Haven’t read/seen it, won’t read/see it* and was generally squicked out by the whole premise of the book to begin with — let’s tell a story that is kinda-sorta about race but more about how these nice black ladies helped white women Find Their Voice, from the perspective of white women of course — but this statement from the Association of Black Women Historians is worth a read. This piece in the Times is also on point:
The fail-safe response for Hollywood has been to depict racial prejudice in cartoon caricature, a technique that has made the Southern redneck a cinematic bad guy on par with Nazis, Arab terrorists and zombies. By denying the casual, commonplace quality of racial prejudice, and peering into the saddest values of the greatest generation, Hollywood perpetuates an ahistorical vision of how democracy and white supremacy comfortably co-existed.
To protect viewers, sometimes at profound damage to the historical record, white heroes are featured and sometimes concocted for these movies, giving blacks a supporting role in their own struggle for liberation. Films of this stripe are legion, though the most irritating example remains “Mississippi Burning,” in which two F.B.I. agents are at the center of an investigation into the murder of civil rights activists. It was a bitter pill for movement veterans to swallow since the agents’ boss, J. Edgar Hoover, was as vicious an opponent as any Southern Dixiecrat. Though not as egregious, both Rob Reiner’s “Ghosts of Mississippi” and the adaptation of John Grisham’s “A Time to Kill” fit this formula.
The other Hollywood fallback strategy when dealing with the movement (or race-themed film set in any period) is to employ “the Magic Negro,” a character whose function is to serve as a mirror so that the white lead can see himself more clearly, sometimes at the expense of the black character’s life. Sidney Poitier’s selfless convict in “The Defiant Ones” was probably the definitive Magic Negro role, though the formula has survived decades, from Will Smith’s God-like caddy in “The Legend of Bagger Vance” up to Jennifer Hudson’s helpful secretary in “Sex and the City” — just a few incarnations of this timeless saint.
I’m not sure what to do with the fact that the Home Shopping Network is featuring a collection inspired by The Help. The nostalgia for ugly times is also what bugged me about plantation weddings — sure, the American south is every beautiful and there’s no reason to demonize every aspect of it, but the marketing of products inspired by the movie (and events on plantations) works not just because those things are aesthetically pleasing but because there’s a romantic attachment to the Antebellum South. And, well, you can’t divorce that white person nostalgia from slavery and segregation. So marketing KitchenAid mixers and gumball-sized faux-pearl necklaces as being “inspired” by a movie about segregation and racialized domestic work strikes me as… clueless, to be generous.
And of course The Help is also “inspiring fried chicken cravings far and wide.”
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*I’m not boycotting the book, I just don’t think it looks very good. Apparently it’s sold 3 million copies, mostly to women, but I don’t actually know anyone who’s read it (Facebook “friends” who I don’t really know don’t count). I suspect that’s more of a Lit Nerd / Snob thing than a “we’re too progressive to read this” thing, but either way, none of the folks I regularly discuss books with have purchased or even mentioned it (and the random people I know who have recommended it are not people whose book recommendations I take particularly seriously). So it’s not on my list, and I’ve placed it in a mental Da Vinci Code category (i.e., “things I will read if I am on a plane and they are free and there is nothing else to do and I can’t sleep). But if you all are looking for a good read, go buy Just Kids
Hey, let’s not go defaming fried chicken now… Yes, racists have used it in some very ugly stereotypes, but damned if it isn’t the most delicious food on this great planet.
Why it’s inspired “nostalgia” themes is beyond me – the entire book is written from the perspective of people who want to move forward.
I read it, thought it was okay. Definitely problematic, however. Look forward to seeing what other people think. The Open Statement was enlightening. I thought through a handful of those things myself, but definitely didn’t identify them all. e.g. abusive drunk husbands in the Black community? I can only think of one that was portrayed that way offhand. I remember a reverend and a son of a maid who was jumped by white dudes, but mostly I remember the women in the story.
