What is it about?
This essay uses insights from southern and childhood studies—particularly Robin Bernstein’s performative theories of racial innocence—to analyze Harper Lee’s newly complicated contributions to understanding U.S. racial histories. I argue that where To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), following American literary tradition, offers child-embodied racial innocence as a solution to injustice, Go Set a Watchman (2015) excoriates it as *the* problem.
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Why is it important?
Deliberately and forcefully violating child-like trust in Atticus Finch’s racial paternalism, Harper Lee in Watchman invites readers into what for many of her contemporaries, and ours, is uncharted territory: confronting racial injustice not as a black body in pain, or in a despised white Other, but as a system of white power embodied in the self. I argue that the extent to which childhood racial innocence is allowed to be ruined in each novel, and the manner of the rage this ruination occasions, offer an important lens into the desires, and the perceived needs, of contemporary readers both in 1960 and 2015.
Perspectives
Many readers, including professional critics, had a visceral reaction to finding out that Atticus Finch espouses racist beliefs in Go Set a Watchman. Some declared that they would not read the novel, to preserve their childhood memories of Atticus. I make the case that Watchman is important, if not entirely "good," reading, valuable for its still-to-rare attempt at critiquing whiteness as a system of power within the white self.
Dr. Katherine Henninger
Louisiana State University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: “My Childhood Is Ruined!”: Harper Lee and Racial Innocence, American Literature, September 2016, Duke University Press,
DOI: 10.1215/00029831-3650259.
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