She doesn't seem to even care about the Civil Rights struggles of black people in the South. It's the fact that he thinks differently than she does. However, it isn't necessarily Atticus's racism that bothers Jean Louise. She's so messed up by this revelation that she literally pukes. "It hurts so much I can't stand it." (10.25) It's an agonizing revelation for this young woman who idolized her father (and for every reader who idolizes Atticus):Įvery nerve in her body shrieked, then died. Here, instead of seeing her father as a heroic white savior, Jean Louise sees her father's racist motivations. The scene in Watchman is significantly different. In a bit of symbolism echoing that of Mockingbird, Jean Louise witnesses it from the Colored balcony of the Maycomb County courthouse, where, in that book, she watched her father defend an innocent black man from rape charges by a lying white woman. She suffers a crisis of conscience during the course of Go Set a Watchman when she sees her father, Atticus, at a racist town meeting. (And yes, we're editorializing.) Blue Jean Her need to poke and prod people for no reason other than to humor herself. But, uh, behavior that was cute in a nine-year-old isn't so much in a twenty-six-year-old. And we often get flashbacks to her youth, which only serve to illustrate how little she has grown. She childishly flirts with her beau, Henry, who tells her, "Don't be such a damn child, Jean Louise" (1.69). She continues her rebellion against society itself by changing into her "Maycomb clothes" (1.5), which are monochrome pants, a blouse, and loafers, a uniform which serves the double purpose of being comfortable and annoying Jean Louise's traditional aunt, Alexandra.
Within the book's first two pages, she "ignore an injunction" (1.3) to strap down a folding bed on a train, and she gets trapped in it.
But she still does whatever she wants to do, sometimes to her own detriment.
She now lives in New York City Lives, where she "beat brains out all year round" (2.51). Yep, in the time between To Kill a Mockingbirdand Go Set a Watchman, she aged to a whopping twenty-six years old. We haven't seen her in about 17 years in book time (and 55 years in real time). Jean Louise Finch-you know her better as scrappy, overalls-wearing Scout-returns home to Maycomb, Alabama.
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