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Harper Lee’s “Go Set a Watchman” reveals racism and multiple personality behind her “To Kill a Mockingbird”

2018 (post 1)

Since Go Set a Watchman (written mid-1950's; published 2015) was actually written before, but, mandated by an editor, was revised into what eventually became To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), the former may be a less polished, but more authentic, reflection of the author.

In this novel, twenty-six-year-old Jean Louise returns home from New York City to Alabama to visit her aging father, Atticus, and also to renew her romantic relationship with Henry Clinton, who says to Jean Louise:

“You’re a Jekyll-and-Hyde character” (1, p. 47).

“In the years when he was away at the war and the University, she had turned from an overalled, fractious, gun-slinging creature into a reasonable facsimile of a human being. He began dating her on her annual two-week visits home, and although she still moved like a thirteen-year-old boy and abjured most feminine adornment, he found something so intensely feminine about her that he fell in love” (1, p. 13).

“ ‘Want to drive?’ said Henry. ‘Don’t be silly,’ she said. Although she was a respectable driver, she hated to operate anything mechanical more complicated than a safety pin: folding lawn chairs were a source of profound irritation to her; she had never learned to ride a bicycle or use a typewriter” (1, p. 11).

At age eleven, when she got her first menstrual period, “It had never fully occurred to Jean Louise that she was a girl: her life had become one of reckless, pummeling activity; fighting, football, climbing…and besting anyone her own age in any contest requiring physical prowess.” And so she felt “a cruel practical joke had been played upon her: she must now go into a world of femininity, a world she despised, could not comprehend…” (1, p. 116).

“Go Set a Watchman” by Harper Lee (post 2): Jean Louise’s multiple personality indicated by her dissociative fugue after finding father racist.

Twenty-six-year-old Jean Louise is shocked, disillusioned, angered, and nauseated—she literally vomits—when she discovers that her idolized father, Atticus, is a racist.

However, in view of the obvious racist hierarchy of their community, and how freely Atticus and her other close relatives acknowledge their racist attitudes, I think that the only way Jean Louise could not have been aware of her family’s racism would have been for her to have compartmentalized awareness of it in an alternate personality. But that is just my opinion.

The main textual evidence for her multiple personality (aside from her duality, described in the previous post), is her dissociative fugue:

She thinks to herself, “Two solid hours and I didn’t know where I was.”

And when her Aunt asks her where she has been, she replies, “I—I don’t know” (1, pp. 120-121).

Search “fugue” and “dissociative fugue” for previous posts on this common symptom of multiple personality.

I would also interpret the episode at the end of the novel—when her uncle convinces her not to leave town and not to estrange herself from the family—as further evidence of multiple personality, because both his backhand to her mouth (p. 260) and his giving her whiskey appear to have changed her mind not by intimidation or intoxication, but by altering her state of consciousness (pp. 262, 269) and causing a switch to a more pliant personality.

1. Harper Lee. Go Set a Watchman. New York, Harper, 2015.