Reading Order
The Help Reading Order
Kathryn Stockett's The Help (2009) is a novel set in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1962 — told through three alternating voices: Skeeter Phelan, a young white woman who wants to be a writer; Aibileen Clark, a Black maid who has raised seventeen white children; and Minny Jackson, an outspoken Black maid with a talent for cooking and a talent for getting fired — who collaborate to write a book about what it is like to be a Black domestic worker in the Jim Crow South.
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The Help
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The Help
Kathryn Stockett·2009·The complete standalone novel. Start here.
The Help — Frequently Asked Questions
Is The Help accurate about the civil rights era?
The Help is a work of fiction and has been both praised for bringing the civil rights era to a wide popular audience and criticized for its perspective and limitations. On the accurate side: the novel correctly depicts the racial hierarchy of domestic service in Jackson in 1962, the dangers faced by Black women who spoke out against their employers, the economic dependence that made those dangers nearly impossible to escape, the white liberal's difficulty in understanding the full extent of Black vulnerability, and the actual events of the civil rights movement (Medgar Evers's assassination occurs in the novel's timeline). On the limitation side: critics, including many Black writers and scholars, have argued that the novel centers white characters' perspectives on Black women's experiences, that Skeeter is given a more developed and sympathetic interiority than the maids, that Stockett (a white Southern woman) could not fully represent the interior experience of her Black characters, and that the novel's resolution — the book they write becomes successful — papers over the structural injustices that had no such clean ending.
Why was The Help controversial?
The Help was controversial primarily because of its perspective: a white author writing in the voices of Black women about their experience of racial oppression in the Jim Crow South, and telling a story in which a white woman (Skeeter) is central to the Black maids' project of speaking out about their conditions. A group called 'the Association of Black Women Historians' issued a public statement in 2011 objecting to the film adaptation's 'ahistorical, oversimplified' portrayal of Civil Rights Era domestic workers, arguing that it depicted Black women as simple, childlike, mammy figures; failed to address the sexual vulnerability of Black domestic workers; and suggested that uplift required white benevolence. Kathryn Stockett was sued by her own childhood maid, Ablene Cooper, who alleged that the character Aibileen was based on her without her consent. These critiques are serious and worth engaging with for readers who want to understand both the novel's popular appeal and its limitations.
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