The Help by Kathryn Stockett, published in 2009, received critical acclaim upon its release and remained at number one on the New York bestseller list Times for a year. By the time the 2011 film adaptation of the book hit theaters, The Help had sold 3 million copies, was on the New York Times bestseller list for more than two years, and had been published in 35 countries and translated into three languages ​​(S. Jones, 8). The popularity of Stockett's novel was widespread, but many historians and scholars have raised questions about the stereotypes perpetrated by the novel and the accuracy of the characters' dialect. Stockett writes the African American character's dialogue in a broken, marked form of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) while depicting all white characters, even working-class ones, with very few vernacular markings despite the fact that most, if not all, of the characters would have had Southern vernacular marks. The novel plays on the racial stereotypes that Stockett claims to be trying to eliminate, but the heartwarming themes of "we're all the same" and the fact that the upper-middle-class white protagonist succeeds in the end suggest that the popular acclaim is perhaps coming from an audience playing into white fantasy, not an audience seeking to reveal truths and heal racial wounds. I argue that the major success of Stockett's The Help and the resulting film, despite its misuse of AAVE and its perpetuation of African-American stereotypes, suggests that its audiences might subscribe to those same stereotypes. Say no to plagiarism. Get a custom essay on "Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned"?Get the original essayThe Help has gained immediate priority on book club lists since 2009, and the release of its film in 2011 propelled to the top of the rankings. once again, topping the New York Times bestseller list six times during its 103-week tenure. The success of the novel, before and after the film's release, is not insignificant: it was ranked number three on its list of best-selling hardcover books of 2009 by Publisher's Weekly; it was the first Amazon Kindle title to sell a million e-book copies; it won the 2010 Indies' Choice Award from the American Bookseller's Association; and it won the 2010 Fiction Book Award from the Southern Independent Booksellers Association (Wilson, 2012). The film benefited from a major promotional campaign that included links to Southern recipe and cooking guides, women's fashion and style guides, and other cross-branding efforts. The movie Help was very successful, likely due to its extensive marketing as well as the popularity of the book. The film grossed approximately $170 million domestically and $210 million worldwide (Wilson, 2012). However, the film's release in 2011 was met with more than just public appeal: Many viewers expressed concerns about the exaggerated African-American vernacular, overt stereotyping of domestic workers, and perpetuation of the white savior trope. These concerns are all apparent in both the novel and the film, suggesting that the broad audience that gave them their popularity is willing to look past – or perhaps even not see at all – the problematic representations of race and the civil rights movement around the world. early 1960s. Conversation around Kathryn Stockett and her novel began immediately after its release. It was controversial becausesome readers found it derogatory toward African Americans and a misrepresentation of the civil rights movement. Ida E. Jones, national director of the Association of Negro Women Historians, succinctly described many of her own issues with race in The Help in an essay titled "An Open Statement to Fans of The Help." “Despite efforts to market the book and film as a progressive story of triumph over racial injustice,” she writes, “The Help distorts, ignores, and trivializes the experiences of black domestic workers. We are particularly concerned about depictions of black life and the lack of attention paid to sexual harassment and civil rights activism” (I. Jones, 2014). The film, she claims, portrays the civil rights movement through rose-tinted glasses and, in doing so, ignores constant adversaries like sexual assault and less-than-adequate wages that women faced. It invalidates an entire violent, hard-fought movement by suggesting that it was people like the white, upper-middle-class Southern protagonist, Skeeter, who truly led the civil rights movement. Furthermore, according to Jones, it completely mitigates the violence by suggesting that racism was not an institutional cultural psyche, but a handful of problematic individuals. “Portraying Mississippi's most dangerous racists of the 1960s as a group of attractive, well-dressed society women, while ignoring the reign of terror perpetrated by the Ku Klux Klan and the White Citizens Council, limits racial injustice to individual acts of wickedness” (I.Jones, 2014). Jones further claims that Stockett used the civil rights movement as a plot development strategy without giving it the respect she believes it deserves: "Ultimately, The Help is not a story