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摘 要

List of Tables v

1. Introduction 1

1.1 Harper Lee 1

1.2 To Kill a Mockingbird and Go Set a Watchman 1

2. Literature Review 3

2.1 Previous research on the classic image of Atticus Finch 3

2.2 Previous research on the changed Atticus Finch 3

2.3 Need of the study 5

3. Study on the Change of Atticus’s Characterization 7

3.1 Continuity between To Kill a Mockingbird and Go Set a Watchman 7

3.1.1 Continuity in plots 7

3.1.2 Continuity in the theme 8

3.1.3 Continuity in characterization 8

3.1.4 The change of Atticus Finch 9

3.2 Timings in novels and corresponding historical events 10

3.3 Conflicts reflected in the two novels 11

3.3.1 Conflicts between white Dixies and African Americans 12

3.3.2 Conflicts between native folks and the federal government 13

3.3.3 Conflicts between conservatives and libertarians 14

3.3.4 From a “guardian” to a “watchman” 15

4. Conclusion 17

References 18

Acknowledgments

The writing of the thesis is a challenging mission to me, and I would appreciate and cherish the encouragement and achievement it returns. I am very beholden to take this opportunity to express my gratitude to some people. For without their help and support, it would be a more difficult task for me to complete the paper.

Foremost, my gratitude goes to Prof. Wang Li, my supervisor, for her knowledge imparted and guidance given in my process of completing this thesis. She helped me to select an appropriate topic, collect literatures needed, and analyze the target text via a rational and comprehensive approach. What’s more, I feel honored to benefit a lot from her unique personalities and wisdom.

My gratitude should extend to all the teachers who have taught me during my study in Nanjing Tech University. It was their teaching that has allowed me to acquire professional knowledge and think critically and independently.

Last but not least, I would like to convey my sincere thanks to the Central Committee of the CPC, the State Council and the Ministry of Education. It was their wise decision in early 2020 that made me grounded at home for months, allowing me to have more spare and lonely time to work on my thesis.

Abstract

Atticus Finch is one of the most significant character in the two novels written by Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird and Go Set a Watchman. The younger Atticus in Mockingbird is well-known by readers for his integrity and wisdom, and is regard as a bridge over the racial gaps. The aged Atticus in Go Set a Watchman however, is portrayed as a segregationist who strongly opposes racial integration in the early year of the Civil Rights Movement.

This thesis systematically reviews the studies of former scholars, including those on the traits of Atticus Finch in each novel and others on the change of his characterization from different perspectives before stating their deficiencies and the novel dimension of the current research. This research is based on an assumption that Go Set a Watchman shares the same cultural and character settings with To Kill a Mockingbird, and there’s natural continuity between the two novels. Go Set a Watchman should not be regarded as a failure work and is also of enormous significance in anti-racism.

The purpose of the present study is to cover and analyze the change of Atticus Finch’s characterization from the perspective of New Historicism. In the body part of the thesis, the researchers first emphasize the continuity between To Kill a Mockingbird and Go Set a Watchman, then list the timings of the two stories and corresponding historical events after an introduction of the change of Atticus. Then, conflicts (between white Dixies and African Americans, between native folks and the federal government, and between conservatives and libertarians) are thoroughly studied accordingly to expose the reasons of the antagonism of the two utterly different images of Atticus Finch. Through the study on these conflicts, the researchers figure out the relations and interactivity between the change of Atticus and social background, reflecting what are the factors that prompt the change and what information is conveyed via the change.

The researchers believe the change of Atticus Finch is driven by many complicated elements and is reasonable, and it reveals the reality of intertwined social problems in Dixie states in certain periods.

Keywords: Atticus Finch; To Kill a Mockingbird; Go Set a Watchman; New Historicism

中文摘要

阿提克斯·芬奇是哈珀·李所著两部小说《杀死一只知更鸟》及《设立守望者》（又译《守望之心》）中的主要角色之一。在《知更鸟》中，阿提克斯因他的正直和睿智而广受读者喜爱；读者们也认为他弥合了种族间的鸿沟。但在《守望者》中，阿提克斯却被描绘为一名种族隔离主义者，在民权运动早期强烈反对种族融合的政策。

本文系统地回顾了前人的研究，包括一些学者对阿提克斯·芬奇在每部小说中的性格特征的研究，以及其他学者从不同角度对其人物塑造变化的研究，而后指出其不足之处和当前研究的新角度。本研究认为，《设立守望者》与《杀死一只知更鸟》有着相同的文化背景和人物设定，并且两部小说之间有着天然的连续性。同时，《设立守望者》不应该被视作一部失败作品，它在反种族主义方面同样意义巨大。

