How Does Jean Louise Change Throughout The Novel

Set in the future of To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman examines the town Jean Louise Finch calls home. During one visit back to Maycomb, Alabama, Jean Louise is confronted with how the town has changed without warning during her absence. She struggles with the differences in the way people are acting and wonders whether it was her or them that transformed. Her overlying concerns about race in society surround this theme throughout the plot.
Jean Louise’s transition from a child who idolizes her father and feels a certain tenderness for life to an adult misses an entire period of life. The novel’s flashbacks to Jean Louise as a child and back to present where she is in her twenties seem to leave a blank space. It is almost as if she was asleep and woke up years later in an entirely different Maycomb. She does not even realize how much change truly occurred, “she threw off the spread, put her feet to the floor, and sat gazing at her long legs, startled to find them twenty-six years old”(141). Growing up happens rapidly for Jean Louise when she is looking back on it. It takes her until this moment to understand that she is no longer the little girl who caused a row on the playground.

Jean Louise’s first shock of Maycomb being altered comes when she is spending an evening with her love interest, Henry Clinton.

The two venture down to Finch’s Landing, a clearing near the water that has been owned by the Finch family for years. The Finch House on the land had already been turned into a hunting club, but Henry further informs Jean Louise that the rest of the land was sold. She is caught off guard by the news as “the tone of her voice made Henry stop”(74). It is unthinkable to Jean Louise that a place with sentimental meaning to her would be given up, especially by her father. It is hard for her to understand why the man she thinks so highly of would do this and not tell

her.
Atticus's image faces further degradation when Jean Louise finds him with Henry at a meeting of Maycomb’s citizens’ council. The group’s purpose is to uphold racial segregation in the South. Jean Louise cannot believe her eyes when two men she thought highly of seem to be fraternizing with the enemy; bigoted individuals who are trying to save outdated, racist practices. She laments that “the one human being she had ever fully and wholeheartedly trusted...had betrayed her, publicly, grossly, and shamelessly”(113). Atticus appears to her now as less of a role model.
Jean Louise has trouble with change. She witnesses too much to handle when she makes her usual visit back to Maycomb, Alabama. Jean Louise even embarks on a brief downward spiral after the unbearable news that her father is a supposed racist. Additionally, it seems to be more of a blow to her that changes happened without a warning. There was no preparation, just shocks that made her question who and where she was. By the end of the novel, Scout learns that she must make her own decisions about society and the world. No longer can she follow Atticus’ beliefs, something she has done blindly her whole life.