Funny, my older sister and I were discussing the book this week and she said “why haven’t you read it”? And I said “I don’t know, it just doesn’t interest me.” Her retort: “you are such a literature snob. Get over yourself.” Well, then. And I have no interest in the movie, given the subject matters. The stereotypes in it just bother me.
If you’re looking for a great novel about domestic workers, try Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy and Victoria Brown’s recent Minding Ben.
Or check out the work of the fabulous Domestic Workers United http://www.domesticworkersunited.org/shownews/92
I was deeply unimpressed by the book. It was a quick read, but even superficially it was racist as hell–the Black characters’ dialogue was written out in a way to show their accent (“gone” instead of “going” etc.) while the White characters’ dialogue was just treated like standard English (even though the White southerners have an accent as well).
AND FFS–the Black women in the book were scared, and passive, and grateful to the Nice White Lady who showed everyone How It’s Done and then was able to move to New York. She had one of the Black characters help her with her column on housework (publicly uncredited) because she knew nothing about housework but this maid did, of course. And it was never pointed out anywhere in the book that this is another continuation of White supremacy, that a White person taking the thoughts or the knowledge or the work of a Black person and getting credit for it is fucked up.
It’s sickening how passive these Black characters were portrayed to be, how they were not active in their own lives or agents of their own liberation. You would have thought that there was no civil rights movement (besides the maid Abileen, telling stories of MLK as a green alien to her White charge). That there was no organizing against Jim Crow, lynchings, and institutionalized racism. That all the Black community in this town needed was a spunky White girl–then the nice, virginal Church Lady maid and the sassy, outspoken maid would be liberated.
I mean, really, considering the fact that women like Fanny Lou Hammer, Jo Ann Robinson, Ella Baker, Septima Poinsette Clark, Vivian Malone Jones and Dorothy Height were hugely important in the civil rights movement, and that they’d been doing work on these issues for YEARS, the book just rankles all the more.
Not for nothing, but it might have been an interesting read if Skeeter had the idea to do the book and ran smack dab into the organizing efforts of the Black community and realized that No Sparky It Isn’t All About You.
(Then again, considering the author is being sued by her brother’s maid for taking her identity and creating a character that is basically her, I’m not at all surprised at the oblivious entitlement to the work of Black people.)
It’s a shame this novel isn’t better, because stories of women’s struggles and contributions during the civil rights era are often overlooked. Going by the mainstream media, you’d think Rosa Parks was the only woman who ever fought for civil rights, and black women never had to fight the sexism of black men who were supposed to be on their side.
Allow me to recommend the nonfiction book “Freedom’s Daughters: The Unsung Heroines of the Civil Rights Movement from 1830 to 1970″ by Lynne Olson.
Since I am a Native Southerner, it’s a double edged sword. There is indeed a unique culture here worth appreciating, but it is nothing like the way Hollywood paints it. It is isn’t an over-the-top caricature, it’s a rendering that is decades out of date.
And, to be honest, in many ways, the South is very similar to the rest of the country. I have not much of an accent. I grew up in a predominately white, middle class suburb that would not have been out of place in say, Michigan. The South of my grandparent’s generation has been dead and gone for a long time.
Yeah? Not Minnie, though, right? Though I guess she changed by the end of the novel, which would sort of defeat the purpose. I really liked Minnie not taking shit for the entire first half of the book.
I love Viola Davis so, so hard, and I wish Hollywood would give her better stuff to do than play Magical Negro Maids. Even the nice buzz she’s getting for her work here isn’t quite enough to overcome my distaste for the project.
I’d seen her in some supporting parts in movies and tv, but then I saw her in the lead in the play Intimate Apparel. What, nobody can make a movie version of that?
I liked The Help. It was a good, interesting read, and I am not a fan of crappy, mass-marketed literature. So there you go. Sorry none of your New York friends read it.
What kind of books do ‘lit nerd / snobs’ read? Let the Great World Spin? Freedom? Ulysses? Faust? I’m genuinely curious.
