Log #2

Book: Go Set a Watchman
Author: Happer Lee

Most of the content I read this week were some description on great length. The beauty of hometown used to be, the memory of childhood and the people who have changed. Besides, the growing of a little girl and the collision between her and her childhood sweetheart due to different kinds of education and experiences made this chapter profound.

Jean Louise, different from “To Kill a Mockingbird”, is now a twenty-six-year woman. Instead of obeying the exhortation of her father, Atticus, without thinking, she’s now much more worldly-wise and never naïve again. There’s a great sense of unspeakable ambiguity by reading the conversation, which happened when her childhood sweetheart, Henry, driving her home after she alighted the train from New York. She loves Henry, but his antiquated thought made her unable to believe him deeply and get married. The education in 1950s of south America for ladies was to instill them with the concept of taking husbands’ opinion as theirs. They should adhere to them. However, for a woman who had come back from New York, especially Jean Louise, can never accept that and act in concert with him. It’s obviously to see her insights learned from New York when she said, “……they go through a kind of fandango, but the application’s universal. It begins by the wives being bored to death because their men are so tired from making money, they don’t pay any attention to them. But when their wives start hollering, instead of trying to understand why, the men just go to find a sympathetic shoulder to cry on. Then when they get tired of talking about themselves, they go back to their wives. Everything’s rosy for a while, but the men get tired and their wives start yelling again and around it goes. Men in this age have turned the Other Woman into a psychiatrist’s couch, and at far less expense, too.”

        It’s ironic to see some dated perspective in 1950s from nowadays view. The strange thoughts, prejudice, blind faith …… Some general rights in our era seems to be imaginary in this book, but they were true, that how 1950s’ America looks like, and that shocks me a lot. However, if we compare it with this modern times, will we feel that the belief we have now is ridiculous after five decades?