Students of American literature sometimes question the placement of different works in the so-called American canon, but there is a list of works that have stood the test of time. The stories of Poe, the poetry of Whitman, the wry wit of Twain, and the outrage of Chopin, Hawthorne and Melville are unquestioned in their encapsulation of the 1800’s. The Lost Generation (Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Pound, Stein, and their satellites), the shell shock of the years after World War II (Bradbury), the absurdity of discrimination (Baldwin, Hansberry, Hughes), and the dissolution of the nuclear family (Updike, Bellow) all have their places in the chronicles of the twentieth century in America. The Help fits well into the American canon and will be considered an important part of this country’s letters well into the 21st century, for three reasons: it touches on an awful theme – the ongoing discrimination against African-Americans, almost a full century after the Civil War that supposedly liberated them from slavery, only to find them held fast by Jim Crow; it is a refreshing expression of a woman’s voice during a time period when women were still expected to manage the Home and do little else; the epistolary format, hopscotching from one voice to the next, renders it a powerful exemplar of the craft of narration that critics and students will long appreciate.
The story of The Help takes a fresh look at a topic that has made its way through the American consciousness over and over again: the discrimination of whites against blacks in the decades after the Civil War – even after World War II. It is true that Emancipation and the resulting amendments to the Constitution ended slavery. However, once the nuisance of Reconstruction was brushed aside through the machinations of the Presidential election of 1876, the shadow of Jim Crow settled over every former slave (“The Disputed Election of 1876”). Instead of being technical property, the former slaves were now placed under a form of white power that, in the late twentieth century, was called apartheid when it was practiced in South Africa. In the 1950’s, when The Help is set, the blacks in Jackson, Mississippi were all confined on their own side of the tracks, on an area of land that would never grow, as the state owned the land all around their ghetto – and it was clear that the state would never sell. On the other side of the tracks, the white neighborhoods were permitted to grow and blossom. Because the whites in Jackson needed nannies and housekeepers to maintain their social status, the blacks were allowed to ride buses into the white neighborhoods and work – as long as they had their uniforms on. If one compares this to the confinement of black slaves to their quarters on their owners’ land, and the requirement that they wear certain clothes if they were to serve inside the house, it is clear that little has changed, at least in practical terms. The blacks had closely defined roles for their lives, and the price for violating those roles could still be death, as the passing of Medgar Evers in the novel shows. The Help shows this story through the growing outrage of one of the white women of the town, who came home from college ready to change the world.
All of the narrative voices in this story are women, whether it is Skeeter, the white woman who wants to tell the story of all of the help in town, Aibileen, the maid who keeps her wrath buried deeply, or Minny, who carries it on her sleeve – and proudly. The fact that all of these women can speak out so powerfully and nobly about their individual situations takes what could have become a simple polemic and makes it deeply, primally personal – as the best stories are. Skeeter has her own limitations to face, as a young white woman growing up in the South: she literally has to make her own escape to the North, to the publishing industry in New York City, to get away from the crushing expectations that were waiting to Stepfordize her the minute she succumbed to them. It is the power of Minny’s decision to leave her abusive husband, Aibileen’s choice to live alone as a single woman and urge her fellow maids to join in the storytelling, and of Skeeter’s decision to end her engagement and follow her own voice that makes this an important chronicle of the liberation of the American woman.
Finally, this novel is a powerful example of the use of different narrative voices to create a multitude of personalities in the book. Each of the narrators has a clearly different personality from all of the rest, and hearing the events of this story from such a combination of perspectives is what pushes this novel from the bestseller list into the canon. It is unusual for a book to make such a jump: usually, works that end up in the canon have tended to go unnoticed at their original publication, and vice versa (it is difficult, for example, to imagine the work of Jeffrey Eugenides ending up anywhere but scurrilous sites on the Internet in 50 years). It is this literary art at work in the story that gives this novel its literary stamina.
Works Cited
Maslin, Janet. “Racial Insults and Quiet Bravery in 1960’s Mississippi.” New York Times 18
Stockett, Kathryn. The Help. New York: Putnam, 2011. Print.
“The Disputed Election of 1876.” PBS.
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