I’m sure Kathryn Stockett’s a perfectly competent writer. Problem is that 60 agents rejected her manuscript before it got picked up. Maybe they just had too much dignity to associate themselves with a(nother) project about Magical Negro women? (Hey, some capitalists have standards!)
I think this ahistorical perspective also reinforces the denial of racism in contemporary culture (e.g., “I’m not racist because I’m not out there wearing bedsheets and burning crosses.”)
Also, the literary merit of The Help (which I read and found to be a quick and tolerable read) is less relevant than its impact on its millions of readers.
Melissa Harris-Perry was on MSNBC a few weeks ago talking about this movie and being about a million different kinds of awesome, as usual. She said it was completely ahistorical, did not reflect the true realities of the lives of African-American women in the South, and used the maid characters as props in a white woman’s coming-of-age story. And she did point out how ridiculous it is that an acress of Viola Davis’ calibre is playing a maid in 2011. If the video of her appearance is up on the web somewhere, it’s definitely worth watching. She also tweeted a bunch of links to books about the real experiences of African-American women domestic workers in those days.
I don’t think it was intended to be a historical depiction of 1960s southern maids. In the afterword, the author talks about how this is more or less a biographical tale. It’s a white woman’s story about growing up in the racist south and depicts her struggle with the inherent racism of the situation. The privilege and inability to accurately depict things that happened to the black community are real to her and possibly to other white women of the south of the time (at least, I imagine – as a chick born in the 80s in the US north).
What I like about it is that all media is chock-full of stories about dudes in the north. I liked that it centered women, and moreover, that it centered the south. But, like True Blood (or more accurately, the Southern Vampire Mysteries), because it’s written by a white woman (in Harris’s case, a TAB straight chick – I don’t know much about the author of The Help), it has privilege-blinders. It’s their perspective, no one else’s, and as such reflects their privileged experience.
The book is about a woman who never got it. She never questioned her racist society, and the book is about her just beginning to do so – and that’s why I can’t be mad that it’s not representative of the south for black women. I appreciate her perspective as long as it’s never presented as fact.
But, what does make me furious is that publishers don’t seem to be marketing books by black women. When I think of women writers who have had commercial success in the last 5 years, I’m coming up white women. This, to me, is a much bigger issue (followed closely by the fact that the movie probably didn’t have an afterword that examined to any extent the issue of perspective). In an environment where black women authors are given equal footing to white dude authors (including Clancy-style movie deals) or even white women authors (TV shows, this movie), would this book be as big a deal? Rhetorical question is rhetorical – it supposes a world so different than ours that I honestly can’t imagine a genuine answer.
Fascinating discussion. I did find the book to be readable (read my thoughts here: http://mariesbookgarden.blogspot.com/2010/11/help-great-dialogue-starter-about-race.html), but it was definitely flawed.
I’m of two minds about the enthusiasm about both the novel and the movie. The benefit is that it has people talking about race. The major downside is that many of those enthusiasts do not recognize how much of the history is missing, and how both book and movie are written completely from the white person’s perspective. A friend–who is married to an African-American man–has pointed out to me that a white person writing about the plight of black people is always going to take crap for it, no matter what she writes. She has a good point, but I do agree with a lot of critics that Stockett is clearly coming at this story from a place of white privilege. I’m sure she had good intentions, but the execution is flawed.
For every “The Help”-inspired series of products on the Home Shopping Network (ugh!!), I see other ways that people could get inspired to work for change, like this: http://www.takepart.com/thehelp?cmpid=help-ad-2011-08-03-goodreads. Working for change, and caring about making the world a better place, is always a good thing.
If you’re interested in reading first-person accounts from that era, I recommend Barefootin’ (the memoir of Unita Blackwell, an inspiring woman who was a sharecropper turned politician and worked with Fannie Lou Hamer and the SNCC): http://mariesbookgarden.blogspot.com/2010/09/barefootin-inspiring-story-of.html.