本研究旨在从新历史主义视角介绍并分析阿提克斯·芬奇的人物形象转变。论文首先强调分析了《杀死一只知更鸟》及《设立守望者》两作间的连续性，而后介绍了阿提克斯的具体形象转变，并通过图表列出两书故事情节上的时间轴及与之相关的历史事实。在此基础之上，通过对三对矛盾（美国南方白人与非裔之间的矛盾，当地人民与联邦政府的矛盾，以及保守主义者与自由主义者之间的矛盾）的一一详细研究，本文揭示了阿提克斯两种截然不同形象间对立的原因。通过对这些矛盾的研究，本文还明确了阿提克斯形象转变和社会背景间的联系及相互作用，确定了推动人物转变的因素以及这种转变所传达的信息。

本文认为，阿提克斯的转变是由多种复杂因素造成的，这种转变也是合情合理的。同时，这种转变也暴露了美国南部各州在特定历史时期错综复杂的社会问题。

关键词：阿提克斯·芬奇；《杀死一只知更鸟》；《设立守望者》；新历史主义

List of Tables

Table 3.1 Timings in two novels 10

Table 3.2 The brief history of African-American Civil Rights Movements 11

Introduction

In this section, relevant information of the research topic is introduced, including the author, the two novels covered, and the character of Atticus Finch.

1.1 Harper Lee

Harper Lee (1926-2016) is a modern American writer, the winner of the 1961 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and was awarded Presidential Medal of freedom in 2007.

Lee was born and grew up in Monroeville, Alabama. Her father, a lawyer, also ran a local newspaper. Her mother suffered from mental illness and oftentimes stayed inside from others. After leaving college without earning a degree, Lee moved to New York in the 1950s, took a job as an airline reservations clerk, and wrote her first novel during that time. Though she gained great fame after the success of To Kill a Mockingbird, she rarely granted interviews and only spoke through her literary agents. Unmarried for her whole life, she passed away in her hometown on February 19, 2016.

1.2 To Kill a Mockingbird and Go Set a Watchman

To Kill a Mockingbird, written by Harper Lee was published in 1960, which was then proved to be an immediate success and won the 1961 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. The story of Mockingbird takes place between 1933 and 1935 in a fictional town of Maycomb, Alabama, where a young colored man, Tom Robinson is accused of raping a white lady, and Atticus Finch is appointed to defend him. Atticus figures it out that the accusers, Mayella and her father Bob Ewell are lying. Despite Tom’s innocence is demonstrated, the jury convicts him, and Tom is shot dead while desperately trying to escape from prison. Following his humiliation at the trail, Bob Ewell attempts to take vengeance against Finch by attacking his two children, but is in turn fatally stabbed by Boo Radley, a mysterious neighbor of the Finches. The story is told by Atticus’s daughter, Jean Louise Finch (Scout) in first person perspective narration. During the 2 years, Scout has matured a lot and learned much about poverty, racism, injustice, and class divisions from her experience.

Go Set a Watchman, the sequel to Mockingbird is Lee’s second and last novel, was not published until 2015, more than half a century after the publishing of Mockingbird. It describes a story that happens in 1953. Jean Louise Finch, 26, returns to her hometown Maycomb from New York, only to find her family and friends have changed a lot. During her stay, she is horrified by discovering his father who bravely defends a black man falsely accused in Mockingbird sternly opposes against empowering the blacks in Maycomb with full civil right (Iannone, 2016:240). At the end of the story, Jean Louise finally “welcomes Atticus silently to the human race” (Lee, 2015:278). The story is written in third person perspective narration through the observation of Jean Louise. Watchman is also accepted as the first draft of Mockingbird, though it is set two decades after and was not published until half a century later.

2. Literature Review

Published in 1960, the Pulitzer Prize winner To Kill a Mockingbird has gain great reputation and fame for over half a century. As a widely read and influential work in American literature, it has caused huge social effects and wide academic responses. Overshadowed by the great success of Mockingbird and marked as its de facto manuscript, Go Set a Watchman is still regarded as a brilliant and compelling novel by critics.

2.1 Previous research on the classic image of Atticus Finch

Atticus Finch is one of the most important characters in both two novels. As an upright lawyer and benevolent father in Mockingbird, Atticus is usually viewed as a man of integrity. He is a father and lawyer of positive energy, who demands his children should learn to understand and respect others as a father and seeks truth as a lawyer (Feng, 2018:60). In Mockingbird, Atticus is doubted and sneered at as a “nigger-lover” by the white natives due to his defense for an innocent black people in the court. In that way, in study of the characterization of Atticus in Mockingbird, Failinger (1993-1994:303) concluded that Atticus is “a hero on his lonely path”.