about the millions of hardworking and dignified black women who worked in white homes to support their families and communities. Rather, it is a coming-of-age story of a white protagonist, who uses myths about black women's lives to make sense of her own” (I. Jones, 2014). Jones is far from the only scholar to express concerns about the handling of race in The Help, and yet the book is still considered a centerpiece of literature in many wine and cheese book clubs . The popularity of The Help, both on and off screen. film, suggests that a large number of Americans are comfortable either ignoring the stereotypes depicted or simply not recognizing the fallacy of the story and the language used by its characters. Constance Ruzich and Julie Blake argue in their essay "Ain't Nothing Like the Real Thing: Dialect, Race, and Identity in Stockett's novel The Help" that the African American community, on the other hand, is able to see the misuse of the dialect. as shown in film and paper. “For many members of the black community and/or those with experience and understanding of African American Vernacular English (AAVE), Stockett's depiction of handmaiden language does not ring true and is therefore perceived as insulting, humiliating and racist” (2015). Ruzich and Blake continue to suggest that the actual markings in the African American domestic workers' dialogue are not necessarily the problem, but the "inscription" process that readers and viewers undergo in consuming the novel as entertainment. Barbara Johnstone, who works in the Pittsburgh area and studies AAVE and coined the term, describes it as "ifhearing a particular word or structure used, or a word spoken in a particular way, is experienced in relation to a particular style of dress or grooming, a particular set of social alignments, or a particular social activity, that pronunciation can evoke and/or create a social identity” (Johnstone, 2011). Asif Agha, who can be put in conversation with both Ruzich and Blake and Johnstone because of his work on recording, defines it as "the process by which a set of linguistic forms or features becomes linked to a social identity and the ideological and cultural consequences that accompany it. values” (2003). Using this definition of registration, Ruzich and Blake argue that the social identity that Stockett attempts to describe to readers through the marked dialect of African American domestic workers is that of being black, poor, and uneducated. In his essay "If Black English Isn't It's Not a Language, So Tell Me, What Is It?" » James Baldwin, argues that specific dialects became institutionalized because they belonged to the people of privilege at the time of the language's conception. With this in mind, the notion of “correct” and “incorrect” speech patterns becomes blurred. He writes that arguments around African-American dialects are "rooted in American history and [have] absolutely nothing to do with the question the argument seems to ask." The argument has nothing to do with language itself but with the role of language. Language undoubtedly reveals the speaker” (Baldwin, 2001). By describing the characters through their marked vernaculars, Stockett suggests that particular speech patterns correlate with different races, particularly that African American English is more marked with "inaccuracies", although the institutionalized creation of 'correct' English is in itself classist. Stockett's marks are clear in the dialect of the African American characters, while many white characters, even those of the working class, maintain a speech pattern almost intact. In this way, the novel and film suggest that specific vernaculars are inherently aligned with class and race and that the marked vernacular of domestic workers should be recognized as a dialect used by the working class while the more " correct” of South American English used by white characters should be seen as one with the upper-middle class (Ruzich and Blake, 2015). Ruzich and Blake argue that The Help adds to a pre-existing cultural record that links AAVE to the poor, uneducated, and lower classes. The recording process in The Help becomes even more problematic when we consider the markings (or lack thereof) in the white characters' dialogue. Ruzich and Blake support critiques of the novel on this basis, because after careful study of the lines of dialogue, they found that "the speech of Stockett's white characters, regardless of their social class or rural-urban differences, is significantly less marked for the dialect. than the one used to give voice to the black characters of The Help. In his [Stockett's] white type language, dialect markers appear about once in every hundred words, compared to his black type language, in which dialect markers appear about once in every ten words" (Ruzich and Blake, 2015). ). This is offered in juxtaposition with the fact that historically, both African American and white characters spoke an accented form of South American English (SAE). The implication of thisasymmetric form of dialect in the novel and book suggests that, as a middle-class Southern woman, Stockett