For books about this era by white people, done much more skillfully:
The Personal History of Rachel DuPree by Ann Weisgarber (about a black woman who ends up married to a homesteader in South Dakota in the 1900s): http://mariesbookgarden.blogspot.com/2010/12/personal-history-of-rachel-dupree.html
And “Blood Done Sign My Name” by Timothy Tyson, an extremely well-written memoir/nonfiction book about a horrible racially motivated killing in N. Carolina, the history of the Black Freedom movement, and the way it has affected the author.
Mississippi Burning wasn’t nearly as offensive as Amistad was—I expected to see a movie about a captives mutinying on a slave ship, and I really saw a movie about white lawyers patting themselves on the back for daring to stand up for these poor black folks. We’re supposed to celebrate the lead slave’s return home to Africa, even though he returns to find his village gone and everybody dead.
I liked it, personally. Yes, Minnie and Aibileen needed Skeeter to help them write the book, because as they said at the beginning, nobody would publish them otherwise. It’s the way things were at the time, not an intentionally (or unintentionally) racist portrayal on the part of the author.
And the black community in the book were not all out there in the civil rights movement because they all had lives to live. They supported it, for sure. But not everyone can be right in the middle of a protest crowd. But I’d say that on the whole, they were far from passive. They just had to tread extremely carefully, which to me only highlights the unjust situation they were in.
The idea that this is something that many people feel nostalgic towards, enough so to provide a mass audience for this book/movie, depresses me. I skimmed through the book, noticed that the author had written the black characters as speaking in dialect but not the white ones, made a face, and put it right back.
I’ve lived in the South. Everyone has regional accents, not just black people. That writing decision alone pretty much served as a sign of how the author intended to depict the characters, and to that I say “no thank you”. It seems that she extended that same attitude to pretty much everything about the book, and as for the movie, Viola Davis deserves better than a role like this.
That sounds about right…? I haven’t actually read Ulysses because I am clearly an ignorant slut, but I did read Freedom because it was basically a cultural requirement where I live, and I loved Let the Great World Spin. So good guesses.
Read it. I was given it by my roommate, an African-American with family in Alabama, who read it for her book group. She wanted my reaction and deliberately didn’t say much about it before I read it.
So I did. And I thought it was phony to the core, and not all that well researched (a bunch of middle class Southern white matrons holding a mourning party for John Kennedy? In Jackson? Really? REALLY?). I thought the “black dialect” rang false, DESPISED Skeeter and her “oh look, I’ll live my dreams by interviewing these poor black maids!” and was appalled by the idea that the only way these women could be empowered was by having a young, attractive white woman bring their voices to the public.
Roomie and I are planning to see it when it gets to a second run cinema because we don’t want to pay full price. We’re not holding hope for much improvement, but it’s always possible. Either way, I resent the hell out of this book for taking time that I could have used to read something decent.
I wasn’t particularly interested in reading The Help because I hated the cover (IS IT ABOUT BIRDS!?!?), but I kinda wanted to see the movie cuz there is nothing else interesting in the theaters, but the boyfriend didn’t wanna go, so I had to see Captain America instead.
Oh racism and sexism, you fuck over my movie choices.
Cool. I haven’t read any of those.
I agree the problem is not Stockett writing what she knows, but that black authors don’t seem to get the same commercial success. The best example I can think of right now is Chris Gardner’s Pursuit of Happyness, which is more about succeeding with the system (and becoming part of it) than resisting a system of oppression. Hence it’s actually a conservative feel-good story. See, even a homeless guy can become a hedge fund manager. …So we’re treated to the same story a zillion times, of “white heroes are featured and sometimes concocted for these movies, giving blacks a supporting role in their own struggle for liberation”. Granted that it is both safer and seems more noble that way. An oppressed group taking liberation into their own hands can quickly become an awfully uncomfortable story when the oppressor is a representation of a society we are meant to identify as closest to our own.
And it’s not just historical fiction. What about Avatar? Basically a privileged dude finds himself by literally becoming a messiah figure for a native civilization. You could say the same to some extent about dozens of other stories ranging from the Motorcycle Diaries to District 9.
