{"id":94844,"date":"2016-02-22T18:08:32","date_gmt":"2016-02-22T23:08:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=94844"},"modified":"2016-02-22T18:48:11","modified_gmt":"2016-02-22T23:48:11","slug":"my-harper-lee-sparknotes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/02\/22\/my-harper-lee-sparknotes\/","title":{"rendered":"My Harper Lee SparkNotes"},"content":{"rendered":"

Writing the SparkNotes\u00a0<\/em>for\u00a0<\/em>Go Set a Watchman.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

From the cover of Go Set a\u00a0<\/em>Watchman<\/i>.<\/p><\/div>\n

Context<\/strong><\/p>\n

The summer when I was eight, I read two books: A Tree Grows in Brooklyn<\/em> and To Kill a Mockingbird<\/em>. My copy of Mockingbird<\/em> was a cheap lilac paperback. Its cover featured the knot of a tree with a pocket watch and a ball of yarn inside, a mockingbird stamped in silhouette. In the corner, a crescent moon as thin as a tea-stain rose above a clot of green trees.<\/p>\n

I lived inside that book. I read it, reread it, and reread it again, sitting in an attic bedroom of my grandparents\u2019 house, hunched on the green shag carpet. I remember the book in discrete images: Dill\u2019s duckweed-like tufts of hair. Slimy Mr. Ewell leering at his daughter. Miss Maudie\u2019s house going up in flames, like a pumpkin, and her prized azaleas frozen and charred in the aftermath. Crotchety, liver-spotted Mrs. Dubose with her perfect camellias, ivory and globular against the glossy leaves. The day when Jem, in a sudden rampage, snatches Scout\u2019s baton and shears off all the buds and flowers on the camellia bushes. And then, when Mrs. Dubose dies, the white box that her servant gives to Jem with one pristine, waxy camellia resting inside. To Kill a Mockingbird<\/em> showed me how to create a fully realized, sensory world.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Plot Overview<\/strong><\/p>\n

Last August, I wrote the SparkNotes for Go Set a Watchman<\/em>. If, as Henry James wrote, a work of fiction is a house with a million windows, SparkNotes are condo units: they\u2019re all the same size and shape, whether they summarize The Outsiders<\/em> or War and Peace<\/em>. And each is compartmentalized into familiar rubrics: summary, analysis, themes, symbols, motifs, context, character list, analysis of major characters, and, of course, a multiple-choice quiz.<\/p>\n

SparkNotes started in 1999, when four Harvard graduates dreamed up TheSpark.com, a portal to host their new matchmaking service. Since TheSpark\u2019s target audience was high school and college students, the founders posted literature study guides to lure them in. Eventually, dating and studying were uncoupled: the matchmaking site became OkCupid and the study guides became SparkNotes\u2014essentially CliffsNotes for the Internet age. (Both deploy\u00a0CamelCase<\/a>, a medial capital in a compound word.) An early ad for the service described the difference between the two: \u201cCliffsNotes cost money \u2026 but \u2026 SparkNotes are FREE!\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Character List <\/strong><\/p>\n

Harper Lee
HarperCollins
SparkNotes
My grandparents
The Internet
Jean Louise Finch
Atticus Finch
Me<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Analysis of Major Characters<\/strong><\/p>\n

Harper Lee\u2019s death, on February 19, 2016, inspired a flood of tributes. John Green, who has produced a Crash Course video about To Kill a Mockingbird<\/em> for PBS, wrote a short series of elegiac tweets to commemorate Lee: \u201cThe great Harper Lee has died at the age of eighty-nine \u2026 When my son Henry was born, Ms. Lee signed a copy of [Green\u2019s] Looking for Alaska<\/em> for him with the inscription, \u2018Welcome to the world Henry Atticus.\u2019 \u2026 That book is my most prized possession. Ms. Lee lived a private life, but she was quietly and extraordinarily generous.\u201d<\/p>\n

When I graduated from high school, my grandparents gave me a new, hardbound copy of To Kill a Mockingbird. <\/em>When I opened it, two handwritten notes slid out:<\/p>\n

