The Help

(My professor thinks I stoled these thoughts but if they belong to you,

Where is thethe theif , Val Littlewolf)

Help by Kathryn Stockett

Dr. K. Ervin

V. Heike

Luther College

The Help by Katheryn Stockett, imagine several writers including those we read sitting

down to tea and talking about The Help, women writers among the within the African American

Women writer’s community hanging out (Dr. K. Ervin, Spring 2012). Let me introduce our

panel and some guest writers. Authors if I may have your attentions (Professor Dr. Keona Ervin.

2012, Spring): Alice Childress author of "Like one of the family”, and Kimberly Wallace-

Sanders "Mammy", Tera W. Hunter "To Joy my Freedom" Southern Black Women's Lives &

Labors After The Civil War, Rebecca Sharpless "Cooking in Other women's kitchens -Domestic

Workers in the South, 1865-1960. And other African American writers like" Coming of Age in

Mississippi" by Anne Moody, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the

Family, from Slavery to the Present by Jacqueline Jones, Ann Petry "The Street", Elizabeth

Clark-Lewis "Living In, Living Out: African American Domestics in Washington, D.C., 1910-

40

Miss Childress have you anything to say? Kathryn Stokett's "The Help", a backdrop for

her conversations between Mildred, a black domestic, and her friend Marge. Together Marge and

Mildred create a vibrant picture of African American womanhood in the New York, in the 1950s.

Full of folksy humor and satire, Mildred’s knows her mind and seems to delight in sharing it. Her

accounts capture the visual accounts of her white employers’ these employers unsure how to take

this new Mammish employee who speaks her mind. As Mildred (I love when Mildred declares to

a patronizing employer that she is not just like one of the family), Mildred ‘s her attitudes and

declares how a tricky employer has created a system of “half days off” to cheat her help. " A

domestic who refuses to exchange dignity for pay, Mildred is an inspiring conversationalist," a

dragon slayer in a segregated world. Beacon Press brought out a new edition of it in 1986 with

an introduction by the literary and cultural critic Trudy Harris."

Anne Moody -Grew up in the south during Jim Crow and became famous for a sit-in she

participated in at Woolworth’s (Ann was a rebel and an activist). African American women were

involved in the quest for civil rights it wasn't something instigated by white women. The

strength is in the heroines that make a declaration (Moody), assertion that nonfiction earlier

about the help were true. Anne’s mother and herself both worked as domestic help, and Anne

vividly recalls her mother working all hours of the day, even after having a baby, bringing home

the white family’s leftovers,(Sharpless,Rebekkah, 2009)"Cooking in Women’s Kitchen,2010,

chapter 4,page 89.) " And the way the help was trusted and simultaneously feared and distrusted

by the people who employed them. Miss Moody was not a happy camper, and she certainly had a

right to be an angry woman.

Jacqueline Jones I think it’s really important to realize that for black American women for a

long time they had no choice but to work outside the home–the exact opposite of white American

women.

Ann Petry (1908-1997), a black novelist, short storywriter, and writer of books for young

people, is one of America's most distinguished authors. Ann began by studying pharmacology,

and in 1934, received her Doctor of Pharmacy degree from the University of Connecticut

College of Pharmacy. ) Her first published story appeared in 1943 in the Crisis, a magazine

published monthly by the NAACP. Subsequent to that, she began work on her first novel, The

Street, was published in 1946 and which she was awarded the Houghton Mifflin Literary

Fellowship. Since both her books were dark I think she might have thought that the "Help"

wasn't dark enough. She might have thought that domestic help has on those at the bottom of the

totem pole, not to mention the culture at large.

Tera W. Hunter "To Joy my Freedom" Southern Black Women's Lives & Labors After The Civil

War "southern black women in domestic work or made Kathryn Stokett’s book so abundantly

clearly ridiculous and naive." (UK. author's idea of what in comparison Tera W. Hunter book was

real in comparison to Kathryn Stokett’s books the Help.)

