I'm currently in a class on Shakespeare, and I had the most interesting discussion with my professor a couple days ago. We're reading Richard III. I asked my prof if Richard III was written as propaganda for the Lancaster side, since I believe the monarch at the time would have been directly descended from Henry VII, who claims the throne at the end of the play. I said that Richard is written as a heinous villain, while Henry VII is written as a heroic figure. It seemed to me that the tale (though I love it) had a rather obvious "this is the good side, this is the bad side" mentality, which smelled of propaganda.
My prof pointed out that the entire first part of the play displays an evil man pretending to be pious. We get to see Richard III's violent thoughts. He comports himself as something otherwise. So to see Henry VII comporting himself as a golden figure would inspire one reading deeply (or watching the play deeply) to ask him or herself if we can actually trust Henry VII's outward demeanor. Which was perhaps Shakespeare's point. I think in great literature much is beneath the surface which doesn't seem obvious at first. Richard III through my eyes appeared rather like (well written) propaganda. But I missed the point beneath the surface. I think that great literature grows like that, on rereads. Or perhaps it is only me who must read and read again to see it.
As I've said, I don't know that Mockingbird is great literature. But I do know Richard III looked like one sort of story to me a few days ago, and it feels ever so much more meaningful, now.
I didn't notice the racism in the line Dill cites when I was a child. (And I agree it is ENORMOUSLY racist.) I have very little memory of reading the book then -- just a ghost awareness of it. I recall a lot of Scout's doings from my early read, and I think I must have been focused there when I read the book. I simply liked the Scout scenes (as a little girl, she was my contemporary), the spookiness of the Boo part of the story, the way he'd leave them presents, the idea that what had seemed scary wasn't at all what Scout had built up in her mind, the coming of age tale, the conversations with Atticus, the going to school. I'm not sure that in my first read I ever made it to the Tom Robinson scenes, so my first read is not actually a first read, probably. I do recall the "mockingbird" line at the end of the book, so maybe I skipped ahead, or maybe the other scenes didn't stick.
I only read it a second time in 2013. I did notice the strange line cited by Dill, but it was so brief it didn't impact me. (I am ashamed to say.) It slipped in as a strange remark. I was so caught up in the story I quickly forgot about it. I wasn't deeply reading. I read the book as a means to pass the time -- with a curiosity about this classic novel I was sure I'd read before, which my mother loved, which I could barely remember.
I didn't know where the story was headed. I was very disturbed by the Mayella part of the novel. That part affected me deeply. I spent a lot of time grinning about the Scout scenes. I didn't notice much in Atticus to be questioned. I liked (loved) that though it was enormously dangerous and certainly potentially damaging to his career, he stood up for what he believed was right. That's what I noticed about Atticus; that's what made him, for me, heroic. I liked to believe he was heroic. It made me feel happy to think such a man could exist. I was glad to believe in Atticus.
I wasn't going to read Watchman when I heard about it. I had an idea that Ms. Lee had been treated badly by someone, that her early draft of Mockingbird had been stolen from her after her sister's death, that they'd published the thing against her wishes because she was incapacitated by age. To me the whole thing stank of abuse. Then I read that she was expressing sorrow at this reaction among readers of Mockingbird, and that the state had investigated charges of abuse, and that she'd been found lucid, and I was ashamed of myself for having so quickly dismissed her work. I still couldn't be sure if it was her own idea to publish Watchman or someone else's, but I decided (personally, within my own conscious) that it would be a greater crime to refuse to read her words than to risk reading them on the off-chance that she'd intended them to remain unpublished.
I came away from Watchman strongly impacted. I felt that the timing was intentional on Lee's part: publication came shortly after Ferguson. I felt (instinctively) that Lee was attempting to defy the "hero" following Atticus had carried for fifty years by publishing Watchman, and that she was challenging people to stop blindly rallying behind him and see him for what he was.
I don't consider Watchman great literature. (I do know enough about literature to say that!) It's a draft, and clumsy in places, but it is the book she initially intended to publish. I don't think it's a good book on its own, but it complicates Mockingbird and certainly validates Dill's claim that Atticus is a racist.
Thomas Jefferson was a racist too. I absolutely loved him once upon a time, as I loved Atticus. A good egg, I thought. I was disturbed, as some are disturbed by the "fall of Atticus," when I realized that this legend of a figure who fought for our freedom during the Revolution, owned slaves. I actually wrestled over it for quite a while a few years ago. Silly perhaps. I take my history seriously, and I began an exploration of the man to try to reconcile my prior idea of him with the knowledge that when he fought for freedom, he really only meant freedom for men, who were white. And had money enough to own property. No one told me that in school.
Is Lee directly tackling this concept in her novels -- the idea that we see what we want to see, when beneath the surface there is racism (in her father) or deep kindness (in Boo), or an enormous story we cannot see (in Mayella)? I don't know? I've said I have no idea if the book is great literature, and I am perhaps too close to it to assess it clinically. But she knew when wrote Atticus in To Kill a Mockingbird that he was a racist. She knew it, though we didn't. And some part of me says she intended that to be implicit -- that it is part of the point. That we are meant to see it. That America has failed to see it.
Perhaps Lee was a raging racist and has pulled the wool over everyone's eyes in America, and the book is acting as propaganda and infecting the children. Or perhaps the book is set in a racist town, and the theme rises above that. Perhaps it is being taught in schools as the legend of Thomas Jefferson was taught. I'll have to reread To Kill a Mockingbird one of these days, to see what I think still further.
But Dill, you raise some piping good questions, and I appreciate the sturdy slap to the face coupled with direct quotations from the novel. Well said, truly.
I'd rather see truth than my hopeful idea of reality. x
