🎧 Listen Here
“Respect for a person’s conscience does not mean accepting moral relativism.”
~ John Paul II, 1993, para. 32-34
Ask yourself a couple questions: Are moral standards culturally-defined making it impossible to determine what is truly right or wrong? Or, is it true that each person created “in the image of God” and so possess both the capacity and responsibility to seek moral truth and follow it? Where do you land and why?
These questions matter because buried inside Go Set a Watchman, under the slow pacing and the difficult protagonist and the conversations that make modern readers deeply uncomfortable, live one of the most precise and devastating portraits of conscience formation put on an American page. Sadly, nobody talks about it because almost nobody finishes the book.
But we’re going to finish it today. And we’re going to unearth the gifts contained within.
The Unlikeable Hero: Jean Louise Finch
Jean Louise is not an easy character to like. Opinionated, self-righteous, impatient, and absolutely certain that she sees more clearly than the people around her, she has the particular confidence of someone who has left a small town and believes that departure alone is the same as wisdom. She lectures. She bristles. She judges. She is also right about a great many things—the Supreme Courts decision that obliterated the 10th Amendment of the Constitution—as well as her instincts about justice, about human dignity, about the ugliness of what she witnesses at that Citizens’ Council meeting. But being right does not mean your conscience is formed or that you have achieved real understanding. And she doesn’t. She has reactivity that leads to destruction, not resolution or even love.
The Catholic Catechism says conscience is man’s most secret core and his sanctuary, there he is alone with God whose voice echoes in his depths. It is not a feeling. It is not an opinion. It is not what your father believes.
Jean Louise has a certain conscience but that is very different than a formed one. She has inherited Atticus’s moral clarity by has bypassed what he went through to form his own questions. He has wrestled, his brother has wrestled too, but Jean Louise has not. And she’s never had to test her convictions against reality, against love, against violence, and against the complexity of people she knows and cannot simply dismiss. Up to the crisis in the book, Jean Louise just knew — because Atticus knew — and that was enough. Until it isn’t.
The Plot is what . . . Rebirth? Or Voyage and Return?
At first, it might seem a Voyage and Return plot. Jean Louise leaves her world, comes home, finds it threatening, escapes back to herself. That arc is present. But Rebirth is the deeper truth of what I believe is actually happening to Jean Louise.
In each of these stories we see the heroine first falling under the shadow of the dark power when she is very young. For a while it still seems to be comfortably remote, although we are aware of it unresolved and menacing in the background. Then there is a mounting sense of threat as the dark power approaches, until finally it emerges in full force, freezing the heroine in its deadly grip. Only after a long time, when it seems that the dark power has completely triumphed, does the reversal take place; when the heroine is miraculously redeemed from her imprisonment by the life-giving power of love.” (Page194-5)
- The vulnerable heroine with limited awareness falls under the shadow of a dark power, and Booker writes that that power may spring from her own personality and enthrall her. In Jean Louise’s case it does. Precisely. But the dark power is not Atticus. The dark power is her own unexamined certainty. Her own borrowed conscience elevated to absolute truth. Her own ideas of what is right and just but these are ideas she has never had to test because Atticus’s version of them was always there to confirm her.
- She is enthralled by her own righteousness. And the poison of it. It’s the slow freeze of a conscience that has never been truly tested and that has been working on her for years without her knowing it.
- Things go well for a while. The warmth of homecoming. Henry Clinton. Aunt. The familiar streets. The threat seems distant.
- Then the floor drops. She goes to the courthouse. She looks down from the balcony. And there is Atticus — her father, her watchman, her entire moral foundation — sitting at a Citizens’ Council meeting. The world does not just feel wrong. Her understanding of the world has been catastrophically wrong. The man she built everything on is not who she thought he was. Or is he?
What Atticus Finch is actually saying and doing:
Before hitting number five, let’s talk through this turning point of the whole book. In that confrontation when Jean Louise calls her father every name in the book and accuses him of believing that Black citizens can only go so far. That Jesus loves them less. That they need to be kept down, she’s missing it. Atticus never said any of those things. She says them.