Elizabeth Clark-Lewis discovers the secret treasure of the elderly so Elizabeth spoke to several

elderly among the community. These fantastic older ladies were as if books awaiting another’s

pen: women who were part of this movement and assemble their oral histories. Grandmother’s

generation who specifically migrated from the south to DC for domestic labor jobs? But this

type of intense focus can make for a greater understanding of an issue as a whole. Elizabeth

Clark – Lewis, thought that with the ladies of the community there wasn’t a need for imagining

characters in a book.

To Serve (Heike, 05/14/2012), locating reviews wasn’t the hard part separating my

thoughts from all I read was; this is my review of the Help. by Kathryn Stockett it was touching

and I understood it clearer then say someone that hasn't been the help. There are people and then

there are people; if you are in the second group of people those that work for others then you are

as if an innate object. I have worked as a in house nanny one house in Castle Rock, Colorado and

one in Cherry Mound, Colorado. The first house had six children my little cubby hole room was

at the top of the third floor, the lock was open able with one single long nail. In both homes

there were six children. The range was a year and a half to eleven. Mr. Baumgartner (that was the

gentleman’s name allowed me the use of a vehicle, which I would thank him for and sometimes

bring him a cup of coffee). His wife Mrs. Baumgartner fired me because she thought I was too

familiar with her husband but that was ok I was ready to go I could never count on my stuff

being where I had put it.

My second house or the second location where I was employed as a nanny; I worked at

also had six children like at the Baumgartner’s. I had six children to care for they ranged from a

four year old to a sixteen year old. The sixteen year old often would cook on my one day off then

call for me to clean up her stuff. Living on site is a bummer a maid is a maid not with standing

racial differences. If you live on site and have no choice for it those that see themselves as your

better will always call you. My bedroom in Cherry Mound was in the cellar with a mattress on

the floor and my door was beads.

I loved the courage it took to stand up to the lady and tell her that the children were not

hers and that she isn't part of the family & enter white bathroom (Katheryn Stockett, The Help,

2009, Chapter. 7, pg. 111) what a hoot. When my mother was a young woman she was in

Mississippi she had long told me of the separate faucets (Marian Heike, 1980.) When I was three

we were visiting family in Des Moines, Iowa and then there were people working there: that was

the first time I had ever been in the company of an African American Woman. I found I

remember so many locations in the book with fondness. Chapter fourteen and many other

locations the characters became flesh and blood before my eyes. Abilene (Katheryn Stockett, The

Help, 2009, chapter 14, page 215 – 231).

That bathroom was the first time and the last I ever felt afraid of the unknown, I am still a

tiny bit ashamed. But only a tiny bit having at one time been blessed with love from a lovely

African American woman. Life is humorous, silly and not I think funny how we look at different

people after we find love in a community. Sometimes that love is from a child like Mae Mobley

((Katheryn Stockett, The Help, 2009, Chapter 6,82-104) a child’s love is pure it sees no race, the

child only sees a heart. Love is always like that there isn’t anytime for hate of difference. I

would re-read this move I only regret that I never had time to view the flick maybe one day.

Review the Help:

August 13th, 2011 5:44 pm

I was there

If you were born in, say, the East Village in 1961 and raised in Manhattan, for example, it might

be inconceivable to you that The Help could remotely represent the reality of 1963 Mississippi.

You might be a fist-shaking feminist, and find this film, and this time in Southern History, to be

distasteful and perhaps abhorrent. But if you lived in Mississippi in 1963 as a teenager, if you

heard, daily, those "shoo nuffs" and "yes sums," if you witnessed your parents becoming

inexplicably hysterical that all that they had known and worked for since The War might be

destroyed by the threat of the Civil Rights movement, then you will find The Help to be a fairly

realistic take on That Time. That Confusing, Wonderful, and Powerful Time.

The maids did not all hate the women that they worked for, because they were, in many (most?)

cases, endowed by their faith with the patience of Job and the Wisdom of Solomon. They

realized that they were making critical and life-changing differences in the lives of the children

by whom they were constantly surrounded. They took no less pride than Ina Garten or Martha

Stewart would in a lighter-than-air biscuit or a cake iced with caramel icing that took years of

burnt pots to master. They found beauty in what they made. They were proud of the artifacts of

their prowess. That was not wrong, and that was not Uncle Tom. It was wonderful, and a blessing

to those of us living in That Time.