You could say the same to some extent about dozens of other stories ranging from the Motorcycle Diaries to District 9.
Oh, now, don’t go dissing District 9. :-)
The thing about District 9 is that the messiah figure, Christopher, is one of the aliens. Wikus is the main POV character, but the fact that he assists Christopher in escaping the planet to go get help is only fair recompense because it was his actions in screwing up Christopher’s plans that led to him becoming an alien hybrid. Christopher would have, most likely, succeeded in getting back to the mothership and going home for help anyway; Wikus’ central role in the story is of a guy who screws up the messiah’s mission and then sees the light and ends up assisting him in his quest.
Wikus is Christopher’s sidekick. We don’t notice, because sidekicks are rarely POV characters and are usually not the character who has a personal growth arc, but Christopher is the hero who conceives of a plan to save his people, and then carries it out… and the only reason he needs Wikus’ help is that Wikus screwed up his plan in the first place. So no, District 9 does *not* fall into the pattern of “privileged white dude becomes savior to minority/alien/Other characters”, because the entire plot arc about Christopher escaping Earth to return home for help is Christopher’s idea, mostly Christopher’s execution, and in the end Christopher’s success. All Wikus does is help Christopher do what Christopher was going to do anyway.
Yes, the story is primarily from the POV of Privileged White Dude, and the character arc is how he becomes enlightened by experiencing the tribulations of the aliens. But the *plot* arc is Christopher’s story.
Let’s be honest: do we really expect people who see no problem with making every terrorist an Arab (or occasionally some other form of Middle Eastern) to get that it’s possible to be racist without using the N-word?
The whole white-person-dealing-with-the-oppression-of-1960s-black-people trope is a cliche. Sure, sometimes artists manage to twist hackneyed material into something fresh and relevant. I wouldn’t rule that out without having read the book, but I’m not optimistic.
One of the objections raised by the Association of Black Women Historians strikes me as questionable. The ABWH complains that the movie is historically flawed because it doesn’t accurately portray the risks the maids faced. That seems odd to me because a major plot point in the book is the peril that the black women put themselves in to participate in Skeeter’s project, at least according to the synopses I’ve read.
The fact that black people speak in dialect and their white counterparts don’t is a big red flag for me, aesthetically as well as politically. It says a lot about the author’s perspective on her material.
As a lit nerd / snob, my desert island 5 would be ‘A Rebours,’ ‘Remembrance of Things Past,’ ‘Candide,’ ‘Vile Bodies,’ and ‘Catch-22.’
I also have my guilty pleasures: cookbooks, crime, and rock star bios.
All right, I’ll say it, I find it troubling that there are so many columns popping up the last few days that are takes downs of a book the authors admit they haven’t read. I actually have read the Help, and I agree that it has some real issues with how it deals with race and the culture of the Deep South in the 1960′s, but I don’t see how one can, with a straight face, make a cogent argument either way without having actually cracked the book and taken the time to read it.
Before I criticize anything, I take the time to do my research and inform myself on the topic instead of simply reacting in a knee-jerk fashion and saying whatever comes off the top of my head. That’s what it means to be intellectually honest, and I’m dismayed to see sites like Feministe and others not putting the usual intellectual rigor they usually do when examining various other feminist and social issues.
I mean, I haven’t been to a plantation wedding either, but I feel ok criticizing those. And I wasn’t criticizing the book itself — I linked to criticism of OTHER people who were criticizing the movie, and who actually had seen it. And I criticized the Home Shopping Network / Old South nostalgia that’s related to the book/movie, but that hardly requires having read the book to criticize as a phenomenon.
Oh holy fucking shit. I did read the goddamn book.
I think she meant Jill. I also don’t think lolagirl was giving a glowing endorsement of the book. It’s something that actually crossed my mind too, but I was glad to be exposed to the links in the OP so meh.
Sheelzebub, I wasn’t referring to you, I specifically noted that I was criticizing the proliferation of columns online and elsewhere that discuss the book even though the author hasn’t read it.