\n

2-6-\u201806<\/em><\/p>\n

Dear Mr. Murray Raphel:<\/em><\/p>\n

One thing the recent\u00a0New York Times<\/u>\u00a0piece did not say is that because of my failing eyesight it is difficult for me to sign books. I sign mostly by touch now.<\/em><\/p>\n

You would oblige me if you would accept the signed tip-in instead of sending me a book.<\/em><\/p>\n

Sincerely,<\/em><\/p>\n

Harper Lee<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The \u201ctip-in\u201d reads:<\/p>\n

\n

To Adrienne<\/em><\/p>\n

with all good wishes,\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Harper Lee<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

 <\/p>\n

Themes, Motifs, and Symbols<\/strong><\/p>\n

When I was growing up, Harper Lee was beloved in part for the scarcity of her work: she\u2019d contributed a single gem to the literary canon, one that made her an untouchable icon. That changed, of course, in February 2015\u2014as soon as HarperCollins announced the publication of Go Set a Watchman<\/em>, my grandmother ordered me a copy. Between February and the book\u2019s publication in July, my sense of dread eclipsed my anticipation. Go Set a Watchman<\/em> was riddled with controversy before anyone had even read it\u2014and it was still more problematic afterward.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Summary and Analysis<\/strong><\/p>\n

Writing SparkNotes can get your endorphins flowing in the same strange way that taking a standardized test does. When you take the job, you receive a style guide\u2014essentially SparkNotes on writing SparkNotes. I got a crash course on the difference between \u201cthemes,\u001b\u201d \u201cmotifs,\u201d and \u201csymbols,\u201d and what level of detail I should use to describe each major character.<\/p>\n

Go Set a Watchman<\/em> is structured as though Harper Lee retrofitted it for the exact specifications of a SparkNote. Unlike some of its competitors, SparkNotes subdivides its summary and analysis: a chunk of summary, a chunk of analysis, et cetera. Any given SparkNote is divided into seven parts with nineteen chapters of roughly equal size.<\/p>\n

To write my Note, I put myself in the same state as my imagined reader: a state of desperation. I wrote the detailed summary and analysis portions throughout the a week, but I left myself just twelve hours before the deadline to pound through the rest. I did everything I tell my students not<\/em> to do: I checked my summary against Wikipedia, I tracked down listicles to crowd source the book\u2019s most important quotations, and I found myself trying to cheat off the SparkNotes for To Kill a Mockingbird<\/em>. What trait is Atticus Finch best known for: his integrity, his morality, or his dignity? What\u2019s another way of saying \u201csleepy Southern town\u201d? With twenty minutes to spare, I spell-checked and turned it in.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Important Quotations Explained<\/strong><\/p>\n

I wasn\u2019t particularly moved by Watchman<\/em> itself. Much of the dialogue is about as subtle as an anvil\u2014\u201cHank, we are poles apart. I don\u2019t know much but I know one thing. I can\u2019t live with you\u201d\u2014and the plot doesn\u2019t make much sense. Jean Louise, age twenty-six, returns to Maycomb for a visit with her beloved father, Atticus. She flirts with an old boyfriend, Hank. Though he\u2019s a perfectly eligible young man, he seems to be convinced that he and Jean Louise will get married, although they only date for a few days a year. Jean Louise sees Atticus and Hank at a meeting of the Maycomb County Citizens\u2019 Council, a white-supremacist group; the meeting takes place in the same courthouse where Atticus had defended Tom Robinson at the climax of To Kill a Mockingbird<\/em>. Jean Louise, disgusted, wanders around town in a blind rage. Jean Louise wanders around Maycomb for a while, overcome with nostalgia and nausea. Eventually, her Uncle Jack slaps sense into her, and she suddenly realizes that her destiny is to remain in Maycomb, though not to marry Hank.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Key Facts<\/strong><\/p>\n

