ABSTRACT
Writing about the successful publication of Kathryn Stockett's novel The Help in an essay that looks at the way women create public narratives about race, I emphasize that it is precisely the book's failure to offer any meaningful fictionalized accounts of the relationships between white women and black female domestics in the 1960s which, ironically, is one of the reasons it has been such a success. The book and the movie tell audiences very little about race and racism in the deep south; however, they do tell story after story about the way women, and particularly white women, interact with one another and with the black females who work for them. Stockett's fictional work was and is a supreme triumph of bad writing. Like the early sentimental novels her work resembles, she distorts, exaggerates, and generally misrepresents the lives of southern white women and black female domestics in order to create a world of female cruelty where sisterhood and solidarity triumph in 59the end. Instead of the Victorian trope “reader, I married him,” the happily-ever-after closing audiences get in these books is “reader, I am free.” Profound message of the moment: “telling your story makes you free.”