Jill, I don’t get the jump to defensiveness, quite honestly. You offered a critique of what is presumed to be the book’s underlying premise even though you admit you haven’t read it. How can you, or anyone else for that matter, know its premise or know it’s silly, or racist or anything else for that matter if you haven’t read the book?
And again, I stated up front that there were definitely some very troubling aspects to the Help, but I only learned that after having taken the time to read the book myself. But to read Jill, and Amanda @ Pandagon and others criticism, one would think it’s a jingioistic and racist overtoned story utterly lacking in nuance, and that simply isn’t the case.
I started to read it but several things put me off. I really wanted to like this book because I love history from the point of view of the working classes. Unfortunately, it became pretty obvious that the white narrator was the protagonist, stealing ideas from the black characters and most of the characters were caricatures and stereotypes.
While looking for reviews I found this page that takes down the racist stereotypes and has quotes and links to the author’s interviews in which Kathryn Stockett starts off romanticizing her childhood and digs herself in deeper from there. She relied too much on her memories.
http://acriticalreviewofthehelp.wordpress.com/
There is a lot of good historical information on this site. I highly recommend it.
I, for one, feel perfectly at ease judging this book without having read it. It’s just another in a long line of racist Nice White Lady tropes. The stories that aren’t being promoted are the ones being told by the POC who actually lived through the oppression. The only reason that the point-of-view of a White bystander is seen as more pallatable is racism.
I don’t know. I think a lot of books by white guys suffer from similar racism, but it only seems to get called out when it’s a book written by and popular with women. Like Eat Pray Love. I’m not defending either of them, but I feel like it’s another way men’s writing and writing starring a man is considered better than women’s writing even if both of them are crap.
I just found this awesome post: Sniffing Dirty Laundry: A True Story from “the Help’s” Daughter.
As the daughter and granddaughter of “the help”, this speaks truer to me than Stockett’s book ever could.
Lola, it’s not a “jump to defensiveness” to explain my position, and why I feel comfortable critiquing the nostalgia tropes that the book has inspired. Sorry, but agreeing with you that I’m intellectually dishonest is not the only acceptable response.
@AngelH;
Thank you so much for the link! Now *that* was stuffs worth reading!
That was awesome, Angel H.!
Angel H, that post is great. I read The Help and always wondered what was missing (e.g., the stuff that Stockett couldn’t possibly know as a white person in Mississippi in the 60s).
Great post, and that Open Statement really helped solidify how I feel about The Help. I’m a white girl from the American South and I first heard about the book through a colleague earlier this year. We were discussing our parents’ occupations, and I mentioned that my mother was a maid (turns out all my colleagues parents were doctors, artists, etc). My one colleagues’ eyes lit up and she asked in this excited, patronizing way “And have you read The Help? Oh, you must read it!” mentioning that she really identified with the main character (she’s a white lady from Connecticut). I should have known by her oh-how-quaint-I-didn’t-even-know-they-still-make-maids response that I shouldn’t read the book but I did and I was deeply offended that she thought it had anything to do with me or my mother’s experience. My mother wasn’t a maid in the 60s and isn’t African American or even a WOC, and I felt that to lump her in with the experiences of those in the Civil Rights Movement was deeply insulting to those who lived through it. But I knew my offense went deeper than that and I couldn’t put my finger on why until I read the ABWH statement: By identifying herself with Skeeter and my mother with one/all of the maids, my colleague must have been imagining that same patronizing worldview that the author adopted: With herself being the hero and my mother being some passive bystander in her own life.
What’s worst? She just made me take a nice little thread and make it about me! Sorry about that (that’s why I waited until a lot of people had already made their comments to submit mine), I just had to comment because I often think about how much my colleague’s comments bothered me. And while that has more to do with my colleague than the book itself, I think this is an example of how The Help – though the author may have had good intentions – reinforces the idea of privilege, race, and class and inspires patronization rather than social justice. Even without idiots drawing false equivalencies, this is unfortunate.
