Harper Lee's 'Go Set a Watchman' Reveals the Limits of the Liberal Imagination

In 1957, Nelle Harper Lee, a young, unpublished Manhattan resident and native of Monroeville, Alabama, completed and submitted a draft manuscript of a novel to the J. B. Lippincott Company. Set chronologically not long after the US Supreme Court's 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling, the semi-autobiographical text explored its 26-year-old white protagonist Jean Louise "Scout" Finch's trip—from New York City—to visit her elderly father, distinguished attorney Atticus Finch, who was still living in her childhood hometown of semi-rural Maycomb, Alabama. Among those Jean Louise encountered once back home were lifelong friend and suitor Henry "Hank" Clinton, her father's devoted mentee and law-firm heir apparent; her snobbish aunt Alexandra "Aunty" Finch Hancock, who after being abandoned by her husband had moved in with Atticus; her eccentric uncle, Dr. John Hall Finch, a retired physician and bibliophile; and Calpurnia ("Cal"), the retired black woman who had reared her after Jean Louise's mother's early death.

The draft of the novel showed considerable but inconsistent literary skill in its depiction of Maycomb's middle class milieu and mores, its characterizations, its humor, and its overall prose style. It also reflected modernist influences in its intermittent use of stream-of-consciousness narration, interior monologues, and perspective shifts. Its plot, however, was no more elaborate than that of a short story: Once home, the liberal narrator quickly learns that her father, aunt, and potential fiancé, like most white people in the town and region, hold deeply racist and segregationist views, provoking her personal loss of innocence, to the point of physical discomfort, and an existential quandary about whether to sever ties to Maycomb and the South altogether.

The draft's emotional fulcrum lies in the narrator's utter disillusionment with her father, whom she has revered all her life as if he were a saint. Not only is she shocked to find in his possession a virulently racist tract, but she eventually happens upon his—and Hank's—attendance at and active participation in a local gathering of Maycomb's (white) Citizens' Council—a socially upscale version of white supremacist organizations like the Ku Klux Klan. As Jean Louise witnesses, the Maycomb Citizens' Council, like similar groups, serves as one of the key foundations for maintaining white resistance to federal intervention and black dissent, while upholding and advancing white economic, political, and social domination through oppression.

This draft novel, called Go Set a Watchman , its title drawn from the Old Testament Book of Isaiah, was not, however, the book that J. B. Lippincott published. Instead, three years later, To Kill a Mockingbird, a substantially revised version of Lee's original submission, appeared to widespread public and critical acclaim, including the 1961 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, followed by an Academy Award–winning film starring Gregory Peck. The revision has continued to enchant readers, in part because of the significant editorial changes from the initial draft. In addition to polishing the draft novel's prose and refining its pacing, in To Kill a Mockingbird , Lee moved Jean Louise's story back two decades, before the US civil rights movement had gathered its midcentury momentum, and situated it firmly in the child narrator Scout's voice; she transformed the father's defense of a black man, incidental in Go Set a Watchman, into a major plot point; she restored two characters, Jean Louise's brother Jem and close friend Dill, whom she had effectively erased from the earlier version; and she left the draft novel's initial depictions of liberal innocence and Atticus's nobility, still touchstones for readers today, unchallenged.

Go Set a Watchman has finally been published nearly 60 years later, by Harper Collins, and despite its aesthetic flaws, it feels imaginatively and politically ahead of its time. More specifically, Go Set a Watchman offers a realist account of the limits of the white liberal imagination in the face of Southern white supremacy during the 1950s, in distinct contrast to Mockingbird's far more palatable and appealing if better-written fairy tale. In Watchman, which reads like a sequel though it predates Mockingbird, Lee dramatizes the crucial fact that racism is not simply an interpersonal problem, reducible to spectacular incidents like the brutal 1955 murder of Emmitt Till (which Lee obliquely references), or to the actions and rhetoric of white supremacist organizations like the Ku Klux Klan (which, we learn, Atticus Finch had once belonged to). Rather, Watchman suggests, racism is an elaborate system of interlocking structures enabled by the participation and indifference of the white majority, including liberal middle-class whites like Scout Finch herself, to ensure white dominance and privilege, which is to say, white power. It's a provocative indictment of the system that remains difficult for many in the media to grasp and still all too absent from many public conversations about "race."