Writing the Note, I entered into a state of heightened clarity. I saw the book in clear, interwoven patterns, like a metro map. Each theme and motif snaked confidently across the map in bright lines of color, tracing a twisted but steady line through the city. Symbols dotted the map, radiating themes and motifs. I had the distinct sense that I was making everything up as I went along: \u201cThe Depth of Family Ties\u201d is a theme! \u201cFlashbacks\u201d is a motif! \u201cWatchman\u201d is a symbol! I wrote each one with the bravura that comes with caffeine and the braggadocio that comes with an impending deadline. What was seemingly arbitrary suddenly congealed into cohesive patterns.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Study Questions<\/strong><\/p>\n

One spring, while I was teaching an introductory\u00a0literature course, one of my students\u2019 final papers seemed fishy. \u201cJanie\u201d had been a straightforward B student, consistently semi-engaged and solidly grammatical, if uninspired. But her paper on Lewis Carroll\u2019s Through the Looking-Glass <\/em>was different: suddenly, she was giving interpretations of the book that tracked motifs, themes, and symbols. When had Janie learned how to analyze? And the writing seemed odd, polished yet Frankensteined, as though she\u2019d written it in discrete chunks of time and sutured it together.<\/p>\n

I submitted Janie\u2019s paper to turnitin.com<\/a>, a plagiarism detection site, and the essay immediately returned flushed in red. She\u2019d copy-and-pasted over 80 percent of her paper almost verbatim from SparkNotes. When I confronted Janie, she wrote to me\u2014nested inside profuse apologies\u2014\u201cI will admit that I had taken part from those Web sites and put them in my work, but I intended on just looking at those ideas and reconstructing them into my own.\u201d<\/p>\n

Should I feel guilty about creating a piece of writing that potentially millions of students across America will attempt to plagiarize? Or should I be deeply flattered? Should I be nervous that my cobbled-together interpretations of Watchman<\/em> might become literary dogma?<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Suggested Essay Topics<\/strong><\/p>\n

My grandmother is one of the most voracious and thoughtful readers I know. When her three children went to college, she decided she wanted to go back and finish her degree. In 1980, at age fifty, while still working full time, she graduated from Stockton University, in New Jersey, with a B.A. in literature. My grandmother didn\u2019t use cheat sheets: she was there to read, and read she did. After reading Go Set a Watchman<\/em>, she e-mailed our family with her review of the novel, which began, \u201cIt is a flawed novel and probably would never have seen the light of day if it didn\u2019t have the name of Harper Lee as author.\u201d<\/p>\n

At first, I was afraid to admit to my grandmother that I was writing the SparkNotes. Not only was I writing a thing that would help students skate by without actually reading the book, I was doing it for a book she didn\u2019t even like. And this wasn\u2019t just any author: this was our Harper Lee.<\/p>\n

But my grandmother couldn\u2019t have been more delighted. The idea of writing SparkNotes\u2014once I explained to her exactly what it was\u2014struck her as delightful. My grandmother has lived her entire life in Atlantic City, and you can\u2019t live in that town for so long without some love of the ethically ambiguous. As a little girl, before she knew what she was doing, she used to run numbers in the back parlor of her father\u2019s hotel. I was afraid that Go Set a Watchman<\/em> would tarnish my grandmother\u2019s love of To Kill a Mockingbird<\/em>, and that my SparkNotes would be another layer of disappointment. But she saw what I saw: a way to live inside the book.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Suggestions for Further Reading<\/strong><\/p>\n

I use SparkNotes. I also use LitCharts, Shmoop, Masterplots, Wikipedia, and many other such sites. I don\u2019t use them instead of the book; I use them to figure out if I\u2019ve missed anything. I also use the book to figure out if the sites have missed anything. But they\u2019re different things. A map of a country and the country itself both offer distinct joys of immersion, but they\u2019re separate experiences.<\/p>\n