The movie is not perfect. Ms. Jenney’s accent, for one thing, is certainly not anything I ever

heard in Jackson, Mississippi in 1963. There are plenty of other little nits to pick. But for this to

be the work of a relatively inexperienced filmmaker, for this to tread the sensitive ground that it

does, it is well done.

– Cmcnally56, Atlanta

Black and white, and not enough 'Help'

By Ann Hornaday

Wednesday, Aug 10, 2011

Next to "Harry Potter," perhaps no book adaptation this summer has been more highly or

anxiously anticipated than "The Help," based on the 2009 surprise bestseller of the same name.

Fans of Kathryn Stockett's folksy, ingratiating novel can rest easy: The director, Tate Taylor - a

childhood friend of the author, who, like her, grew up in Jackson, Miss., where the story is set -

has preserved the book's story line, characters and confiding tone with loyalty worthy of any best

friend.

Fair warning: "The Help," which Taylor wrote for the screen as well as directed, isn't likely to

win any converts among those who couldn't abide Stokett’s dialect-heavy writing and earnest but

vaguely self-congratulatory tale of a young white writer who strikes up a Jim Crow-defying

friendship with black domestic workers in 1963 Mississippi.

But readers who felt they came to intimately know characters such as Celia, Minnie and Skeeter

are likely to greet their alter egos on screen like cherished, long-lost friends - especially the

nobly suffering Abilene, here brought to quietly watchful life by Viola Davis.

Indeed, not surprisingly, Davis is the best thing about "The Help," in which she stars with a

veritable cavalcade of up-and-coming actresses. They include Jessica Chastain (seen this summer

in "The Tree of Life," here delivering a complete 180 from her ethereal presence in that film with

a garishly giddy performance as the wrong-side-of-the-tracks Celia); Bryce Dallas Howard as the

conniving, hysterically racist Hilly; and Emma Stone as Skeeter, the recent Ole Miss graduate

who is searching for work as a writer as "The Help" opens.

Skeeter gets a job as a newspaper cleaning-advice columnist, but when she asks Abilene for

some tips, she realizes that the real story lies in the emotional lives of black women who virtually

raise their white employers' children, but who are treated by those same families as unfit to share

a kitchen utensil, much less political or economic power. "You is kind, you is smart and you is

important," Aibileen repeatedly intones to her young white charge.

As anguishing as those scenes are, both in vernacular and substance, there's no denying the

cathartic exhilaration of watching Aibileen, Minny (Octavia Spencer, in a breakout performance)

and Skeeter form their fragile but potent friendship, even as they keep their furtive meetings

secret from their respective communities.

Skeeter is under her own pressures to hew to traditional definitions of Southern womanhood and

get married like her friends, who inherit their low-wage servants much as some of their ancestors

might have inherited enslaved people. But Skeeter's discomfort serves as an inadequate index for

the pain and suffering of Aibileen and Minny, who endanger their very lives by speaking

candidly about segregation's grimmest realities.

One of those truths, which "The Help" deserves praise for bringing to light, is that racism should

be understood less as a matter of black grievance than of unexamined white privilege and

pathology. And no one is more race-crazy than Hilly, portrayed by Dallas Howard in "The

Help's" weakest performance as a cruel, snake-eyed witch whose villainy extends to making

Minny use an outside toilet even during a hurricane.

Hilly's monstrousness is in keeping with "The Help's" tendency to reduce its characters to stock

types, but it has the effect of enabling white viewers to distance themselves from racism's subtler,

more potent expressions. (Far more troubling than Hilly's brand of insanity is the disapproving

but passive acquiescence of her mother, played with vinegary brio by Sissy Spacek.)

