(Once again, here’s a gentle reminder/encouragement to donate to Boy Gets Girl if you can.)
Ever since The Help was made into a movie, I’ve been hearing about it all over the place. I featured the trailer of the film adaptation in my August Movies I Won’t be Seeing post and have read a lot of different commentaries on the text. After reading all of these commentaries, I felt torn about the text. I got a huge whiff of White Savior Rescues the Black Folk from the story, but I also liked that a story featuring women’s experiences was getting such good press. I finally decided to read the book myself and develop my own opinion.
Overall, I would say that I liked The Help. It was an engrossing, well-paced read. I also tend to like books with multiple narrators and I enjoyed reading the shifting perspectives of Aibileen, Minny, and Skeeter. I also liked that both Skeeter and Kathryn Stockett (in the book’s afterword) acknowledge the problematic aspect of a white woman telling black women’s stories for them. Skeeter doesn’t seem to have a White Savior complex. I think she actually acknowledges that her privilege allows her to express herself in a way that Aibileen and Minny can’t.
I did, however, have other problems with the book (major book spoilers ahead, so read no further if you don’t wish to be spoiled). The first problem has to do with the romanticizing of the black nanny/white charge relationship. The dynamic between Aibileen and “Baby Girl” Mae Moebly, as well as the dynamic between Skeeter and her nanny Constantine, was so sanitized that it made Scarlett O’Hara and Mammy look gritty and realistic in comparison. There were only two of these relationships in the book and both of them had these black maids loving these white children as much as they loved their actual children. I’m sure those types of relationships occasionally existed, but I would’ve liked to see a third character, say, resent the hell out of the white kid who took time away from their own kids, or at least not embody the perfect black mother stereotype and treat the raising of these white children like the job it was. For more on this topic, I highly recommend reading Dr. Bernestine Singley’s Sniffing Dirty Laundry: A True Story from The Help’s Daughter.
The other main problem I had with the story revolved around the story’s main antagonist, Hilly Holbrook.
This is Hilly Holbrook:
Hilly is, in a word, awful.
How can you tell she’s awful? Well, Hilly is racist. She’s really, really racist. She barely hides her really awful racism behind her sickly-sweet persona, but Hilly is a poisonous bitch from hell who is super-condescending to black people as she plans to stab them all in the back. If they cross her, she will ruin their lives.
But see, Hilly isn’t just awful because she’s racist. She’s also awful because she’s an Exceptional Woman. She’s only nice to other women if they don’t threaten her in any way or do whatever she says. The minute another woman crosses her, she’s ready to crucify that woman and make her ostracized throughout the entire town. Just ask Celia Foote, the nice white lady who employs Minny – she had the audacity to date the man Hilly used to date, and for this sin, Hilly makes sure that Celia has no friends.
Close to the end of the book, Hilly’s characterization was reminding me a lot of the characterization the Family Guy writers used to show that the tobacco industry was evil:
The only problem is that the Family Guy writers were attempting (and succeeding) at satire (hey, it sometimes happens) while Kathryn Stockett wanted to take Hilly seriously, and after awhile, I just…couldn’t. She reminded me so much of a cartoon villain by the book’s end that I’m surprised she wasn’t literally setting Minny on fire with her mind and having her eyes bug out.
I know what people are going to say: “But that’s how people really were back then!” Sure…some of them. But they didn’t just exist “back then.” They still exist today, and there are much subtler, much more dangerous forms of racism than the overt racism shown by Hilly Holbrook. Professor Patricia A. Turner writes about these issues in a great New York Times op-ed called “Dangerous White Stereotypes.”
This part really stood out to me:
“With one possible exception, the white women are remarkably unlikable, and not just because of their racism. Like the housewives portrayed in reality television shows, the housewives of Jackson treat each other, their parents and their husbands with total callousness. In short, they are bad people, therefore they are racists. There’s a problem, though, with that message. To suggest that bad people were racist implies that good people were not. Jim Crow segregation survived long into the 20th century because it was kept alive by white Southerners with value systems and personalities we would applaud…The White Citizens Councils, the thinking man’s Ku Klux Klan, were made up of white middle-class people, people whose company you would enjoy.“
That sure is a disturbing thought. Fortunately, though, Kathryn Stockett doesn’t plague us with any of those disturbing thoughts when we read about Hilly in The Help. We don’t have to think about the more insidious forms that racism might take. Instead, we’re free to hate Hilly and walk away happy when she’s literally tricked into eating shit. (I know I’m supposed to cheer Minny on for being, well, sassy enough to do this, but I just felt extremely grossed out, not to mention distracted by the idea of Minny baking her own shit in a pie. She had to put her hands all over it and roll it in the dough and yuck. I’m supposed to cheer for this action, why?)
Anyway, The Help is a feel-good Civil Rights era-story, except I’m not really sure who’s supposed to feel good aside from us white women reading the book who can comfort ourselves with the fact that we’re more like Skeeter than Hilly. We can walk away from the book feeling good about “change coming from a whisper.” It doesn’t challenge us to read more about the Civil Rights era from the perspective of, say, a black woman, or have us think about how domestic workers are treated today.
That doesn’t make it a bad story. It also doesn’t make “bad people” out of the readers who enjoyed the book. It does, however, make me think that the book isn’t nearly as brave or challenging or inspirational as it’s portrayed to be. I don’t find anything revolutionary or special about a book where the main antagonist is a cartoon villain who we all love to hate, because we can be comforted that we’re not like her.
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It’s funny I value ALL of this commentary on The Help, but the most pernicious stumbling block for me has been the lawsuit by Ablene Cooper, who works for Stockett’s brother, and claims the main character is based on her life. I don’t even know or care if her suit met any real legal standard of validity, because just Stockett’s demeanor and behavior are pretty damning, and says a lot about privilege and racism right here and now.
