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ATTICUS AND THE LAW By Susan B. Arthur A Thesis submitted to the Faculty of the English Graduate Program of Ohio Dominican University Columbus, Ohio in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of MASTER OF ARTS IN ENGLISH December 2020 iii ATTICUS AND THE LAW Abstract This work compares and contrasts the Atticus of Harper Lee’s novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, with the Atticus of Lee’s novel, Go Set a Watchman. Although Atticus appears to be a proponent of equal rights and justice in one and a staunch segregationist in the other, this work argues that Atticus is essentially the same man in both novels, and supports this perspective with an examination of Atticus’ positions on racism, the law, and justice. This work also examines Atticus and racism in the South from a regional point of view during the time period of both novels, and asks relevant questions as to the universal moral obligations the characters may have to one another. iv Dedication In memory of Harper Lee, who got it right the first time -- “For thus hath the Lord said unto me, Go, set a watchman, let him declare what he seeth” -- Isaiah 21:6. To my wonderful daughter, Emily – “The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams” – Eleanor Roosevelt. v Acknowledgments Dr. Squire: I appreciate your excellent overall direction on my thesis. I am also grateful for your eagle-eyed editing and spot-on assessments of areas that needed attention. Your own published Watchman project was an added inspiration when I considered this topic. Dr. Brick: Thank you for your overall support on this project, for reading Go Set a Watchman, for your astute observations and excellent comments, and especially for your class, “Contemporary Issues Literary” (ENG 586), that helped me to bring this idea to fruition. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract ………………………………………………………………………… iii Dedication ……………………………………………………………………….iv Acknowledgments ……………………………………………………………….v Introduction ……………………………………………………………………...7 Chapter I: Justice and Equity ……………………………………………………11 Chapter II: Regionalism and Racism ……………………………………………22 Chapter III: Morality and Obligation ……………………………………………34 Conclusion ………………………………………………………………………43 Works Cited ……………………………………………………………………..46 7 Introduction To Kill a Mockingbird and Go Set a Watchman author Nelle Harper Lee began her college career planning to study law, and in fact she attended law school at the University of Alabama for a little over a year. But Lee was miserable, and in the words of a classmate, “hated” studying law. A friend who worked with Lee on the campus newspaper said that Lee “could have been a good lawyer. Her mind was so quick, but she just wanted to write” (Shields 100-101). Lee was mostly trying to please her lawyer father, A.C. Lee, who expected his daughter to follow in his footsteps and join the family firm, which also included Lee’s older sister, Alice, who was already a lawyer. In the spring of 1948, A.C. Lee realized his daughter was unhappy, so he financed a summer semester abroad for Lee to study literature at Oxford University in England. After the summer, Lee attended one more semester of law school, then told her father over the holidays that she planned to “drop out, move to New York, find a job, and write” (Shields 109). Following several years of trying to write while working low-paying jobs in New York, and with a surprise financial gift from friends, Lee was able to take a break from the daily grind to write all day every day. In early 1957, in her early thirties by now, Lee took the first fifty pages of Go Set a Watchman to publishing house J.B. Lippincott. The editors thought the manuscript needed revising, and several months and manuscript drafts later, Lee was offered a contract along with a book advance, and Lippincott editor Tay Hohoff officially began working with Lee on the manuscript that would eventually become the best-selling, Pulitzer Prize-winning, To Kill a Mockingbird (Shields 112-116). Some fifty-five years later, and a few months before Lee’s death, Go Set a Watchman would be published and met with a critical mixture of shock and disbelief at the different portrayal of Atticus. Atticus of Mockingbird has primarily been perceived as a champion for justice and equal rights. In Watchman, readers learn that Atticus, 8 though still a kind person, is a staunch segregationist who believes the federal government has no right interfering in the laws made by states. Amid the myriad critical reviews, Samford University law professor Mark Baggett says, “the one, inevitable, unblinking fact is that Watchman was written first. This was the message the real Harper Lee (not the fictional Scout) wanted to say first by writing a kind of Jeremiad of her frustration and disillusionment with racial