With clunky, episodic pacing, Taylor traces the genesis and effect of Skeeter's project, including

"The Help's" climactic sequence, when Minny performs an act of subterfuge that, depending on

taste and perspective, will play like a heroic act of subversion or a crass burlesque. Surely both

taste and perspective will inform whether viewers will find "The Help" a revelatory celebration

of interracial healing and transcendence, or a patronizing portrait that trivializes those alliances

by reducing them to melodrama and facile uplift. (By way of comparison, the 2008 drama "The

Secret Life of Bees" struck a far more sensitive, observant chord in its portrayal of similar

themes in a similar place and time.)

As affectionately as Taylor has brought "The Help" to the screen, and as gratifying as it is to

watch Davis and Spencer bring Aibileen and Minny to palpable, fully rounded life, their

narrative, like "The Blind Side" a few years ago, is structured largely around their white female

benefactor. That this is the story we keep telling ourselves is all the more puzzling - if not galling

- when viewers consider that, precisely at the time that "The Help" transpires, African Americans

across Mississippi were registering to vote and agitating for political change. In other words,

they were helping themselves. And, on screen at least, their story remains largely untold.

Aug 10 2011 7:31 PM EDT 19,521

'The Help': The Reviews Are In!

While some hail the film as the finest drama of the summer, other critics aren't as kind.

By Eric Ditzian (@ericditzian)

"It feels kind of scary saying this because that means it's only downhill, but it's been the best year

of my life," Emma Stone told MTV News late last year as we honored her as the actress we were

most thankful for in 2010.

The past eight months, however, have hardly been downhill, and Stone might soon have to

rework her conception of a superlative year. The year 2011 has seen Stone, among other things,

nominated for her first Golden Globe, film her lead role in "The Amazing Spider-Man" and win

advance plaudits for a dramatic, yet at times comedic, turn in "The Help," which hit theaters

Wednesday (August 10).

Emma Stone Relates To Her 'The Help' Character

In a summer filled with wizards and robots and all manner of nasty alien invaders, some critics

are pointing to "The Help" as perhaps the finest drama of the season, highlighting not only

Stone's performance, but also that of Viola Davis, who could well be part of the upcoming

awards-season hubbub. Other reviewers, though, haven't been as kind, citing a jumbled story

structure and an overall maudlin tone that distracts from the weighty themes of the film. Read on

for those critiques and more:

The Story

"What the film lacks is a strong point of view. The story is all over the place on that front,

bouncing from one perspective to another. ... Skeeter Phelan (Emma Stone) has just graduated

from college in Mississippi in the 1960s and returned home. The town is divided, Black and

White, and nowhere is this more evident than in Skeeter's social circle, young women married as

soon as possible, raising children — or, more accurately, having their children raised by the

Black women who work for them. ... Skeeter wants to be a serious writer, and a New York editor

(Mary Steenburgen) needs something to judge her on. So Skeeter, having gotten a job at the local

newspaper writing a housecleaning column, asks Clark for help with tips. But what she really

wants is to know how the 'help' is treated, about the world from their perspective, for a book." —

Bill Goodykoontz, The Arizona Republic

The Performances

" 'The Help' is Davis's movie, and it's about time. Davis underplays everything, even the movie's

big 'racism is bad' moments. When she informs Skeeter that she raised '18 babies' — meaning

mostly, of course, white people's babies — you don't doubt for a minute that they turned out

great. ... In terms of its basic plot points, 'The Help' only skates along the surface of one of the

most painful and violent periods in our country's history. But in the latitude it allows its

performers — and in the way those performers dig deep into their roles, to find more, perhaps,

than what was actually written there — 'The Help' is anything but conventional." — Stephanie

Zacharek, Movie line

The Adaptation

"[The movie] isn't likely to win any converts among those who couldn't abide Stokett’s dialect-

heavy writing and earnest but vaguely self-congratulatory tale. ... [Director Tate Taylor's]

strength, as it was in his debut ['Pretty Ugly People'], is in fully mining the comic talents of his

actors to help the drama go down; he's less sure-footed in handling the big themes. In being true

to the book and the complex interlocking stories and characters Stockett created, Taylor runs into

the same difficulty — too many happy endings that come too fast and fail to foreshadow the

difficulties that lie ahead." — Ann Hornaday, The Washington Post

The Comparisons

"As a book and a movie and a social phenomenon, 'The Help' functions as a kind of Rorschach

test that measures how you feel about the history of racial inequality in America. Kathryn

