![]() ![]() Whether or not the complaint has merit, it resonated with critics of the novel who see The Help as yet another appropriation of black struggles to heap laurels on a white character. Worse, earlier this year, a woman named Ablene Cooper who has worked for Kathryn Stockett for more than a decade sued Stockett, claiming that she had lifted Cooper’s life story in a way that was damaging to her. The local civil rights movement originates from a naive white girl, not an organized, black-led movement. The black characters in the novel speak in fairly heavy, sentimentalized dialect. In The Help, whether you're black or white, liberation's just a matter of improving your self-esteem.įrom its initial publication, The Help was met with criticism from writers like the New York Times’ Janet Maslin, although also with upbeat reviews and a rapturous commercial reception (it has sold more than five million copies). In The Help, whether you’re black or white, liberation’s just a matter of improving your self-esteem. ![]() But other than a mention of unenforced minimum-wage laws and a scene of the aftermath of Medgar Evers’ murder, the movie is disengaged with the public legal framework that let white women treat their white servants dreadfully in private. The project that brings them together, a secret oral history of maids’ lives in Jackson, may spotlight the domestic side of racism. The heroines-a privileged, liberal, white Mississippi woman named Skeeter Phelan (Emma Stone) and two black domestic workers, Aibileen Clark (Viola Davis) and Minny Jackson (a particularly good Octavia Spencer)-are much easier to identify with. Its villains, Junior League bigots who wear smart little suits to cover their scales, are so cartoonish that viewers won’t risk recognizing themselves or echoes of their behavior in them. Stockett’s novel presented a vision of segregation in service of a feel-good story, but the film version of The Help is even more distant from the virulence of American racism. But he could have asked the same question when thinking about The Help, Kathryn Stockett’s wildly popular novel about black domestic workers and the women who employed them in 1960s Mississippi, the movie adaptation of which arrives in theaters today. He’d been contemplating how to explain to his daughters the many uses of “nigger” in Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer. at the end of a recent episode of his sitcom Louie. That question came from comedian Louis C.K. “How do you try to feel like a good country when you’ve done shitty things as an entire nation?” ![]()
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