Off the Shelf: The Help

Historically, my "Off the Shelf" posts are concerned with books that have changed my life, or, at least, have caused me to think and question a bit. This blog post is concerned with Kathryn Stockett's The Help, not because I loved it, but because it has made me think. Interestingly, even people who found serious flaws in both the book and the movie have given it credit for stirring up some thinking about racism in America. I concur. (By the way, the link leads to a great article. You should read it.)

I read this book as part of a women's book group for my church. I was wary. I experienced some very conflicted feelings while I read it. When we met to discuss, I was fairly, but hopefully, pleasantly, vocal about what made me uncomfortable with this book. Many of my points have been brought up in more eloquent (and certainly more widely read) articles than this one. I will share links to them further on.

First of all, I think it's extremely important to understand why parts of this book are offensive to many, but certainly not all, Black Americans. You know, oftentimes white people live in a bubble. And that bubble needs to be poked with an ice pick. When I read the book, I was concerned with how black men were portrayed (or not portrayed. One is dead, and the other is an alcoholic, abusive husband). Though I appreciated Aibileen's love and concern for the white child she tended (and this did happen), I was also concerned that Stockett might be giving a false impression of how loveable white children were and are. Many black maids disliked the children they looked after. These are a few of my qualms with the book, but there are many more, and they are discussed wonderfully in this article (this is a GREAT article. You should read it)

So how is it possible that I agree with much that this article (which is also a great article. You should read it too) has to say about the movie (which I haven't seen), and the book that inspired it, and yet The Help has 2 stars, instead of 1 on my Goodreads account?

Well, it's complicated. First of all, I think if white people are supposed to think about race, they should be able to write about it too. Toni Morrison, in her book Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, writes that we have fallen into a pattern of thinking about racism in terms of its consequences on the "victim", but "that well-established study should be joined with another, equally important one: the impact of racism on those who perpetuate it" (11). She calls for "a serious intellectual effort to see what racial ideology does to the mind, imagination, and behavior of masters"(12).

The Help does not do this. It is not a serious intellectual attempt to do this. But to give Stockett some credit, however, I think she does try.

Such intellectual efforts have been reached though. Mr. Pip, for example is a novel told from the perspective of a black girl from Bougainville, and is, incidentally, written by a white man from New Zealand and it is amazing.

Interestingly, the last two articles I linked up here disagree on the accuracy of the black vernacular used by Stockett's black characters. To be fair to Stockett, and because I am not qualified to weigh in on this matter myself, black American authors have also been accused of exaggerating or inaccurately portraying black southern dialect, namely, Zora Neale Hurston.

Also up for debate are Stockett's two main black characters and whether they avoid the embarrassing and inaccurate historical portrayal of black Americans as "exotic, bestial, silly, or sullen--biologically criminal on one hand or comically simpleminded on the other--in short, the plethora of dehumanizing images callously or sometimes merely carelessly superimposed day after day on the psyches and lives of black (and white) people" (Hansberry x). Personally, I can't say that Aibileen and Minny fit these stereotypes consistently or comfortably, but other interpretations are both justified and welcome.

That doesn't mean, though, that The Help is a good book, simply because it may not enforce the stereotypes of old. The Help is a readable, popular book, but this does not mean it is a good or an accurate one. As mentioned in every article I linked, history has been brushed over and glossed up to make it palatable for a wider, mostly white, audience.

It needs to be understood that one reason for anger from the African-American community is probably connected to the fact that black people are more read about than read from. Uncle Tom's Cabin, To Kill A Mockingbird, and, yes, The Help all have several important things in common: They were and are bestsellers and widely read. They were written by white people. They are about black people. They tell inaccurate stories. Have you read any books about the black experience by any black authors? This is an important question to ask yourself. If the answer is nay, you should remedy this, quickly, lest you be too quick to praise The Help for letting you in on how things "really were".

Works Cited:

Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Vintage Books, 1993.

Hansberry, Lorraine. A Raisin in the Sun. Signet Books, 1992.