Stockett's best-selling novel is set in the profoundly segregated and hierarchical Deep South of

the Jim Crow era, nearly half a century ago, and writer-director Tate Taylor's handsome and

largely admirable film adaptation captures the time and place in ravishing detail. 'The Help'

definitely worked on me as a consummate tearjerker with a terrific cast, and it's pretty much the

summer's only decent Hollywood drama. You could also describe it as an accretion of familiar

ingredients: 'Mad Men' plus 'Steel Magnolias' plus 'To Kill a Mockingbird' plus 'Mississippi

Burning.' " — Andrew O'Hehir, Salon

The Final Word

"Despite its occasional cloying moments, 'The Help' transcends its comfort-food-for-Oprah's

Book Club-ready wrapping to get at something deeper, the gray in a story that seems so far

removed as to be utterly black and white. And Davis and [Octavia] Spencer give faces and fully

fleshed out lives to women who must have been more than what they did for a living as 'The

Help.' " — Roger Moore, Orlando Sentinel

Check out everything we've got on "The Help."

For breaking news, celebrity columns, humor and more — updated around the clock — visit

MTVMoviesBlog.com.

Dir: Tate Taylor; Starring: Emma Stone, Viola Davis, Octavia Spencer, Bryce Dallas Howard,

Jessica Chastain.

Cert: 12A, 146 min

On its American release back in August, The Help took an impressive $166 million at the box

office, so it’s clear this hugely enjoyable, honey-marinated adaptation of Kathryn Stockett’s

novel struck a chord with US audiences – although exactly what chord it struck remains up for

discussion.

Set in 1960s Jackson, Mississippi, the film tells how Skeeter Phelan (Emma Stone), a young,

white would-be writer, convinces two black maids, Aibileen and Minny (Viola Davis and

Octavia Spencer), to work secretly with her on a book. Skeeter wants the maids to reveal,

anonymously, the hardships routinely inflicted on them by the wealthy families whose food they

cook and whose children they raise – thereby winning them a valuable step towards true racial

equality and her a big fat publishing deal.

While the story takes place at a time of seismic social upheaval, director Tate Taylor’s screenplay

niftily sidesteps politics for the most part and instead concentrates on specific personal injustices

– particularly those meted out by Jackson’s Queen Bee, the meticulously-coiffed Hilly Holbrook

(Bryce Dallas Howard), whose conniving small-mindedness is neatly summed up in her ongoing

campaign for the town’s maids to use separate bathrooms from their employers.

The Help: the film dividing America

23 Oct 2011

The Help: set report from Mississippi

15 Oct 2011

'The Help' director: film better than a history lesson

27 Feb 2012

The Help tops US box office but hits controversy

22 Aug 2011

The Help: Mesmerized by Mississippi

26 Oct 2011

Hilly is a terrifically hissable villain, and Minny eventually bests her with a revenge plot that’s

almost Rabelaisian in its iciness and far too much fun to give away here. But crucially, The Help

only holds its characters’ attitudes to account by 1960s standards (paying a black person a

pittance to be your servant is alright, so long as you’re nice to them), and there’ll surely be few

viewers whose consciences will prick while watching it. The film doesn’t even berate Skeeter for

being a chain-smoker; like the acclaimed television drama series Mad Men, with which The Help

shares a period setting, it just replicates the behavior of the age and lets viewers draw their own

conclusions. As a result it feels simultaneously small-L liberal and small-C conservative. Is this

film’s huge American box office success starting to make sense yet?

This, incidentally, is fine and dandy with me. Good films rarely feel like lectures, and the

performances in The Help are so strong and so moving that the lack of any right-on Hollywood

finger wagging to distract from them is a blessed relief. Stone is sparkling as Skeeter: she deftly

defuses the role’s potentially condescending overtones, proving that at 22, she’s already a

compelling and capable leading lady. Spencer’s eye-rolling, richly comic turn as Minny pays

homage to the famous mammy roles of Louise Beavers and Hattie McDaniel but still feels

genuine. And Davis, as Aibileen, gives the often-broad dialogue some serious emotional

purchase: the last time she tells an unloved, chubby, white two-year-old in her care “You is kind,

you is smart, you is important,” my bottom lip was wobbling even more than the toddler’s.