progress. We also know that the Atticus of Go Set a Watchman is the portrait of Atticus that she painted first – not the Gregory Peck version” (13). In fact, the character of Atticus is modeled after Lee’s father. “Mr. Lee himself only gradually rose to the moral standards of Atticus,” says Lee biographer Charles Shields. “Though more enlightened than most, A.C. … was typical of his generation, he believed that the current social order, segregation, was natural and created harmony between the races” (121). But later in the 1950s, A.C. Lee changed his views, and Shields writes that “Nelle watched as her father, formerly a conservative on matters of race and social progress, became an advocate for the rights of Negroes” (125).1 Although some critics and readers feel that Watchman should not have been published,2 as it in some ways spoils the reputation of the beloved Atticus, Baggett believes otherwise. He 1 A.C. Lee’s change of heart took place over the course of a decade in the 1950s that saw Emmett Till murdered in Alabama and black student Autherine Lucy denied admission to the University of Alabama. The race war was heating up, and “a civic-minded man like A.C. Lee could not fail to recognize it happening in his own backyard,” says Lee biographer Charles Shields. In 1959, the Ku Klux Klan threatened to kill members of the all-black Union High School band if they marched in the Monroeville Christmas parade, and wrote racist graffiti on the front of a local store that was owned by the Kiwanis Club president, A. B. Blass. The Kiwanis Club sponsored the parade, so Blass decided to call off the parade for safety reasons. According to Blass, A.C. Lee walked in the store, put his hand on Blass’ shoulder, and said, “Son, you did the right thing.” Shields also reports that by the time Mockingbird was published in 1960, A.C. Lee told a journalist who was interviewing his daughter that reapportioning voting districts to make the black vote fairer has “got to be done” (Shields 125). 2 At the time that Watchman was published in 2015, there were concerns over whether the 89-year-old Lee, who had suffered a stroke and was confined to a nursing facility, was of sound enough mind to approve the release of the novel, as well as questions about Lee’s attorney’s motives for doing so. Alabama officials investigated and found no signs of elder abuse. For more see Neely Tucker’s article in The Washington Post, July 13, 2015. 9 says, “Watchman is nowhere near as good a novel as Mockingbird, but it might prove an equally significant one, if it helps us look to history for our lessons, rather than to our consoling, childish, whitewashed fables” (9). History professor Matthew Crow agrees, “Taken together, Harper Lee’s two books dramatize the trouble legalism has with the inscrutability of motive, conscience, and judgment, and how the history of the law intersects, if it does, with what we might call the history of justice” (42). Indeed, resolving race relations involves using the law, and in both Mockingbird and Watchman, Lee, with insider legal knowledge gleaned from her days at law school, uses aspects of the law mixed with social customs to deftly portray serious inequities between blacks and whites in and outside of the courtroom in the old South. Vanderbilt professor Eric Sundquist describes Mockingbird as “something of a historical relic,” even though it “continues to have a widespread influence on the imagination of many young Americans” (183). As such, it continues to be widely taught in schools around the world. Perhaps in the future, teachers will begin to incorporate portions of Watchman into the classroom discussion, especially the debate between Atticus and his adult daughter, Jean Louise, over integration and states’ rights that was triggered by the Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown v. Board of Education. The difference between the two portrayals of Atticus in the books is dramatic, but important, as is the way in which Atticus uses the law. As Baggett says, “The Atticus of Go Set a Watchman, which lay … in a safety deposit box for almost 60 years, eventually proved more authentic than the Atticus of Mockingbird” (4). Through a critique of both Mockingbird and Watchman, and to contrast the differences in Atticus in each novel, Chapter One takes a look at how Atticus views and uses the law in terms of justice and equity. It becomes apparent through close analysis that although Atticus follows the letter and the spirit of the law, he applies it differently depending upon the circumstances, 10 and that justice in the Old South did not always mean equality. Mockingbird takes place in the Jim Crow South when a policy of separate but equal was legislated between blacks and whites; while Watchman occurs right after this concept was struck down by the U.S.

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