The Help, by Kathryn Stockett
I am hardly qualified to write an analysis of the way race relations are treated in Kathryn Stockett’s best-selling novel The Help. I’m a privileged white girl growing up in California
I’ve read other reviews, casual and official, good and bad, and everyone has something to say about it, whichever side they fall on. Maybe it’s different, listening to the audiobook than reading it myself, or maybe it’s because I’m not from the south and so everyone’s accents sound like some kind of stereotype to me, not just the voices of the African American characters, but the well-acted, well-read dialogue didn’t bother me as it seems to have bothered others.
Yes, this book had narrative problems. Oblivious and naïve as I may be, I too questioned certain plot points – why didn’t Skeeter, from her well-off and comfortable position, consider doing anything to help Yule Mae’s sons? Why didn’t she, or for that matter Minnie, make any kind of comment to the discomfort of the white lady taking credit for writing the book (when clearly Aibilene was just as competent to write it as Skeeter, and the stories weren’t Skeeter’s at all)? For that matter, why didn’t either Skeeter or Aibilene ever raise, even in their own minds, the issue of Aibilene doing all the work on the Miss Myrna columns the whole way through? It’s true that Skeeter, even from her position as the novel’s sole politically conscious voice, seemed curiously unaware of how she was taking advantage of Aibilene – at the very least, by the time they had become friends, Skeeter should have been rethinking how she exploited her friend’s maid in those earlier days of the column. I agree, too, with the common complaint that it makes no sense for Celia Foote to be so oblivious to the rules and boundaries regarding relations between white and black people, given that she is a white woman in Mississippi, even if she’s white trash. (If anything, she should be more aware of those lines and where her position is in relation to them.) In general, though, I was more disappointed with Celia’s plotline for its tight and easy ending, its total lack of going anywhere with the infertility issue – after the promise of that mimosa-chopping scene, and the tragedy of the miscarriage, to have everything conclude with “and we’re so grateful, you have a job with us forever, Minnie!” just felt easy and pat.
There are other issues, too, of a similar nature, but honestly, I enjoyed this book, and I really didn’t find it as problematic as many reviewers seemed to. For instance, I didn’t think that The Help divided its characters into black people = good people, white people = evil. I didn’t even think that those white characters who had done terrible things were particularly Baddies Are Bad – yes, Miss Hilly is a pretty dreadful person, but we are asked to like and almost to sympathize with Skeeter’s mother as well as with Stuart, and both of them have done bad things for bad reasons, both of them hold the typical views on race and both of them are simultaneously condemned and still liked by Skeeter – which just feels real to me. And the fact that we are, with Skeeter, asked to reconcile that liking of them with the disgust for what they believe is what prevents, for me, the Baddies Are Bad factor.
As for the critique that The Help portrays all the problems black women in the 60s had to deal with as catty gossip and petty backstabbing…that’s kind of ridiculous. I believe this critique was more focused on the movie, which I haven’t seen, so who knows? Maybe the film lightens the novel’s narrative considerably and eliminates all those references to lynchings, attacks, murders and maimings and unfair imprisonment and the total, absolute injustice these characters face… but the novel certainly does not pretend that the worst its black characters might have to contend with is social disgrace or petty gossip. Even at its best, the petty gossip can lead, the book informs us, to no longer being able to get a job, which itself means ruination of a family’s life – no food on the table, no way to support your children – and at the worst, there is murder, there is a black boy beaten to blindness, there is a woman put in prison for years for a crime she came nowhere near committing, there is absolutely reality here. The women who tell Skeeter their stories aren’t scared of being caught gossiping, and being embarrassed – they are scared that they and their families will be arrested, attacked, destroyed. How is that making light of the situation?
Leaving aside those issues, though, the book has some narrative flaws – like I said, the Celia plotline wrapped up far too neatly and easily for me, and furthermore, I was sick and tired of hearing oblique, menacing references to “that awful thing I done with the pie” when it was absolutely obvious from nearly the first moment exactly what it was Minnie done (the same problem goes for what Skeeter’s mother did to Constantine – with all the looming threats and mystery surrounding that incident, I was expecting a trifle more than what I got, and was just tired of the awkward, stilted phrasing used in both cases, to boot – that awful thing! That terrible thing! The horrible thing Mother did!). But for the most part, I can only say that I listened to those eighteen and a half hours in one weekend, turning it on every chance I got because I was intrigued, wrapped up in the slow, drawling world, dying to know what would happen next (even when what happened next turned out to be frustratingly trite). And really, that’s all I expected or asked for from The Help.