Here’s some charming sexist bullshit from “The Help” director Tate Taylor: http://www.kspr.com/weather/redeye-qa-octavia-spencer-tate-taylor-of-the-help-20110804,0,1707288.story
“Interviewer: Emma said you kept a calendar of everyone’s hormonal states?
TT: Oh, yeah. Yeah, varying menstrual cycles and 110-degree weather in Mississippi could have been a time bomb, but it was not.
…
And obviously there’s a special calendar that you can buy to keep it all organized.
OS: No, he can just tell, because if I give him a look—
TT: The calendar’s her face.”
Another note to those who insist that Stockett wrote only the black characters “with an accent” and the white characters without–she is not writing the black characters’ accent, but their dialect. They are speaking African-American Vernacular English. Technically, most of the white characters are speaking Southern American English (not “standard English,” as sheelzebub said), which AAVE is closely related to.
Sometimes it makes me wonder when people are upset when an author writes out AAVE, but not when a writer shows a character’s British English dialect. Maybe because AAVE is though to be “low-class?” In which case, I’d say check your privilege. AAVE follows a grammar that is consistent with many of the world’s creoles, and is at times actually more linguistically precise than SAE. Check out Wikipedia’s page on AAVE for more, it’s fascinating.
I don’t know if it’s the beer I just finished or not, but this is one of the funniest Feministe comments I’ve ever read. YOUR NEW YORK FRIENDS.
None of my Houston friends (including myself!) read it either.
I kind of want a New York friend, actually. It sounds like fun! Is there an application process? Do I have to go there, or can I import? Oh, oh, can Jill be my New York friend?
I, for one, completely agree that the British have had it really hard throughout history and therefore might be sensitive about having their voice interpreted by a USian. That power dynamic is definitely the same as a white USian interpreting the voice of a black woman in the south. Who her parents employed. At less than federal minimum wage. Because of institutional racism.
I loved this book and was surprised to read the backlash against it. I also saw the movie, which is told from Abilene’s perspective. The only white person who “finds” a voice is Skeeter and it is clear she has one all along. The people who significantly find their voices are Abilene and Minnie. These women are shown in the roles thrust upon them by society and unlike using them as “magic negroes” we see their lives, we see their character, we see them grow. Abilene reminds me of a maid in my extended family when I was a child. She was as kind a woman as there was, unconditionally loving and exceptional in every way. Reading The Help reminded me of some sweet childhood moments. Don’t listen to people who pan the book who haven’t bothered to read it.
Alice Walker recommended this book on her blog. She ‘read’ it (as an audiobook) and said that she was surprised that she liked it, but she did. She goes on to say why, you could go check that out.
It was in my book-club, and everyone who read it loved it. But everyone in my book-club besides me and the person who enrolled me, are white women over 55. So I was skeptical of a book about maids, recommended by 10 white women living in South Africa who all have maids. I must say, I grew up with maids too, the only time I didn’t have them was when I lived in the U.S and New Zealand, but I still somehow was suspicious of them and their views on maids, perhaps because I’ve been to their houses/mini mansions.
So I took the book home. But never read it. Returned it the quietly the next month and moved on. Until I read the Alice Walker post. And all the judgement I had on the oldies in my book-club, and those that I had on myself came up. So now, I’ve decided to give it a go.
Maybe you could give it a go before you bash it? At least then you can bash it from a more informed standpoint, which is what I’m kinda planning to do:)
Completely agree! I work in a bookshop and get a fairly good idea about how much I want to read books based on the customers who buy them. Not being harsh, I adore almost all my customers, but I can tell whose tastes are compatible with mine. “The Help” looked too warm’n'fuzzy for me in any case (: mainly purchased by sweet old biddies), regardless of the political minefield it wanders into.
re: Patti Smith and Mapplethorpe, I once made the hilarious mistake of taking a group of European summer school students, aged 13 – 16, to the art gallery while there was an exhibition of Mapplethorpe’s photography running. Made for very interesting conversation. “Now, why do you think people might find this offensive?” *THANK GOD they were European kids*