formed her own prejudices that translated into her writing (Ruzich & Blake 2015). This problem is exacerbated by the novel's popularity among white audiences, as it suggests that Stockett's internalized stereotypes are part of a larger, more widely accepted discourse. “The linguistic stigmatization of black characters in Stockett's novel must therefore be seen as something much broader than a reflection of a single author's individual prejudices, but rather as an indication in popular culture of racial and class anxieties deeply woven. in the sociocultural fabric of American society, a society that embraces and popularizes such linguistic choices” (Ruzich and Blake, 2015). This problem is highlighted by Stockett's treatment of white working-class dialect, represented by Celia Foote, a Sugar Ditch woman who marries richly and learns basic housekeeping and cooking skills by one of the African-American domestic workers. Minnie. She is of particular interest to linguists and historians examining the novel's accuracy because, although being a lower-class woman is an intrinsic part of her character, she does not have as many vernacular markings as working women domestics. Although historically Celia Foote's language would have been just as marked as that of domestic workers, Kathryn Stockett actually spoke in an interview about how she created Celia Foote's half-broken hybrid English. “I had a lot of fun writing Miss Celia. I wanted to create a character so poor that he was beyond prejudice. But in terms of dialogue? His was the hardest to capture. When you really get into deep, thick redneck accents, you kind of have to take all your teeth out before you can really take them out. But I like these accents” (Calkin, 2009). Ruzich and Blake wrote that they found this specific quote particularly disturbing because it shows the real lack of attention Stockett seemed to give to the accented AAVE and SAE marks, which all characters would historically speak. "Stockett's claim that she depicts Celia with a 'deep, thick redneck accent' is difficult to reconcile with the relatively infrequent dialect markers found in Celia's speech," they claim. "In fact, after examining the linguistic features of Celia's speech, it is unclear in what sense Stockett "pulled all his teeth out" to portray a character she describes as "so poor he is at beyond prejudices. Instead of emphasizing the differences between rich and poor, Stockett's novel emphasizes the differences between blacks and whites” (Ruzich and Blake, 2015). This type of recording becomes problematic when perpetrated by popular culture, but it becomes even more concerning when books and films that play on misrepresentations of race become the most popular literary work in this period. The problems with the characters' dialect in the novel and film are far from the only example of misrepresentation of African American domestic workers, although it is arguably the easiest to point out directly. When one considers the flaws in Stockett's version of the broken AAVE in tandem with the misrepresentations found in the characters and the plot itself, it becomes clear that the novel and film could be considered not only a representation false of a culture, but sometimes downright inaccurate. Allison Graham in"We Ain't Doin' Civil Rights: The Life and Times of a Genre, as Told in The Help" argues that one of the many ways race is distorted in the novel is its use of the Civil Rights Movement to generate vain discussions. The movement acts as background noise for the plot itself, which centers on a privileged white woman, although the book is marketed as a piece of civil rights movement literature. She further claims that the film's conclusion, while achieving its "feel-good" goal, really only suggests a "happy ending" for Skeeter and some extra money for the domestic workers involved. The only light at the end of the tunnel for African American domestic workers is that “the film gives no indication that Abilene and Minny will experience further backlash for ‘doing’ civil rights” (Graham, 2014). By focusing the entire story on a "white savior" protagonist, the novel and film allow white audiences to identify with the main character while feeling like they completely understand the civil rights movement. Other scholars, such as Tikenya Foster-Singletary, have expressed many concerns about the misrepresentations of color in The Help: "The way Stockett handled racial errors in multiple ways, spoiling the novel's ultimate task and the weighed down with the language and problematic details of the novel. a big part of history” (Foster-Singletary, 2012). Graham and Foster-Singletary are just two voices among a large number of critics who suggest there are problems in the way Stockett's The Help treats racial issues and the civil rights movement. Many literary critics, academics, and casual bloggers seem to pick on the obvious problems in the novel's depiction of race. In her essay "The Help: A Critical Review," April Scissors discusses some of the problems she found in the text, such as the lack of African aid. American male characters, who perpetuate