ABSTRACT
Harper Lee’s Atticus Finch, the lawyer–hero of her classic To Kill a Mockingbird, (1960) has inspired practicing lawyers and provoked academic debate – albeit debate heavily weighted in favour of Atticus. The publication of Go Set a Watchman in 2016 led many to question Atticus’s status as a lawyer–hero. In Watchm an, Atticus is not the tolerant, compassionate, wise figure of Mockingbird. Instead, he is a segregationist, fighting to slow civil rights reform. Watchman was taken to have vindicated the views of naysayers who had questioned Atticus’s claim to the moral standing he had been given. I argue that this response to Watchman is an error. Others have defended Atticus by arguing that the Atticus we meet in Watchman does not warrant moral outrage, but I think that that is a mistake, too. The evidence that the Atticus we meet in Watchman does not deserve the moral standing enjoyed by the Atticus we knew from Mockingbird is all too clear. The real mistake is to suppose that the characters called Atticus in the two novels are the same character. In paintings we call elements an artist paints over while producing a work, intending that they will not be visible in the final version, pentimento – an Italian word meaning ‘repentance’. I argue that the Atticus of Watchman is a pentimento, and that it is consequently an error to suppose that he is the Atticus we met in Mockingbird 20 years earlier or that he and the Mockingbird Atticus are the same character. Whether those arguing that the Atticus of Mockingbird did not deserve his moral reputation are right or wrong may still need to be settled, but it is a mistake to think it will be settled by anything the Atticus we meet in Watchman does. I finish on a positive note. Watchman may be seen to reinforce central themes in Mockingbird. In both novels, the characters called Atticus demonstrate that racism is evil; that tolerance and equality are ideals to be treasured and pursued. The Atticus of Mockingbird does so by modelling tolerance, by pursuing equality under law; the Atticus of Watchman, by starkly confronting his daughter with the appalling assumptions of racism and segregation. In Mockingbird, Atticus summons us to virtue; in Watchman, the character called Atticus pushes us from vice.
