How Is Atticus Portrayed In To Kill A Mockingbird

In Go Set a Watchman Atticus is portrayed as being racist . The new book gives the impression that Lee knew what much of her audience didn’t : that her character’s principles didn’t constitute justice. in go set a Watchman, it stands to be redefined as a book about racism not just in Maycomb County, but within the Finch household itself. Here’s something . In Mockingbird, when Atticus first tells Scout that he’s taking on the Tom Robinson case, he talks about the nobility of fighting for a lost cause. “Simply because we were licked a hundred years before we started,” he says, “is no reason for us not to try to win.” Scout replies, “You sound like Cousin Ike Finch,” referring to Maycomb County’s “sole surviving Confederate veteran.” Within a few pages, she adds, “Cecil Jacobs asked me one time if Atticus was a Radical. When I asked Atticus, Atticus was so amused I was rather annoyed, but he said he wasn’t laughing at me. He said, ‘You tell Cecil I’m about as radical as Cotton Tom Heflin.’”Heflin, of course, was a white supremacist senator and member of the Klan.

In many ways, Atticus’s subtle racism in Mockingbird is the story.

Go Set a Watchman, in comparison, is its passion and roughness which makes the book . Where Mockingbird is polite, Watchman is rude. And Maycomb could use some rudeness. In Watchman, Lee quits being nice about sexism, too. Tomboy Scout has grown up to be Jean Louise, the kind of woman who jokes about her period and offers to have an affair with her boyfriend rather than committing to marriage. Her boyfriend watches her sleep and thinks “he was her true owner, that was clear to

him.”

And there was foreshadowing of this, too, in Mockingbird. Atticus lets his young daughter run around in overalls; he doesn’t force her into dresses, because he is a good dad. He understands that she’s a serious person, but when Scout voices her indignation that women aren’t allowed to serve on juries, Atticus says, “I doubt if we’d ever get a complete case tried—the ladies's be interrupting to ask questions.” He’s a good dad, a good role model but he was raising Scout the best way he could . Scout’s brother Jem echoes this in Mockingbird with his taunts that Scout is “so much like a girl it’s mortifyin”—by saying, “being a girl, girls always imagined things, that’s why other people hated them so.” Atticus brings this idea into his defense of Tom Robinson: Mayella Ewell is a girl who imagines things. If there’s any uncertainty about the natural extension of Atticus’s beliefs, when Jem burrows into his anger, he says Mayella Ewell is surely lying about being raped by Tom Robinson because for rape to count “you had to kick and holler, you had to be overpowered and stomped on, preferably knocked stone cold.” Rape is only rape if there’s visible proof. Girls, being girls, imagine things.

The depiction of Atticus in “Watchman” makes for disturbing reading, and for “Mockingbird”, it’s especially disorienting. Scout is shocked to find, during her trip home, that her beloved father, who taught her everything she knows about fairness and compassion, has been affiliating with raving anti-integration, anti-black crazies, and scouts shares her horror and confusion. How could the “role model” Atticus — described early in the book in much the same terms as he is in “Mockingbird” — suddenly emerge as a bigot?