While The Help’s characters push against the era in which they live, elsewhere the film openly

mythologizes it. The fashions, food and physiques of the early 1960s are lovingly framed by

cinematographer Stephen Goldblatt, and he draws some mischievous links between the three: in

one mouth-watering scene, his camera celebrates the glorious curves of both the town’s white-

trash-made-good social outcast Celia Foote (Jessica Chastain), heavenly in a snug blouse and

seam-straining pencil skirt, and the glass bottle of emphatically non-Diet Coke she holds in her

manicured grip.

The Help: seven Magazine reviews, by Jenny McCartney

Seven rating: * * *

An adaptation of Kathryn Stockett’s novel set in Jackson, Mississippi, in the Sixties; The Help is

a big, old-fashioned tearjerker of a film, full of reckonings and reconciliation.

If it contains much that’s undoubtedly true about the relations between Southern whites and their

black domestic staff, then it also approaches that era with a firm desire to make good in fiction its

injustices: a desire that extends to tweaking and smoothing the plot until – like a well-made bed

– it promises to let us rest easy.

That is not, however, to cast doubt on the power of its performances, or the compelling force of

its narrative. It opens with the voice of a black maid called Aibileen Clarke (played by Viola

Davis, whose mesmerizing gaze alone could carry a film), who has over the years raised 17

white children in the households of her various employers.

She has watched as the innocent adoration of the children for her slowly becomes infused with

the poisonous politics of race, whereby she’s gradually relegated from the warm human heart of

their world to the chilly status of a “coloured” employee.

The current batch of young white women, raised by black maids, seem – thanks, perhaps, to the

whiff of change in the air – to be more zealously racist than even their mothers’ generation,

particularly when they fall under the influence of Hilly Holbrook (Bryce Dallas Howard), a

gimlet-eyed horror show in frosted lipstick and a floral dress. Her political awareness extends to

campaigning vigorously for compulsory separate lavatories for white families and their black

employees.

The exception to the rule is Skeeter (Emma Stone), a ringleted bluestocking whose ambitions lie

in journalism and writing, and who decides to ask the maids to tell, anonymously, of their own

stories and feelings: the results will be sent to a New York publisher.

At first, no one will chance it. Then, Aibileen and her rebellious friend Minny (Octavia Spencer,

full of both rage and comic verve) gradually grow excited by the rare opportunity of truth-telling,

after so many years of biting their tongues, and the project becomes a real and risky possibility

(albeit one in which, as ever, the maids have more to lose than Skeeter).

Tate Taylor’s script and direction is at its strongest while exploring the painful paradoxes and

power-shifts between maid and employer: the physical intensity of the relationship between

white children and the black “help”, who constantly cuddles and soothes them, while the adult

white women – immobilized and emotionally withered by social codes – shrink from touching

either maids or children.

Striking, too, is the way that a maid’s apparent status as a long-standing family member can

evaporate with a single dismissive word.

Davis and Spencer command the most powerful scenes, their bodies sometimes trembling with

the effort of restraining the statements which natural justice demands (and which come spilling

out in an unforgettable show-down between Aibileen and Hilly).

Elsewhere, the characterizations of the white women feel a little too broad-brush: the excitable

Marilyn-esque bombshell (Jessica Chastain) who is marginalized by the snobbish society girls,

the outstandingly loathsome Hilly, the earnest Skeeter.

Revenge is doled out with a side helping of broad scatological comedy. And yet The Help picks

its audience up and carries it forcefully along in its engrossing, sympathetic, moving wake: and

then, like all the best nursemaids, it lulls us to sleep with a large spoonful of syrup.

