A Hero Shaped And Dispelled:How Atticus Finch Became Atticus Finch

To Kill a Mockingbird,written by American novelist Harper Lee(1926-2016),is a Bildungsroman concerning a girl's childhood life in a southern American town.Published in 1960,the story represents delicately the racial,class and gender conflicts in the 1930s.The namesake film,produced and released in 1962 by Robert Mulligan(1925-2008)focuses on the trial of the innocent black young man described in Lee's novel.The film features the protagonist Atticus Finch as a typical white hero who fearlessly stands against legal injustice.Enormously welcomed by the audience,Atticus Finch in the film is considered to be one of the greatest screen heroes in American film history.Nonetheless,Go Set a Watchman,another Harper Lee novel published in 2015 as the sequel to To Kill a Mockingbird,subversively reveals Atticus Finch's hidden side as a racist.Existing studies on Atticus Finch 's image in To Kill a Mockingbird mainly focus on his influence over racial,legal and educational issues,and the insinuation toward the authentic world and historical problems.Major discussions argue that the image of the protagonist remains consistent in the film and the novel.Researches concerning Go Set a Watchman are still on the initial stage,concentrating on its relation to the prequel.In light of the New Historicism concept of "self-fashioning" developed by Stephen Greenblatt and Gilles Deleuze's film theory of "movement-images," this thesis attempts to probe into the image of Atticus Finch in the above three works.Lee's novel represents racial conflict during the Great Depression through portraying Atticus Finch 's noble advocating of racial justice;meanwhile,readers are able to obtain self-identification through recognizing the "Other".The namesake film,through shaping Finch as a hero,meets the urgent demand of "self-fashioning" under the menace of existential crisis of Americans in the 1960s.Go Set a Watchman,on the other hand,retrospects American racial tension and Civil Rights Movement in the past half century through revealing the racist viewpoint of Atticus Finch,which may have helped shape or suggest the racial tension in the current world of globalization.This thesis thus on the one hand studies how historical events are reflected in Harper Lee's novels and Robert Mulligan's film,and how these works reflect and influence the cultural and social development of American history;on the other hand,it tends to inspect current social problems through the image of Atticus Finch,aiming at studying the constraint and mobility of cultural context conveyed and shaped by these works.