What are we-we readers and watchers and admirers of Atticus Finch as a father and a fighter, we who have embraced his heady symbolism, we who have named our children in his honor, we who have, finally, no say at all in his fictive fate-to make of that shift? What are we to do upon learning that the man who was so stubborn in his sense of justice has chosen, in the end, to live on the wrong side of history? Syllabi and screens and the soft promises of imagined worlds have made Atticus an intimate figure in many lives suddenly, though-literally overnight-there are multiple Atticuses (Attici?), and they represent not just competing characters, but competing cosmologies. “The Negroes down here,” this Atticus observes, “are still in their childhood as a people.” His fatherliness has eroded into paternalism. He has attended a meeting of the Ku Klux Klan. This Atticus has rejected the work of the NAACP. This Atticus, now aged 72, spouts “abhorrent views on race and segregation,” The New York Times’ review of Harper Lee’s latest novel, Go Set a Watchman, announced, with equal parts shock and sadness. An Atticus who is both distressingly new and distressingly old, and who is, in pretty much every way possible, the antithesis of the legend and the lore. Harper Lee-or, more specifically, the Harper Lee industrial complex, an amalgam of author and lawyer and publishing house-has given readers another Atticus. Why You Should Wait Out the Wild Housing Market Derek ThompsonĪnd now we’re reminded of how erroneous that assumption was. He was Maycomb’s, yes, and he was Scout’s, and he was Harper Lee’s, and he was Hollywood’s. We acclaimed Atticus in the process, though, we claimed him. The Atticus who, at some hazy point in American history, made the epic leap from “literary character” to “legend”-smoothed of edges, lightened of humanity, diffused into literature and life as a kind of universal father figure.
“You never really understand a person,” Atticus once said, “until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.”īut that is the Atticus of To Kill a Mockingbird, the beloved novel and movie and meme. The man who taught many people-young people, in particular-that most fundamental of life lessons: that justice must find its basis, if it is to have any hope at all, in empathy. The man to whom many practicing lawyers have attributed their interest in legal work and who, over the years, has lent his name not only to children and pets, but also to production companies and vintage shops and clothing lines and nonprofits and bookstores and bars.
Ever” and “ the greatest hero of American film,” the man whose wisdom concerns everything from “ manliness” to “ leadership” to “ life” itself. The man who has been dubbed one of the “ all-time coolest heroes in pop culture” and the “ Best.
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