Harper Lee. Go Set a Watchman. New York: Harper, 2015. Print.

 For thus hath the LORD said unto me, Go, set a watchman, let him declare what he seeth. (Isaiah 21:6 KJV)

It appears that some reviewers are trying to compare Go Set a Watchman to To Kill a Mockingbird. They truly are different stories even if they involve many of the same characters.

Harper Lee has an engaging manner of telling a story. Readers of To Kill a Mockingbird recall that the frame of the novel was the trial of Tom Robinson. Yet there were many other episodes that had little to do with the main plot but gave insight into the Finch family and Maycomb, Alabama. Among those were Scout’s first days of school and its Deweyism, Calpurnia’s church, the roly-poly bugs, and the mysteries of the Radley family.

Go Set a Watchman is like that, too. Now Scout goes by Jean Louise and is twenty-six. She lives and works in New York and has returned to Maycomb for a two-week visit. Many of the episodes seem unrelated to the frame (if there is one): a visit to the now-retired Calpurnia, the attempts to theologically “modernize” the Methodist Church, and some humorous reminiscences of Jean Louise’s teen years.

It is indeed difficult to tell what the frame of Go Set a Watchman exactly is. Is it the Jean Louise Finch and Hank Clinton romance? Is it Jean Louise’s discovery that both Hank and Atticus attended a White Citizens’ Council meeting? Or is the tale really a collection of vignettes held together by Jean Louise’s visit to her home?

Hank was Jem’s best friend. Since Jem died of the same congenital problem that killed their mother at an early age, Atticus has taken Hank under his wing and is grooming him to take over his law practice. Hank has had a crush on Jean Louise since high school, but his family is not a socially prominent as the Finches, and Jean Louise has doubts about marrying him or even staying in Maycomb.

Atticus Finch is much more in the background. Jean Louise realizes that her father has become her idol and it is time to get a grip on reality. Instead of Atticus, the person who really plays grown-up in Go Set a Watchman is Uncle Jack Finch. He is the one who tells her that “every man’s watchman is his conscience,” and till then she had leaned on Atticus “assuming that your answers would always be his answers.” (325)

While this kind of Erik Erikson identity crisis is universal, Go Set a Watchman is distinctly Southern. In a way, it is dealing with problems or at least situations that are normally gone nowadays. Did Atticus attend the Citizens’ Council meeting because he was a racist (well, he is condescending) or because he was a watchman who wanted to make sure the WCC did not get out of hand as it had in other places?

Unless you count Tidewater Virginia when I was in the service, and that is more military than Southern, I have not lived in the South. I am no expert on Southern women. I just think of what the Beach Boys sang:

The Southern girls with the way they talk
They knock me out when I’m down there.

However, it does strike me that three well-known Southern writers all bring up details of female figure enhancement in their writing. Scarlett O’Hara is very serious about Melanie being too flat-chested and not doing anything about it in Gone With the Wind. Amanda Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie embarrassed her daughter Laura when she tries to get her to wear a pair of “gay deceivers.” Jean Louise tells a hilarious story of her attempt to wear them at a school dance. Hank, with a suggestion from Atticus, gets her out of trouble.

Even in that example, we can see a change in the generations. Margaret Mitchell never questions the variety of techniques women used to make themselves more attractive to men. Tennessee Williams sees that as being somewhat old-fashioned, but modesty forbids really discussing the subject. Harper Lee is able to laugh at it. Southern women are changing. Does Jean Louise even have to have a man?

Lee lets us know that such changes take time. Jean Louise rightly questions her father’s attendance at the meeting. “One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever.” (Ecclesiastes 1:4 KJV) Her generation is growing up. Her generation will raise up new watchmen, and they will be different. At the very least the language of the ladies will be saltier.

Maybe some things will change too much. The questions Go Set a Watchman notes as an undercurrent in mainline churches “notoriously short on theology” (114) in the 1950s have well nigh destroyed some of them—at least in terms of membership, attendance, and core beliefs.

Perhaps, though, some things will not change enough for Jean Louise’s generation. She is no racist, nor is she an Aunt Alexandra, but Jean Louise is enough of a Finch to admit that Uncle Jack is probably right about Hank. As appealing as Hank is to her, he was raised by a single mother and still seen socially as “trash” in spite of his education and tutelage under Atticus. It would be another generation or so before a Southern lawyer raised by a single mother of low social standing would marry a Wellesley grad and go on to be elected President. His name was Clinton, too. Is that a coincidence?