I mean she goes out of her way to write a whole letter to this woman about how “it’s totally NOT about you” that doesn’t even pass a giggle test. It’s such an obscene breach of ethics and decency if not the law.
It’s amazing to me someone thought let’s make a chick lit/flick out of a subject that is just so LOADED with wounds and thorns. Especially in the South it’s impossible to separate domestic work from the history of slavery, although even in the rest of the country and of course in Europe domestic work was indentured servitude. There is this great quote in one of my African American Lit classes about the degree of intimacy vs. absolute imbalance of power, that existed between slaves (particularly house slaves) and masters, deeply painful complexity of emotions that existed: love, attachment, bonding, shame, hatred, resentment, jealousy. It is some seriously fucked up shit that should never be given this kind of glossy spin.
What The Help does make me want to do is go read non-fiction explorations of Domestic Work and it’s history cross-culturally.
There is this great quote in one of my African American Lit classes about the degree of intimacy vs. absolute imbalance of power, that existed between slaves (particularly house slaves) and masters, deeply painful complexity of emotions that existed: love, attachment, bonding, shame, hatred, resentment, jealousy. It is some seriously fucked up shit that should never be given this kind of glossy spin.
Yeah, that’s my overall feeling as well. I don’t think the book did nearly as much as it could have with the real ugliness of the whole situation. There’s some mention given to the meaner bosses, but Minny has a nice white lady she has to watch, and Aibileen has mean bosses but absolutely loves the little girl of the mean parents.
And that was another huge problem I had with the story. Half of the time, Aibileen is worried about this poor little white girl whose parents ignore her, and Minny is irritated by but also worried about the damaged nice white lady she works for. It feels like half of their stories is still devoted to worrying about the white people they work for, and that’s just…ugh. A part of me feels like it would’ve been a better book without Aibileen and Minny’s perspectives and if it had just been a story about white Skeeter taking a stand against prejudice in this town. The whole “writing from the maid’s perspective” just seems wrong, like the author and other people reading this can pat themselves on the back and feel less guilty about the whole “help” issue. “It’s a bad system but the maids LOVED us so it’s okay!”
I don’t really know how this directly relates to “The Help” but as a white woman, I never realized how lacking non white women were in role models that didn’t have some sort of “historical” or “ethnic/native” origins until I started teaching in an inner city school. Even children’s books that had minority heroines only had them if it was some slave/segregation background and have next to no “mainstream” non white heroines. I guess “The Help” made me think of this because, again, we can have a story about black women only if it focuses on that time in history when they had very little power. I just wish I had more literature to offer my black,hispanic,asian and native american girls with strong heroines they could relate to, kind of like “Buffy” only not blonde and white.
Even children’s books that had minority heroines only had them if it was some slave/segregation background and have next to no “mainstream” non white heroines.
I hear that. I remember trying to find a book with minority heroines when I was teaching in an inner city school, and the two that came to my mind were Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry and Their Eyes Were Watching God – both GREAT books, of course, but it was difficult to find more modern stories. Walter Dean Myers has a wide variety of wonderful young adult books with black heroes, but the great majority of his protagonists are male. Although, come to think of it, he often has strong female characters at the center of his short stories if not his novels.
Have you read anything by Sharon M. Draper? She has several books with strong black protagonists, both male and female. How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents by Julia Alvarez is really good, too.
Growing up in Ireland, a country of pale-skinned populace, when reading, I automatically picture white characters, unless the text indicates otherwise. I assume that most people who come from a mono-cultural society do the same. In the Harry Potter books JK Rowling doesn’t talk about the colour of her characters’ skin. However, in some cases she has indicated their ethnicity by their name. These clues prompted my imagination when picturing the characters as I read.
Most of the books my family have the opportunity to read are written by English writers and published by English companies. Because of this, we do tend to get a much greater cultural mix in our reading material than we would if we read solely from Irish sources. England, of course, is a much more multi-cultural society.
I would imagine that books written in languages other than English, and published in non-English speaking countries, must feature characters of the local race or ethnicity. Perhaps we need to make more effort to find books from other countries and cultures so that we have more diversity in our reading material. Perhaps, also, we need to push for more English-language books published by non-white authors.
The Help has been criticised, among other things, for being a black person’s story written from a white person’s perspective, and therefore illegitimate. Ms. Stockett, of course, could not change her skin colour, nor her upbringing to alter the perspective. All she could do was write it from her own point of view, and do her best to try to understand that of the black maids she portrayed in her story. Whether true or not, whether romanticised, commercialised, or fictionalised, her book has prompted this white, Irish woman to learn more about the history of racism, slavery, and bigotry throughout the world. Isn’t that a good thing?
First of all, I apologize for the lateness of this rely. Somehow this comment got buried deep in my inbox.
Whether true or not, whether romanticised, commercialised, or fictionalised, her book has prompted this white, Irish woman to learn more about the history of racism, slavery, and bigotry throughout the world. Isn’t that a good thing?
Of course. I’m in no place to tell anyone how s/he should or should not react to a certain text, and in fact, I went out of my way to avoid doing that. Just because a text is problematic doesn’t mean that it can’t have positive effects on people. If The Help is the only text that anyone looks at and expects to learn everything about slavery and racism ever, well, that’s a problem, but if it’s just one of many, then that’s great.
I do find it more than a little troubling, though, that Kathryn Stockett’s inspiration came from a relationship with her own maid, and that this story contains two maids who watched after little white girls and really loved them, darnit, while Minny learns that the white people she’s now working for are really not as bad as she thought they were. It’s a feel-good story about black people FOR white people.
The rest of your comment is spot-on.