Film Reviews

Culture »

Film »

Oscars »

Robbie Collin

In Film Reviews

Sundance Film Festival 2012 portraits by Larry Busacca and Victoria Will

More from The Telegraph

Top Gear delayed until 201310 May 2012

Hilary Mantel: Catholic Church is not for respectable people13 May 2012

Strictly Come Dancing winner Tom Chambers overcomes difficult relationship with Summer

Strallen11 May 2012

Edward Lear was the master of glorious nonsense12 May 2012

Stars of music and film01 celebrate jazz May 2012

The Help by Kathryn Stockett - review

NewYorkGirl: 'The Help really is a special book'

Share 31

'Jackson, Mississippi, 1962. Black maids raise white children, but aren't trusted not to steal the

silver' is the first line that you read on the blurb of The Help and this rings through not only in

the book but in history too.

The Help

By Kathryn Stockett

The Help is an unforgettable story told from the viewpoints of three very unforgettable

women: Aibileen, raising her seventeenth white child; Minny, forever losing jobs due to her

sassy tongue; and Miss Skeeter, an aspiring writer who has been raised by black maids all her

life.

When Skeeter gets the opportunity of a lifetime to become a published author, she of course

takes it but in order for this to happen, she has to write about things that people need to read

about.

In a time when even talking to a black person was shunned, these three women team up on a

project that will put them all at risk in an attempt to change the minds of the Jackson residents.

What follows was, for me, a rollercoaster ride of emotion, as we hear stories of cruelty and

humiliation but also those of tenderness.

This book has characters in it that you are meant to empathies with and those, of course, whom

you are meant to dislike. The way in which Stockett has written about her characters is so

believable that I didn't find myself thinking 'no-one would have said or done that.' As I was

reading this book, it didn't cross my mind at all that it was fiction because everything Kathryn

Stockett wrote about seemed thoroughly believable, particularly coming from such different

characters.

It is told in alternating viewpoints from the three main characters, so we get to see from both

sides of the story in this book; from the League ladies such as the truly venomous Miss Hilly, to

the maids who work for them and basically raise their children single handedly.

It's hard for me to fault this book, except I feel that Skeeter did not quite understand the danger

she was putting the maids in to help her write the book, as there was much more risk for black

maids to tell stories about their employers than it was for Skeeter to write them. However, the

characters were well built and the plot was very intriguing. It's definitely a hard subject to write

about and we see that from both Kathryn Stockett's and Skeeter's writing. The Help changed the

lives of the women in the book and I feel as if somehow it changed my life too. The Help really

is a special book and I encourage anyone and everyone to check it out.

The Help, By Kathryn Stockett

Pantomime and prejudice

David Evans

Sunday 13 November 2011

inShare

Print

Kathryn Stockett's debut novel – which has already been turned into a saccharine Hollywood

movie – explores the relationship between white middle-class women and their black domestic

"help" in 1960s Mississippi.

Stockett alternates between three narrators – the maids Aibileen and Minny, and an idealistic

white journalist known as Skeeter – as they work on a book of interviews exposing the callous

prejudice of the state capital's housewives, thereby doing their bit for the gathering civil rights

struggle.

Stockett is white, and so is walking a very fine line in adopting the idiomatic vernacular of a

black housekeeper. There have been accusations of racism from some quarters. I'm not sure

about that. She is, at least, sufficiently self-aware to have Aibileen comment derisively that

"white people been representing colored opinions since the beginning a time".

If anything, I find Stockett's treatment of the white employers more troubling. They come across

as pantomime villains: their ringleader, Hilly Holbrook, is an odious racist with the primped

veneer of a Stepford wife. The problem with such simplistic characterization is that it puts the

reader in too comfortable a position. We boo and hiss at Hilly, and cheer when she gets her

comeuppance, all the better to reinforce our complacent sense of superiority – and to avoid

thinking too deeply about how we might have behaved, had we grown up on the privileged side

of the Jim Crow South.

Reviews can be located at :http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/the-

help-by-kathryn-stockett-6261286.html, http://www.washingtonpost.com/gog/movies/the-

help,1175294/critic-review.html,

www.newyorker.com/arts/reviews/film/the_help_taylor