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. iii 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 iv 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 1 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. 2 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. 3 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,