Go Set a Watchman: Part 4, Chapter 12 Summary & Analysis

Here Lee hints at the motif of the mockingbird that would give its title to To Kill a Mockingbird: the idea of something beautiful and fragile that is crushed by human hatred or violence. Here Lee loosely connects the flashback to the present with the idea of Jean Louise waking up happy and then remembering the horrible truth.

Jean Louise truly returns to her familiar Maycomb world—now facing Atticus as well as Alexandra—and finds that nothing has changed except herself. Before this morning she just hadn’t considered the possibility of anything unsavory mixed in with Atticus’s familiar character. The “diminished” physicality of the arthritic Atticus mirrors how he has been diminished in Jean Louise’s eyes. That she cannot look at him attests to how devastating this diminishment is for her.

Clearly Hank isn’t ashamed of being part of the citizens’ council, as he even saw Jean Louise watching and waved to her. Jean Louise sees that nothing seems different about Atticus or Hank, so she blames herself for somehow becoming different and unlike them. Atticus and Hank's comments about Jean Louise seeing a doctor again suggests a latent level of sexism in Maycomb, as a woman being upset is seen as a sign of her being ill (as if there might not be any other legitimate reason for her to be upset).

This echoes the main conflict in Mockingbird, where Atticus decides to defend a black man against a white woman. Now Atticus does something similar, and so Jean Louise gets a glimpse of hope that maybe he still is the same Atticus she had idealized. At the very least she expects him to be loyal to Calpurnia and her family.

Jean Louise’s hope is shattered when Atticus reveals his real reason for wanting to take the case. In Mockingbird (and Jean Louise’s rosy memory) he seemed only interested in objective justice, but now he is playing politics and has no real concern for Calpurnia’s grandson.

Here Lee explicitly states the theme of disillusionment, as Jean Louise has her comfortable shell broken all at once. It seems late in her life for this to happen, but finally her eyes are opened and so are those of the readers who idolized Atticus like she did. Her decision to visit Calpurnia seems like an attempt to try to find at least some vestige of the past she remembered.

Once again this scene almost requires the experience of Mockingbird, as the reader of Watchman alone wouldn’t feel particularly attached to Jean Louise as “Scout.” Jean Louise thinks of Atticus as having drastically changed, as having died, instead of having always had a side she was blind to.

Jean Louise is feeling especially homeless right now, now that those closest to her seem to have betrayed her, so it confuses her pure anger and pain to hear Mr. Fred talk about how important Maycomb is as a home. As a result of this Jean Louise starts to blame herself instead of Atticus and Hank and Maycomb. They seem unchanged, so she decides that she must have somehow changed.

This is the only real interaction with black characters Lee portrays in Watchman, and it serves mostly to heighten the sense of division and distrust that emerged between blacks and whites in the South after the 1954 Supreme Court decision. Whites reacted with anger to the imposed decision and its mandates (whether for racial reasons or states rights reasons or both), and Blacks suddenly saw in this moment of gaining new rights that even their “friends” among the whites were only friends when whites were acknowledged by all as superior. Jean Louise was friends with many of Calpurnia’s family members as a child, but now they step away from her as one—and with good reason, considering the kind of hatred and racism we saw at the citizens’ council.

Jean Louise expects at least Calpurnia to remain familiar and comfortable, but when men like Atticus are attending citizens’ council meetings it has tragic results. Blacks are in danger of systematic oppression and even violence, and so naturally they are wary of whites like Jean Louise. Jean Louise only sees the personal side of this, the rupturing of her personal relationship with Calpurnia, and so is deeply hurt.

For her part, Calpurnia has clearly been hurt by the sudden anti-integration movement, and more personally she probably feels betrayed by Atticus just like Jean Louise does. While Calpurnia shaking her head suggests that the personal relationships that Jean Louise remembers were in fact real, the pause before hand also suggests that for Calpurnia it was always more complicated and that perhaps Calpurnia always saw Atticus with clearer eyes than Jean Louise did.

Jean Louise still can’t see the larger political and social forces being played out in Maycomb, so she sees only personal betrayals. Now Calpurnia, her last link to her sense of home and belonging, seems to have disappeared too.

Jean Louise tries to return to her old naiveté as Scout, but she cannot now that she has seen the truth. Calpurnia did clearly love the Finches, but that doesn’t mean she wasn’t constantly aware that they were in the position of power over her. Jean Louise suddenly remembering the children’s rhyme shows that the racism she is seeing is not anything new—she has just been blind to it.