2.2 Previous research on the changed Atticus Finch

Nevertheless, the publication of Go Set a Watchman in 2015 arouse great controversy to Atticus’s characterization. Readers are shocked by its depiction of Atticus Finch, for the wise and patient white lawyer who is a model of heroism and enlightenment in Mockingbird is found espousing segregationist views and forces us to consider and reconsider the classic status in Mockingbird (Iannone, 2016:240, 243). Because of the short period after the publication of Watchman, there are but scarce works on it, among which scholars have tried to understand and explain the abrupt change from different perspectives.

Some scholars take the change as a sort of disillusion. In 2015, Maureen Corrigan stated outright that “Watchman is a Mess that makes us reconsider a masterpiece”. Domestic authors Li and Xu argued that the image of a white Messiah shaped in Mockingbird is broken in Watchman, and thus allows readers to see a more vivid social background, visualizing the conflicts and tangles in the storm of segregation. The Atticus’s classic characterization collapsed, so did his heroic image that have lasted for 5 decades in readers’ mind. That’s why many people tend to believe the story of Watchman happens in a parallel world (Li amp;Xu, 2016). And many critics also pointed it out that reading Watchman is like swallowing harsh medicine, as this book is a better and more precise reflection of the time when Lee was writing. The rewrite itself represents the complexity of racial problems in the United States and brings the American readers with deep influence as well (Jiang, 2016). In an earlier investigation, Iannone asked his interviewees 4 questions about Lee’s works. In the last question, he required them to consider what effect Go Set a Watchman would put on the status of Lee and her first novel. Among the answers, Mark Bauerlein believes that the plot of trail in Mockingbird makes for good melodrama but bad history while Watchman is the opposite; Mary Grabar held the view that the dilemma in Watchman is eliminated by the change of time frame as well as the age the storyteller; Donald M. Hassler stated that Watchman is more like an essay, which aims to present solid exposition on the General Principles that were the foundation of the Old South; Peter Augustine Lawler took Atticus as a combination of virtues and vices and a model of democratized aristocrat in the mode of Thomas Jefferson (Iannone, 2016).

The New Historicism was developed in the United States in the early 1980s, and was soon be adopted in the study of British Renaissance and early modern literature, becoming one of the major movements in American literature research. It is against isolating the aesthetic form from the material world, and view art and history as two realms that intertwined but not disjoint. The New Historicists hold the view that literature is a production of society and in turn literature exerts significant impacts on society (Zhu, 2015). And studying one period in history for the sake of studying literature of that period is not enough, because it may finally come to a dead end. New Historicism should cross the periods like the process of the history (Liu, 1989). A truly historical understanding is one that based not on the knowledge of particular events but on the ability to generalize about continuity and change, to identify the shape of temporal movement and the facilitating conditions for that shape (Dimock, 1991).

Ma studied the image of Atticus in the book Mockingbird, its namesake movie and the book Watchman from the perspective of the New Historicism. In the research, Watchman is examined as a “self-fashioning work”. According to the author, Atticus ended up as a segregationist in Watchman from a gentle lawyer and anti-racist hero in Mockingbird, and the shift of Atticus reveals the how events in history and cultural background interact with human conscious through works of art (Ma, 2017).

This thesis, however, is defined by New Historicism in its premier outlook on fictional works. It is not extended to a monograph on literary theory, but employs the theory as a means of interpreting the targeted novels. The thesis studies the text from a macro perspective, covering a historical background that includes but is not limited to the fictional timing range with the purpose to fully investigate where the change of Atticus Finch’s characterization roots.

2.3 Need of the study

Though the laborious work of former researchers is of great values, a gap does exist between former and present researches. When analyzing Atticus’s characterization, existing studies mainly focus on one book or study the two separately. What’s more, some researchers are preoccupied with the cognition that Watchman is a failure compared with Mockingbird, resulting its being replaced by Mockingbird in the 1950s and the delay of publication for 6 decades. What the former researchers failed to see is that Watchman shares the same cultural and character settings with Mockingbird, and there’s natural consistency between the two novels. It is also a complementary work of Mockingbird in plots. Though the main thread of Watchman describes 3 days of Jean Louise’s stay at home when she’s 26, the book informs readers the contents concerned with Jean Louise’s childhood and adolescence through reminiscence and dialogue, filling the vacuum in plot between the timings of Mockingbird and Watchman and linking the two works together instead of denying the consistency. Therefore, an assumption is made in this thesis that Watchman in fact does not twist Atticus’s characterization, but enrich it. And the key of the thesis is to critically analyze the change of his characterization and the reason on the ground of the assumption.

