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 writers 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 WallaceSanders "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., 191040 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, Mildreds 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 Woolworths (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. Annes 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 familys leftovers,(Sharpless,Rebekkah, 2009)"Cooking in Womens 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 its really important to realize that for black American women for a long time they had no choice but to work outside the homethe 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 Stoketts 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 Stoketts 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 anothers pen: women who were part of this movement and assemble their oral histories. Grandmothers 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 wasnt a need for imagining characters in a book. To Serve (Heike, 05/14/2012), locating reviews wasnt 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 gentlemans 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 Baumgartners. 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 childs love is pure it sees no race, the child only sees a heart. Love is always like that there isnt 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. Jenneys 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 Stoketts 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 Stoketts dialectheavy 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 its clear this hugely enjoyable, honey-marinated adaptation of Kathryn Stocketts 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 Taylors screenplay niftily sidesteps politics for the most part and instead concentrates on specific personal injustices particularly those meted out by Jacksons Queen Bee, the meticulouslycoiffed Hilly Holbrook (Bryce Dallas Howard), whose conniving small-mindedness is neatly summed up in her ongoing campaign for the towns 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 thats 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 youre nice to them), and therell surely be few viewers whose consciences will prick while watching it. The film doesnt 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 films 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 roles potentially condescending overtones, proving that at 22, shes already a compelling and capable leading lady. Spencers 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 toddlers. While The Helps 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 towns whitetrash-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 Stocketts 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 thats 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 shes 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 Taylors 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 maids 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

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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/thehelp-by-kathryn-stockett-6261286.html, http://www.washingtonpost.com/gog/movies/thehelp,1175294/critic-review.html, www.newyorker.com/arts/reviews/film/the_help_taylor