The Help by Kathryn Stockett

Posted on | April 9, 2010 | 17 Comments

It’s clichéd but The Help by Kathryn Stockett is an unputdownable book: I was immersed in the story and despite all the books that I read it is still rare for a book to captivate me so fully that I can think of nothing else but read the book.  I was a little averse to reading The Help because of the hype surrounding it but the thing with hype is that it is gererally justified, as it was in this case.  By no means is the novel flawless but it is a good, engaging story that I enthusiastically recommend.

Stockett set The Help in her native Mississippi during racial segregation and the Civil Rights Movement.  Telling the stories of three women of small-town Jackson in 1962, Stockett examines racial tensions and behaviours in the domestic sphere.  Aibileen and Minny are both black maids working in white households and, in Aibileen’s case, raising white children, whilst Skeeter is a twenty-two year old white woman who has returned from college to find that the maid who raised her, Constantine, has been sacked by her mother, left Jackson, and nobody will tell her why; together the women, at Skeeter’s instigation, write an exposé of domestic help and the relationships between mistresses and maids.

No book with race as its subject can ever be comprehensive but what The Help achieves is a balance between bad and good experiences of the maids and, moreover, it is done with compassion.  As a native Mississippian, from Jackson itself, Stockett does not portray her home-city as one where racism is endemic nor non-existent but objectively shows that it is not a case of black vs. white but that there are many shades of grey.  Of course, an exposé, especially a fictional one, cannot delve deeply enough to cover a multitude of experience, nor satisfy a reader hungry for a meaty overview, but the maids’ stories are multi-faceted and do highlight the positive as well as the negative.  Skeeter’s story comes across as semi-autobiographical, with Stockett’s writing and magazine publishing experience; furthermore, Stockett was raised by her own African- American domestic help in the absence of her own mother.  Stockett’s own experiences as a child and inhabitant of Jackson, Mississippi, obviously influenced her and The Help is an exploration of issues that she grew up with.  The Help is not high literature and nor is it necessarily a prize-winning, novel (it is longlisted for this year’s Orange Prize) but is a book whose mains characters I grew fond of and one that will remain with me.  One of my favourite novels and one that famously deals with race, is To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee; Stockett is no Lee and The Help no Mockingbird but there are echoes of the classic text in the modern one with Skeeter at one stage comparing herself to Boo Radley.

The Help is narrated from the perspectives of Aibileen, Minny and Skeeter in alternating sections; the narratives are distinctive and Aibileen and Minny came to life for me, Skeeter less so.  The Ebonics employed for Aibileen and Minny made their voices credible and they were exceptionally well-characterised; Aibileen is strong, dignified and has literary aspirations whilst Minny is sassy, memorable and a fighter.  Minny talks back and stands up for herself and I loved her as a character; Aibileen is more likeable and sympathetic but Minny is the most vividly realised character that I have met on a page in some time.  I found Skeeter more two-dimesional and irritatingly naïve at times; she seemed to only became consciously aware of the prejudice that surrounded her once her surrogate mother Constantine vanished for her life, at which point she was personally affected.  I though that the clandestine writing of the book, albeit commendable, was self-serving on Skeeter’s part, at least to begin with, and it was only towards the end of the project (and the novel) that she realised its significance and the dangerous implications for everyone involved.  Ultimately I found the the undertaking somewhat idealistic as opposed to plausible; the consequences were at once dissatisfying and disproportionate to the suspense created throughout the novel and apparently the consequences that Stockett herself has faced in the telling of these domestic help stories, with members of her own family no longer speaking to her, were harsher than those faced in an unstable Mississippi in the 1960s.  However, I can recover from my disappointment in the ending as the remainder of the book was thoroughly enjoyable; I was satisfied by characters being rewarded with what they deserved.

The support cast in The Help were strong creations and were exposed for their ignorance, prejudices and naïveté.  Skeeter belongs to a privileged society and Aibileen and Minny are in service to households belonging to Skeeter’s peers. Hilly and Elizabeth (Aibileen’s boss), Jackson socialites, are friends of Skeeter from childhood and it was surprising that Skeeter was not more discerning in who she socialised with, although she was less passive to her surroundings as the novel progressed.  The Help is mainly a book about women and how women exhibit their racism as opposed to the violent racial attacks commited by men.  It is frustrating in its portrayals of the racist attitudes of these women, particularly Hilly who is an odious character; Hilly’s unpleasant nature is even more loathsome because she acts from a place of privilege, convinced that in her ignorance she is helping her family, friends and even the help e.g. in her campaign for segregated toilets within households for sanitation.  What I considered insidious was that nobody surrounding Hilly ever challenged her and that is most frustrating with the treatment of racists, when nobody actively educates them and calls them on their actions.  The only person to stand up to Hilly was Minny -in a key event central to the plot- and then later Skeeter, Aibileen and the other contributing maids.  Hilly was very much a symbol of the accepted status quo; by writing the book and braving her wrath and her possible revenge on the small-scale, the main characters were standing up against what was wrong in society.  Where Minny was one of the more favourably memorable characters from literature that I have come across recently, Hilly will be remembered for her sheer ugliness; what Minny did to Hilly, which is revealed later in the book and acts as their “insurance”, was most definitely Hilly’s just desserts.

The Help enthralled me, it enraged me, it entertained me; a mixture of laughter and tears, this is such an enjoyable read.

The following quotes are taken from each of the individual narratives:

I put the iron down real slow, feel that bitter seed grow in my chest, the one planted after Treelore died.  My face grows hot, my tongue twitchy.  I don’t know what to say to her.  All I know is, I ain’t saying it.  And I know she ain’t saying what she want a say either and it’s a strange thing happening here cause nobody saying nothing and we still managing to have us a conversation.

I nodded that I understood.  I was just smart enough to realize she meant white people.  And even though I still felt miserable, and knew that I was, most likely, ugly, it was the first time she ever talked to me like I was something besides my mother’s white child.  All my life I’d been told what to to believe about politics, coloreds, being a girl.  But with Constantine’s thumb pressed in my hand, I realized I actually had a choice in what I could believe.

And I know there are plenty of other “colored” things that I could do besides telling my stories or going to Shirley Boon’s meetings-the mass meetings in town, the marches in Birmingham, the voting rallies upstate.  But truth is, I don’t care that much about voting.  I don’t care about eating at a counter with white people.  What I care about is, if in ten years, a white lady will call my girls dirty and accuse them of stealing the silver.

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