3. Study on the Change of Atticus’s Characterization

3.1 Continuity between To Kill a Mockingbird and Go Set a Watchman

Before a detailed discussion, the continuity between To Kill a Mockingbird and Go Set a Watchman must be explained and acknowledged. The relationship between the two novels forms a foundation and condition for the research in the following subchapters. In this subchapter, the settings of both two novels are studied to expose the continuity.

3.1.1 Continuity in plots

It’s safe to say that Lee must have considered the continuity in plots when rewriting her first novel. We can deduce the precise time (table 3.1) from the text, for example the bill of Roosevelt implies that the story of Part 2 in Mockingbird happens in the year 1935, when the heroine is 8. That matches the timing of 1954 of Watchman, which can be concluded from the declaration of the Supreme Court with Jean Louise at her age of 26. The story of Watchman also contains the reminiscence of Jean Louise’s childhood and adolescence, matching the narration in Mockingbird.

In Watchman, when Jean Louise go back to the location of their old house, the memories of her neighbors and the adventures she shares with her elder brother Jem and their close friend Dill. Correspondingly, in Mockingbird, there are individual stories about these neighbors and the adventure of the three children, such as Jem reading books for Mrs. Dubose. Nevertheless, some paradox cannot be neglected, for example, according to Watchman, Atticus wins the lawsuit that defend Tom, but he loses it in Mockingbird, we can deduce that as the most important event in Mockingbird, the case of Tom Robinson should be given more description and more complicated conflicts are needed to strengthen the theme of the novel. It’s wise for the author to replace the result of the lawsuit, but the adaption imposes no negative effect on the continuity. Because the lawsuit happens 20 years before is of rather limited influence in Watchman.

3.1.2 Continuity in the theme

The focus of Watchman is the issue of racial segregation. Describing the experience of Jean Louise at her hometown, the novel reveals complicated society in the Southern United States. As a novel written by Dixie but for Yankees to read, the writer’s opinion or emotion is scarcely found in this work. The book just tells a story instead of trying to persuade. However, due to the style of narration, readers are more likely to favor Jean Louise while reading. In that way, a message is conveyed that racial equality is important, but many problems must be solved in the South before that and people in the North must be aware of the appeals in the South.

Mockingbird, on the other hand, consists of two lines of story, one is about Boo Radley, the other is the case of Tom Robinson. The two lines are unfolded parallelly and meet in the ending. Different from Watchman telling a 3-day-long story, Mockingbird has a much longer timeline with many independent but intact trivial stories, for example, Atticus shooting mad dog and Jem reading books for Mrs. Dubose. The complexity of Mockingbird allows readers to accept more educational concepts. The most significant one among them, without doubt is anti-racialism. And in Mockingbird, Lee’s attitude is clear, she shapes a perfect Atticus and stands firmly on his side. But the tragic hero of Atticus also exposes the heartless reality in South that Dixies refuse to accept the African Americans living with them. Considering that, a conclusion can be made that both of the books feature local literature and share the same theme of anti-racialism.

3.1.3 Continuity in characterization

The continuity in characterization is also considered by Lee except some adjustments to serve the plots and theme. For example, in the settings of Watchman, Jem has been dead of heart disease at the age of 28, so the description about him remains in the memories of Jean Louise. In Mockingbird, he is 10-year-old in Part I and 12 in Part II, he plays an important role in many events. And Boo Radley, a character can be found no trace in Watchman is a necessary role in Mockingbird, without who, the story of Mockingbird will be less interesting and the theme will be weakened. Except those adaptions, the heroine Jean Louise Finch remains a tenacious tomboy, Aunt Alexandra a conservative Dixie woman, Uncle Jack a humorous and knowledgeable doctor.

Then it comes to the object of the research, the characterization of Atticus Finch. One thing must be noted is that the abrupt change of Atticus is clearly mentioned in the novel, not coming from the outside of it. That implies Lee prepared the setting of a younger Atticus who strives for the equality nobly before writing Mockingbird. In the Watchman, the change is noted by Jean Louise, but no one else in town doubts or is surprised by the change of Atticus. A cruel fact comes up after these clues—the nobility and elegance of Atticus in Mockingbird become a disguise of his prejudice. When the disguise is removed in Watchman, the heroic image is “disillusioned”.

3.1.4 The change of Atticus Finch

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