Exploring concepts of representation conveyed in and by
The Help
through the phenomenological approach of reader-response theory
– A bachelor thesis by Tania Havris Lind –
first published in 2013 – revised in 2020
PART II – TWO NOVELS, MANY READERS
The literary construction of The Help provides a space in which the reader is actually reading about the novel being written by readers e.g. the three main characters, while additionally reading about other readers e.g. the sub-characters reading the published novel within The Help as well as their response to it.
To avoid unnecessary confusion, I have applied some labels in order to separate the real life novel from the novel within it, as well as separate the many layers of readers:
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The Help is the title of the real life novel
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Help is the title of the novel within The Help.
As for the multiple layers of readers, I have applied the following labels, which for the sake of clarification do not reflect some sort of principal importance, but are only to be viewed as precautionary labels:
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The main characters are the primary readers with the primary response
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The 1962 readers of Help are the secondary readers with the secondary response
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The contemporary readers of The Help are the contemporary readers with the contemporary response – or the third readers
Additionally, I want you to acknowledge the fact that Kathryn Stockett is in fact a reader with a response herself and will, if needed, be referred to as the authorial reader with an authorial response.
This ultimately results in a structure consisting of four layers of readers linked to four layers of response.
If we accept the assumption, that a reader’s response to a text constitute some sort of representation, it supports my argument that The Help contains at least four layers of ‘esthetic’ representations:
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of the authorial reader
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of the primary reader
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of the secondary reader
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and of the contemporary reader
How representation reflects individual perception
The Help offers a perspective of the distinctiveness in response that readers can have towards representation; all three main characters represent themselves as well as each other. As a result, the contemporary reader is enabled to experience how much self-perception can differ in comparison with the perception done by others.
This is illustrated in The Help through the changing attitude towards and within the main character Skeeter as well as the personal development that she undergoes: in the beginning of the novel, Skeeter seems oblivious to the extent of the invisible gap that separates the white from the black; she is aware of the segregation and the Jim Crow laws, but does not seem to be fully aware of its ubiquity. When she adapts Aibileen’s idea of portraying the perspective of the maids, she naïvely assumes that the maids will be eager to contribute with their silenced perspectives of the South’s history. Through this naivety, Skeeter also represent a brilliant fictional personification of the intellectual, which Spivak refers to in her essay; Skeeter assumes that just because she and the maids are both from the South, and because they share the same gender, they are automatically on the same page.
In Spivak’s ideology, Skeeter has yet to discover and unlearn both her intellectual privilege and her ‘female privilege’, before she can have any chance of forming a connection with the maids. Skeeter does not truly fathom the level of seriousness and danger that surrounds the idea of writing the maids perspective of the South, until she starts conducting the interviews; as a direct effect of this, she starts ‘to notice things’ and thus begins the process of unlearning her privileges.
According to Iser’s phenomenological approach, this happens because ‘reading reflects the structure of experience to the extent that we must suspend the ideas and attitudes that shape our own personality before we can experience the unfamiliar world [of a literary text]. But during this process, something happens to us’.
In the interview sessions, Skeeter assumes the position of a reader and thus ‘suspend[s] (as far as possible) the clamour of … her own consciousness’, which makes her able to view her white friends from both her own perspective and the perspective of the maids. This also exemplifies how representation enlightens the reader and plants a ‘seed’ within his or her mind, that will somehow change the reader’s inner landscape.*
The literary construction of The Help also forms a multi-dimensional reading experience for the contemporary reader; in a standard* reading process, the reader is able to absorb the ‘unfamiliar’ because of what Iser calls ‘identification’, which is ‘the establishment of affinities between oneself and someone outside oneself.’ With The Help, the contemporary reader assumes a dual position in which he or she is able to identify with the characters that are portrayed and represented, much like Skeeter’s identification with the maids, as well as experience the identification process that the secondary readers undergo when reading Help.
This complex structure of identification that The Help offers can perhaps pose as a method for those critics and authors, who argue that a satisfying representation of the silenced postcolonial subject is almost unattainable. In their opinion, the voice of the silenced subject is irretrievable due to the man-made differences that colonial history has bestowed between the intellectual and the Other through centuries of race labelling, the dissemination and uncountable acts of segregation, as well as the numerous statements, literary works, actions etc. of implicit and explicit racism, which inevitably have shaped the mindset of the contemporary reader.
Much like Skeeter, the contemporary reader is probably unaware of the distinction between their own world perception as opposed to how the world regards the contemporary reader, his or her attitude and response. By presenting the contemporary reader with a constellation of main characters, who represent different perspectives of the issue, the contemporary reader gains insight into the ‘unfamiliar world’ of the ‘Other’, as well as becomes aware of how the ‘Other’ regards them, or at least becomes aware of the possible distinction between the contemporary reader’s own perception and the ‘Other’s perception.
In relation to Iser’s phenomenological approach, the complex identification structure provided through the different perspectives and response of the main characters in The Help offers a possible stepping stone between the issues of representation and the possibility of voicing the silenced part of the South’s history: through the literary space of The Help, the contemporary reader becomes aware of the dynamics behind the primary- and the secondary readers and thus is likely to become aware of the identical dynamics taking place within his or her consciousness. In addition, the contemporary reader might realise the importance and dangers of his or her ‘esthetic’ representation.
In short, through ‘the realization accomplished’ by the secondary readers, an awareness of the contemporary reader’s own accomplished realisation is produced through the reading of The Help.
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PUBLISHING MY REVISED BACHELOR THESIS…
I wrote my bachelor thesis in the fall of 2013. I had become a mom for the first time in the spring, and my son was just a few months old when I started writing my paper with guidance from my lector Eva Rask Knudsen.
I fell in love with postcolonialism from the first time I was introduced to the subject during the second or third semester. The whole notion of how acts of colonialism have shaped (and still shapes) the world we live in today captivated my interest instantly. The infatuation arose when I was introduced to The Theory of Knowledge on the fifth or sixth semester, and I immediately felt the need to find a way to combine my two passions in my upcoming bachelor thesis – and so I did.
I have decided to publish my bachelor thesis on my blog, because the combination and understanding of both postcolonialism and reader-response theory is still very much a part of my professional foundation when I work with communication, as well as my personal interests for how we talk about people around us – on both a national and global scale.
Much have happened since 2013 when I first handed in my bachelor thesis, so I have used some time to revise the thesis to make it more contemporary. The core is still intact – I’ve merely brushed the exterior up a bit.
I hope you will enjoy the revised version of my thesis, and please leave any constructive thoughts in the comment box below.
