiece, not only through feminism and intersectionality but also

through shared textuality, character genealogy, the actual chronology of authorship and many other critical discussions that will hopefully take place in the future.

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