the stereotype that African men -Americans are not involved in family life at all and when they are, they are violent (like Minnie's abusive husband who is only shown in the film as a menacing shadow). She also argues that many scenes in the film and novel follow a stereotype by suggesting that African Americans must be religious and forgiving. Especially when these qualities are expected of middle-aged African American women, the line between what is a “black mom” stereotype and what is an accurate representation of domestic workers becomes blurred (Scissors, 2013). “It is important to note that as a black woman, Abilene could not tell the stories of other black women and have the book be received as well as The Help. If a black author wrote the book, or if the story allowed Aibileen to be responsible for her own freedom, The Help would be reclassified as "African-American fiction" or "film noir", marginalized by its subject and not half as much. succeeded” (2013). It is clear that many readers and viewers of The Help, particularly African Americans in the South, find it to be an inaccurate portrayal of life in Jackson, Mississippi, and yet its popularity with of the public does not seem affected. What does this suggest, then, about the public willing to consume entertainment widely considered inaccurate? Some literary scholars argue that at least part of the novel's success was due to its tendency to be more attuned to the audience's emotional response. than the real historical truth. By revealing the full extent of theviolence and struggles within the civil rights movement and the lives of domestic workers in the 1960s, Stockett would have lost the ability to conclude the novel in a tidy and optimistic manner. Instead, she chooses to lump all of the racial injustices suffered by African-American domestic workers into one minimal, hateful character, Hilly Holbrook. With his defeat at the end of the novel, it is assumed that the defeat of all "racists" would follow. In this way, the audience is allowed to ignore the issue the film purports to highlight: the racial injustices suffered by domestic workers in the 1960s. Henneberger writes in his review of the novel that "the real appeal of the book, seems to me -it, lies in its invitation to immerse themselves in a warm bath of moral superiority over the book's racist simpletons, who worry about the diseases they might catch if they did so. women who cooked their food and raised their children also had to tinkle in their toilets” (Henneberger, 2011). The public, she claims, is given the archetype of a “racist,” who simply appears to be a mean-spirited and largely under-informed woman. By placing the racial problems of this period on the shoulders of Hilly Holbrook, the audience can take some comfort. In this way, I argue that part of The Help's popularity comes from its misrepresentation of race relations in the 1960s, as it allows for a momentary alleviation of white guilt. By allowing racial injustices as a whole to be condensed into a single antagonist, the audience trades historical truths for the temporary pleasure of a fictional story. Perhaps then, the widespread success of the novel and film suggests consumers, although I would hesitate to claim that a purchaser of the book equates to a strong supporter of the book. I would like to suggest that perhaps the book's popularity in the marketplace comes from the conversations that are generated about its misrepresentation of race, but I think that would be deep optimism and that in reality its popularity comes from its perpetration of fanciful white stereotypes. . Ruzich and Blake agree, stating that "the commercial success of Stockett's novel can be explained by its attempts to meet the emotional and political needs of its audience" (2015). These "emotional and political needs," they explain, include the need to alleviate white guilt and the need to personally connect with a main white character who ultimately triumphs. “One could argue that the book's central concern is not with social justice for black people, but rather with white people trying to determine what roles they will still have to play in a social landscape in which a black man is president. from the United States – a black man from the North who doesn't talk like Uncle Remus” (Ruzich and Blake, 2015). This becomes especially problematic when you consider that this is one of the few novels written by a Southern author that depicts (even inaccurately) Southern life during the civil rights movement. The Help is an inadequate source of history, but for many current moviegoers, it is the most information they have received about the civil rights movement at any point since high school. In Ann Hornaday's review of the novel, she agrees, stating that many of her concerns stem from the fact that the novel might not be popular despite the historical inaccuracies, but because of the inaccuracies. She lets the reader discover the book on their own, but be aware of the issues surrounding race as depicted in the novel. “Taste and perspective will surely determine whether viewers will find “The Help. 2017.