What Atticus argues is narrower and more specific. He argues against federal government overreach. Against outside organizations imposing change on a community from above. Against the mechanism and pace of forced integration, not against the destination. His concern is about who governs Maycomb. He believes change imposed from Washington without the formation of local conscience produces resentment and backlash rather than genuine progress. He believes you cannot legislate a conscience. You can only form one.
That is a gradualist argument not a white supremacist one. And Jean Louise, blinded by her own rage, with her borrowed and untested certainty, cannot yet distinguish between the two.This is her failure and it’s not emotional but intellectual. Worse, she’s not listening. A formed conscience listens before it judges. Jean Louise is not there yet.
And turning this whole thing around, falsely accused and not listened to, Atticus says three words that become one of the hinges of the entire book: As you wish.
She has told him she’s leaving. She has called him everything she can think of. She has prepared to sever the most important relationship of her life.
And he says: As you wish.
This is a man brimming with love. 1 Corinthians 13 love that “does not insist on its own way, that bears all things, hopes all things, endures all things.”
Remember The Princess Bride and Wesley saying “as you wish” to Buttercup. In that story, it meant I love you. It means you come first. It means I will be a farm boy to your pompous certainty if that is what love requires. In Watchman, those words mean, “Your freedom matters more to me than my vindication.” And in that that act of true, unselfish, unconditional, and non-grasping love awakens her. And now we tip into number five of the Rebirth plot: The Heroine miraculously wakes, liberated through the power of love. The rescuer is often a child representing goodness and light (Tiny Tim), or a figure of the opposite sex, representing the “complete Self.” Atticus is the figure of the opposite sex.
The Mother. The Stunting. And the Gift
There is a line Jean Louise delivers almost as a joke that is actually one of the most important lines in the book. She tells Atticus he should have remarried so she could have been raised a proper Southern woman, like Auntie. And this takes us back up the plot chart to the falling that creates this elder Jean Louise. She lost her mother young and Atticus raised her which means she was formed almost entirely in his image, by his values, inside his moral atmosphere. There was no counterweight and no other adult voice with a different formation, a different set of certainties, a different way of seeing.
It stunted her in the sense that she never developed the fully rounded social formation a mother figure in that Southern context would have provided. The feminine grammar of Maycomb with all the proprieties, the expectations, the careful social navigation is something she has no patience for because she was never shaped by it. But it’s also what sets her free. Atticus gave her something most Southern women of her generation never received. Permission to think. Permission to question. Permission to be a mind first and a social creature second. The freedom that made her an alien in her own hometown is the same freedom that makes her the only person equipped for what comes next.
Uncle Jack: The Second Necessary Hinge
Dr. John Hale Finch, Uncle Jack is a retired physician, an eccentric, and brilliant. He’s the person in this story who actually understands what is happening and refuses to let it end in disaster. To stop that disaster, he slaps Jean Louise very much in the way a doctor slaps a baby that’s just born. Jean Louise is that baby only she’s twenty+ years old.
Jean Louise is in full flight. Not just emotionally, she is preparing to make a permanent decision that cuts Atticus off and severe famille relationships. She is ready to declare her father a moral monster and herself free of him. She is doing what our culture now calls healthy, what therapists encourage young people to do right and left, which is blame the parents and cut them out of their lives in order to “have a life” but this is the supremacy error, and one Jean Louise is about to make. She’s treating her own devastation as the final moral word. Uncle Jack will not let her do this.
Paired with Atticus’s: As you will and I love you, Uncle Jack steps in and completes the picture of what love does in the formation of a conscience. One holds open the door (the birthing). One prevents the flight (the slap). Both are necessary. And then Uncle Jack talks to her for a very long time and right away, points out she is the bigot in the room.