In as much as Go Set a Watchman dramatizes Jean Louise's revulsion at white supremacy's manifestations in the pamphlet, or the hate-filled tirade by an arch segregationist Grady O'Hanlon—"essential inferiority… kinky woolly heads… still in the trees… greasy smelly… marry your daughters… mongrelize the race… mongrelize… mongrelize"—what most upsets and offends her is her direct, personal connection to it in the form of her family members' support for it. While Jean Louise harshly critiques racism in her argument with her father—"You neglected to tell me we were naturally better than the Negroes, bless their kinky heads"—she never contemplates more radical action, including forms of social or political activism, let alone active cross-cultural solidarity in Maycomb. Instead Jean Louise retains her option of flight back to New York, and views herself as "colorblind" while also partially accepting her father's arguments about black inferiority ("They are simple people, most of them, but that doesn't make them subhuman"). She parrots states' rights arguments, though she at least acknowledges that the NAACP is not the bogeyman her father and others claim it is, but a response to the racist system already in place. When she goes to visit Cal to inquire about her former caretaker's grandson, who has run over an elderly drunk white man, she transforms the encounter in Cal's house into a performance of her own importance and recognition—"I'm your baby, have you forgotten me?… What are you doing to me?" rather than addressing the looming extrajudicial danger Cal's grandson faces.

As a counterpoint and complement to the compelling fantasy of Mockingbird, Go Set a Watchman possesses real value. What was often latent in the later novel is on full display here, ranging from the middle-class whites' classism, self-absorption, and entitlement to a racial-epithet-packed screed that would not appear out of place on a forum like Stormfront. Reading Go Set a Watchman also made me wonder how it might have been received by critics and the public if it had appeared in the late 50s, and whether there exists another work of fiction from these years by a young white Southern writer that so baldly lays bare the complicity of the mass of white Southerners, particularly the social elites and middle class, in maintaining white supremacy.

In its focus on liberalism's limitations, and its conclusion in Jean Louise's sentimental emotional accommodation with her father's and family's views—"I can't beat him, and I can't join him"—the book also feels very contemporary, since we still encounter unironic invocations of America as a "post-racial" society in the public discourse, despite constant indications to the contrary.

Certain moments in Go Set a Watchman read as if they were written last week: When Atticus and Jean Louise rail against the Supreme Court and the federal government, they sound uncannily like Republican politicians denouncing this year's SCOTUS rulings on same-sex marriage and the Affordable Care Act. Compare this passage in Go Tell a Watchman:

And Antonin Scalia, dissenting opinion in Obergefell v. Hodges:

Go Set a Watchman's arrival in bookstores in 2015 raises a host of questions, including basic ethical ones. Did Harper Lee, who for decades after Mockingbird's publication has refused to issue any longer works of fiction, actually and fully consent to the publication of this work? Why now, and why only after the death of her sister Alice, who had been a careful guardian of her work and legacy? The clunkiness of the novel's organization and its periodic slides into stage-play-like dialogue made me feel as though I were reading a posthumous work rather than one by a living author, in the twilight of her career, who had green-lighted a lesser work she knew might benefit from even a little more editing. Did Lee recently read through this text and approve it, and if so, how will we ever know? While I understand her ongoing desire not to grant interviews or meet with reporters, I nevertheless felt it would assuage many readers' concerns, including my own, to know beyond a doubt that she was truly behind it.

In the end, despite its attendant controversies, Go Set a Watchman is more than a historical curiosity. It breaks a silence its non-publication five and a half decades initiated, and in so doing calls for an engaged reading.

Go Set a Watchman is available in bookstores and online.

John Keene is the author of Annotations and Counternarratives, both published by New Directions, as well as several other works, including the poetry collection Seismosis, with artist Christopher Stackhouse, and a translation of Brazilian author Hilda Hilst's novel Letters from a Seducer . He teaches at Rutgers University–Newark.