The review, at New Rambler, discusses in part the views of Monroe Freedman and Stephen Lubet about Atticus Finch. (h/t: Faculty Lounge) Excerpt:
While it might then appear that I am in accord with the iconoclastic critics of theMockingbird Atticus, I am not. I understand the misreading of Atticus in a way that parts company with them. The problem is not, as these critics seem to think, thatMockingbird readers saw Atticus as a hero because they mistakenly thought he was a true racial egalitarian. The problem is that the readers saw Atticus as a radical egalitarian because, for other reasons, he was a hero, and it alleviates cognitive dissonance to believe our heroes are unsullied and uncompromised. Which is to say that, despite my criticisms of the Mockingbird Atticus, he is heroic. Facing considerable risks, he tried to save a man he hardly knew from a false charge of a capital crime.
The dangers were even more obvious than the racism, but also bear description. First, Atticus faced risk to his livelihood. The generalist practice of law is a socially conservative business and some southern lawyers of the 1930s had to leave their town to practice elsewhere after their community decided they had fought too hard to defend blacks accused of serious crimes against whites. Atticus also faced physical risks, starting with the lynch mob outside the jail where Tom Robinson was held. That the newspaper editor, Mr. Underwood, was hiding in the shadows prepared to intervene with a shotgun on Atticus’ behalf merely confirms the potential for injury or death if the mob had pushed past him, which would likely have transpired but for Scout’s accidental intervention. Atticus faced an added danger from impugning the credibility of the Ewells at trial. In retaliation, Bob Ewell tried to provoke Atticus into a fight by spitting into his face and, when that failed, tried to murder his young children with a knife. Atticus did not stay home when the lynch mob formed and he did not play it safe by offering a perfunctory defense for Robinson, as his community expected.
Like most readers, I therefore revere the Atticus Finch of Mockingbird. Partly I admire him because he led his white community in the right direction, towardsracial justice, however impossible it would be for him to lead or push very far given his compromised moral vision and the ultimate need for black leaders to mobilize mass action. More importantly, however, I revere Atticus because he was willing to take serious risks with his life and reputation to stand for the limited justice his conscience demanded. If there were white radicals in the fictional town of Maycomb, Alabama, I would join others in praising the superiority of their vision of racial justice. But I would also lament the fact that, unlike Atticus, their courage apparently failed them and they remain invisible in the novel, realistically so, as they were frequently (though not always) invisible in small towns throughout the 1930s Jim Crow South. When it comes to preventing or correcting injustice, sometimes the world works this way: the courageous but compromised individual accomplishes more than the principled but timid one. Here, I think of the fact that the Yad Vashem in Israel bestows the honorific “righteous among the nations” on non-Jews for having risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust, not for holding the best, most enlightened views of Jews. There was never reason to think Atticus had the most enlightened views of African-Americans, but when the racist mob came for Tom Robinson, he did more than speak out.
For that reason, the contrarian criticisms from Freedman, Gladwell, and Lubet, and the like, always struck me as strangely miserly with praise, as if they share in common with the deifiers of Atticus Finch the inability to abide a flawed hero. More generally, I have always suspected that much of the criticism and occasional disdain for Mockingbird and the Mockingbird Atticus is inspired by the novel’s best-seller status, its being required reading in many public schools, and the sanitized popular understanding of Atticus, all factors about the public reaction to the novel rather than the novel itself. If there were any one race novel good enough to require millions of school children to read, to prompt difficult discussions of race, it would plausibly no longer be a novel set in the 1930s South when the salient racism was so overt and vicious that it makes it difficult for white readers to recognize contemporaries in the racists of the story, who are entirely too easy to condemn. As inventive as it was to tell the story though an unreliable narrator, an eight-year old girl, any singular literary introduction to race would contain deeper depictions of the victims of racism, who are mostly beyond Scout’s comprehension.