Jean Louise rose and went to the bookshelves. She pulled down a dictionary and leafed through it. “‘Bigot,'” she read. “‘Noun. One obstinately or intolerably devoted to his own church, party, belief or opinion.’ Explain yourself, sir.”
“I was just tryin’ to answer your running question. Let me elaborate a little on that definition. What does a bigot do when he meets someone who challenges his opinions? He doesn’t give. He stays rigid. Doesn’t even try to listen, just lashes out. Now you, you were turned inside out by the granddaddy of all Father things, so you ran. And how you ran.“
Uncle Jack explains what this whole story is about and yes, the slap is shocking, surprising, jarring and challenging to our sensibilities but the point he’s making here is that the core structure was in her and had always been in her (like the ruby slippers in The Wizard of Oz). And the fact that she was so furious and unable to simply agree with Atticus, unable to simply walk away, and unable to pretend none of it mattered was all a sign that her conscience was there and working.
“You are not losing yourself, Jean Louise,” Uncle Jack says. “You are, for the first time, finding yourself.”
And then he gifts her one of her core gifts (the one that was part of her original self) which is that she’s never seen color.
In a town entirely organized around color, that cannot see past it on either side, this is the thing that makes Jean Louise unlike everyone else in the conversation. She grew up so close to Calpurnia, so genuinely unseeing of color, so formed by a father who told her to climb inside another person’s skin and walk around in it that the filter simply never developed. This is her immaturity in one sense, she cannot fully inhabit the reality of people who see color because she has never had to build that particular awareness. Her innocence is real. And a conscience that cannot account for how the world actually operates is not yet fully formed. But it is also her formation. Tested now. Real now. Not naivety anymore but a genuine and hard-won quality. A Southerner who truly does not see color. Who loves Maycomb and cannot accept what Maycomb does. Who is equipped to be something the conversation has never had.
The Finch
Harper Lee did not name this family the Mockingbirds but the Finchs. The mockingbird is pure innocence. It only sings. It harms nothing. And the world destroys it. IE: Tom Robinson, Boo Radley. The mockingbird cannot protect itself. But the little finch is different. It’s small, unassuming and extraordinarily resilient surviving in almost every climate on earth. It does not mimic like the mockingbird but it sings something native to itself and that comes from its own formed interior.
In medieval Christian iconography the goldfinch appears in paintings of the Madonna and Child. The infant Jesus holds a goldfinch because the finch was believed to eat thorns and thistles, and its red marking was said to come from a drop of Christ’s blood when it tried to remove a thorn from the crown of thorns.
The finch touches what hurts. And survives it.
Jean Louise approaches the thorn. The courthouse, the confrontation, the shattering of everything she thought she was. She sustains the wound. She does not die from it. She does not flee it permanently. She survives it. Marked. Changed. Formed. And her nickname, Scout is a military term for the one who goes ahead of the main body into unknown territory and reports back what she sees.
Jean Louise is a Finch who scouts. A songbird who goes first. And she is likely coming back to Maycomb, not as Hank’s wife, that would be the expected resolution, the social grammar of the town asserting itself one last time, but as a Finch. She will take up the mantle that Jem, the firstborn son and natural heir, couldn’t.
Jean Louise then is the next generation. The true heir. Formed in fire. And she’s carrying what was best in Atticus forward and further.
🤔 Questions to Ponder:
Either take up the discussion born in you with the two questions that started this teaching: Are moral standards culturally-defined making it impossible to determine what is truly right or wrong? Or, is it true that each person created “in the image of God” and so possess both the capacity and responsibility to seek moral truth and follow it? Where do you land and why?
Or ask yourself this one: Who is your Atticus? Not an enemy. Not a villain. The person you loved so completely that their moral certainty became yours and you called it formation when it was really devotion. What would it take for their floor to drop? And if it did, would you leave? Or would you stay, and do the harder, slower, more terrifying work of finding out what you actually believe? Perhaps do a bit of writing about these core questions and bring to class.
