“Must the Novelist Ask Permission?”

Abstract

Kathryn Stockett ends her 2009 New York Times bestseller The Help with fear. In the opening quote, the first-time author expresses the apprehension she experienced in employing the voices of two middle-aged black domestic workers, Aibileen and Minny, as narrators within her text. Her fear of “crossing a terrible line” denotes a feeling of separation between the author and her black characters (Stockett 450). Such a statement spurs curiosity into why Stockett felt the voices of Aibileen and Minny were off limits to her authorship yet not the voices of Skeeter, Hilly, Elizabeth, or any of the novel’s other white characters. Since its inception, Stockett’s novel has garnered copious criticism for its portrayal of the lives of several white families and their hired black domestic laborers in Jackson, Mississippi, during the 1960s. In interviews, Stockett, a white female author, seems most concerned with having somehow overstepped a boundary by penning a work with two-thirds of its narration being spoken by black female characters. The overwhelming concern for media outlets, such as Time magazine and CBS News, has been the irony in Stockett confessing to have written a story so near to her personal history that lacks a clear connection to the author’s professed identity. The afterword to this work, titled “Too Little, Too Late,” contains memories of the author’s childhood and Demetrie McLorn, the maid employed to assist in the care of generations of Stockett children. After 444 pages of narration detailing the intricate and complicated relationships among Aibileen, Minny, their employers, and a host of other Jacksonians, both black and white, in four additional pages, Stockett enlightens the reader as to her impetus for writing the bestseller.

I was scared, a lot of the time, that I was crossing a terrible line, writing in the voice of a black person. I was afraid I would fail to describe a relationship that was so intensely influential in my life, so loving, so grossly stereotyped in American history and literature.

—Kathryn Stockett, The Help