Posterity will probably let Go Set a Watchman<\/em> fade, or at least let it slip into the same corner of the bookshelf as Madeleine L\u2019Engle\u2019s Many Waters<\/em>, or Louisa May Alcott\u2019s Little Men<\/em>, or L. M. Montgomery\u2019s Rilla of Ingleside<\/em>: lesser-known novels that feature the same characters as their more famous counterparts. They aren\u2019t necessarily bad books, but aren\u2019t necessarily good, either. If you love the little orphan Anne in her Green Gables, loquacious, pigtailed days of Anne of Green Gables<\/em>, the motherly, capable Anne with six children doesn\u2019t change or ruin the other Anne, just as the so-called bigoted Atticus in Watchman<\/em> doesn\u2019t change the Atticus of Mockingbird<\/em>.<\/p>\n

My SparkNotes will never get the same kind of readership as the Note for To Kill a Mockingbird<\/em>. And that\u2019s fine. I don\u2019t feel any kind of ownership over my Note. I\u2019m not sure I\u2019ll ever read it again. But I do feel like I have a deeper awareness of the mind that went into Go Set a Watchman<\/em>. Through To Kill a Mockingbird<\/em>, Lee taught me how to experience the sensory world. By letting me into her mind in writing Go Set a Watchman<\/em>, Lee gave me the heightened clarity of living in the map.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Quiz<\/strong><\/p>\n

What is a Watchman?<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. A Theme<\/li>\n
  2. A Motif<\/li>\n
  3. A Symbol<\/li>\n
  4. A Major Character<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    What is CamelCase?<\/p>\n

      \n
    1. Using medial capitals in a compound word (e.g.,\u00a0SparkNotes<\/em>,\u00a0CliffsNotes<\/em>)<\/li>\n
    2. A word that contains two humped-shaped letters<\/li>\n
    3. A mockingbird<\/li>\n
    4. The format of John Green\u2019s tweets about Harper Lee<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

      How will Harper Lee be remembered?<\/p>\n

        \n
      1. As the author who took the time to write an unknown teenager and her grandparents two handwritten notes<\/li>\n
      2. As the author of one of the most beloved novels of the twentieth century<\/li>\n
      3. As the crux of one of the most beloved literary maelstroms of the twenty-first century<\/li>\n
      4. As the creator of a world<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

        Adrienne Raphel is a graduate of the Iowa Writers\u2019 Workshop and is currently a Ph.D. student at Harvard, where she writes about poetics and plays word games.\u00a0She contributes regularly to\u00a0<\/em><\/em>The New Yorker\u00a0online,<\/em>\u00a0<\/i>and her debut collection of poetry,<\/i>\u00a0<\/em>What Was It For,\u00a0is forthcoming from Rescue Press in 2017.\u00a0<\/i><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

        Writing the SparkNotes\u00a0for\u00a0Go Set a Watchman.\u00a0 Context The summer when I was eight, I read two books: A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and To Kill a Mockingbird. My copy of Mockingbird was a cheap lilac paperback. Its cover featured the knot of a tree with a pocket watch and a ball of yarn inside, a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":818,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[21244,21243,8892,21242,2186,16969,14708,5821,11989,13793,53,21239,21241,21240,13117,15779],"class_list":["post-94844","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture","tag-assignments","tag-camel-case","tag-childhood","tag-cliffsnotes","tag-death","tag-go-set-a-watchman","tag-grandparents","tag-harper-lee","tag-obituaries","tag-quizzes","tag-reading","tag-southern-literature","tag-sparknotes","tag-study-guides","tag-to-kill-a-mockingbird","tag-young-adult-literature"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nI Wrote the SparkNotes for \u201cGo Set a Watchman.\u201d Here\u2019s What I Learned<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"February 22, 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As Katy Waldman wrote<\/a> for Slate<\/em>, Lee\u2019s legacy has become complicated by \u201ca sort of collective disenchantment, or an interlocking series of disappointments\u201d\u2014disappointments fueled in large part by Go Set a Watchman<\/em>. Waldman also points out that Lee herself, ironically, would probably have approved of her flawed legacy. After all, she professed to have empathy for her flawed but ultimately deeply human characters.<\/p>\n