I have begun many blog posts about the novel and movie “The Help” and have decided to summarize a few observations instead. Despite the sugary triumph at the story’s end, I felt grains of discontent in my craw. I heard white friends say, “Wouldn’t it have been great to hand the children over to someone else in the house and to have a maid?” This appalled me and confirmed some of the worries of many bloggers. That the movie would make the system of exploitation attractive and desirable for people who identified with the white women. I think that is the appeal of the book and the movie for white women. We would have been Skeeter, courageous and helpful, and outside the nasty little tribe of the Junior League. But would we?
I read blogs and heard first hand that at the film’s end audiences rose, applauded, and wept. This reaction makes me incredibly weary and sad. The acting deserves accolades. The screenplay presented a more politically aware Skeeter than the book did. But the emptiness of all the women’s lives is something I can’t applaud, no matter the presentation. The black women spent their lives cleaning for others who intentionally and daily demeaned them. The white women demeaned the black women in order to play bridge.
The movie, perhaps unintentionally, shows a tremendous waste of human potential. So why the applause?
That the women in “The Help” were most concerned about excrement was horrifyingly appropriate and gallingly sad. The plot action revolves around potties and potty jokes. Were women so demeaned that this issue was their main concern? It is true that murders and beatings swirled around the periphery of this novel. But poop and pee were the tools of the war among the women.
What could have been the main territory, the writing of the stories, a brave act of empowerment, was not given the plot. There was little danger in the book or the movie, actual danger, to the writers. They succeed fabulously. No one rips up their only manuscript. No one rejects it. No one puts Aibilene’s eyes out to prevent her from writing her prayers or her chapter. No one hunts Skeeter down and threatens her on a country road. She loses the editorship of the jr. league newsletter, which she is leaving behind anyway. Instead, the plot action centers on high school-like petty revenges. Almost an as afterthought, when Aibilene is fired for her chapter, we are told it frees her to be the person she wants: in the novel she becomes the columnist Miss Myrna. Is that a triumph? It’s the job Skeeter has left behind to become a “real writer.”
To aid in this discussion, I read an article in the current Atlantic Monthly by Sandra Tsing Loh called “The Madness of Menopause,” which calls fertility “The Change.” Fertility hormones cause women to “begin the mysterious automatic weekly rituals” of cooking, cleaning, and caring while the “rest of the family…reads the paper and lazes around like rational, sensible people.” When the “hormonal cloud wears off, it’s not a tragedy, an abnormality, or going crazy.” It means a woman can “rejoin the rest of the human race: she can be the same, selfish non-nurturing, non-bonding type of person every one else is.” I appreciate this because I have always been housework/housewifey/soccermom challenged. I always suspected there was something biologically different about me, even though I have produced three sons. I dare say that the haze of the hormone cloud interferes with the self-regard and self-discipline a writer needs to do her work.
In “The Help,” all the white women, Skeeter especially, have somehow missed this hormonal bondage. The members of the Junior League have children so there is a whiff of fertility in their chemistry but poor Celia Foote, the least racist white woman, can’t bring a child to fullterm. It is the black women, Minnie, Aibilene, Constantine, et al, who are the nurturers, care-givers, the abnegated. In “The Help,” freedom from this bondage is to be 1) white. #1) white and well-off. #2) white and unable to produce children. #3) white and career-minded (Skeeter). In this context, we have a weird depiction of women. The white women in the Junior League are really like men! Lazy, selfish, rational, unmaternal, and hierarchical.
Unfortunately for the women who do the work of nurture and care, menopause will not free them. If the white women are denied their hormonal expression, do they become mean? If biology contributes to this desire for nesting and homelife, then what happens if one has to pretend one doesn’t have it?
I don’t have answers. I am just disappointed and perplexed that the lives of women are so mysterious that we end up praising with our attention and pocketbooks these sad and demeaning caricatures.
