Kathryn Stockett's The Help

Stockett, Kathryn.  The Help.  New York: Amy Einhorn Books, 2009.

The Help  affords us a plethora of hospitality lessons—mostly proscriptions, mostly obvious ones:  Treat the caretaker of your elderly and children with respect.  Treat the person who maintains the order of your house with respect.  And the most obvious—don’t piss off the person cooking your food.

I’d like to examine a less obvious one: Treat the person telling you her story with respect. 

You can read several hundred pages and still be impressed with how Skeeter navigates the narration of the “Negro” maids’ stories.   Then, you’ll read that she absent mindedly leaves behind the “satchel” with some of those stories at what amounts to a small town Junior League meeting whose leader is a particularly disgusting but typically racist “white” woman advocating for separate toilets in all homes with “Negro” help.   True, Skeeter worries about her transgression—worried about Little Miss “White” Woman getting her hands on these stories.  But this is far more that a transgression.  This could amount to a death sentence for the Help who’ve revealed intimate aspects of their employers’ lives.  The details of their stories need no interpretation to reveal a scathing portrayal of one “white” female wife/mother after the next.  These women could lose their jobs, their lives, and their families’ lives.   For them, Skeeter should be terrified.  But the novel reveals, no worries for Skeeter (or the Help) because she retrieves the satchel without the stories being read.  She hopes. But wait. Her nemesis—Miss Hilly LeLeefolt—does see a book cataloguing Jim Crow laws, which is enough to indicate that her “friend” Skeeter should be watched and simultaneously, shunned.  Thus, Skeeter gets ditched by the bitches.   Instead of a sigh of “Good riddance!” the novel adopts a poor little rich girl sympathy for Skeeter.  This concern is totally misplaced.  We’d do better to extend our sympathies to these maids who are about to be discovered blabbing their deepest resentments.

So far, Skeeter has jeopardized only her social standing among bigots.  However, amidst racist assaults and murder, the Help and their neighbors risk far more—their jobs, their homes, and their lives.  Not  Skeeter.  Instead of taking more precautions for insuring the Help’s privacy and secrecy, Skeeter deliberately puts them at risk when she divulges her project to her boyfriend—a Senator’s son, an alcoholic, and probably a racist—all of which she knows.  The novel should have cut her loose at this point, wagging a finger in shame as it stood arms akimbo over her.  Rather, the novel just moves on.

Disaster strikes after the book of stories is published and advertised on television.  When someone recognizes a detail that clearly reveals a particular dining room table in a particular house of a particular “white” female racist employer, the town’s identity is determined, as well as the identity of the Help.  They suffer, of course.  But they are triumphant in their cause, so goes the novel. And Skeeter?  She leaves this small town hell hole for the big city publishing paradise.

I know that you’re primed for my diatribe.  Once again a great story becomes mired in solipsism.  Like Clive Cleeve’s Little Bee,  here’s another novel that releases the “white” woman from responsibility while glorifying  the “black” woman’s struggles and suffering.  If you think I’m off-track here, read Trudier Harris’s Saints, Sinners, and Saviors: Strong Black Women in African American Literature.  She admonishes, “Seldom have we stopped to think, however, that this thing called strength, this thing we applaud so much in black women, could also have detrimental effects or consequences” (10).  She explains further, “The landscape of African American literature is peopled with black female characters who are almost too strong for their own good, whether that strength is moral or physical, or both” (11).  Harris catalogues these stereotypically strong African American characters: “more suprahuman than human, more introspective—indeed, at times, isolated—than involved, more silently working out what she perceived to be best for her children than actively and warmly communicating those desires to them” (11).  I agree with Harris that what’s lauded by our narrator is achieved at too high of a price—the price of self-actualizing. 

We need to be careful that we authentically depict the stories of others rather than eulogize their miseries and struggles, which so often keeps them ensnared in a master narrative of pity more than understanding, of sympathy more than appreciation, and of shame more than honor.  The Help  tells more than the story of these female characters.  It implies a slice of life during the American Civil Rights Movement.  As such, it should attempt to break the mold of the stereotypically strong, enduring, and sacrificing “black” woman.  Rather, it should respect the hospitality of guest and host—in this case, teller and listener—by treating stories as vehicles for female self-actualizing.

Note: As usual, I’ve interwoven my interest in hospitality with my interest in female hospitality.  Later, I may bifurcate this essay, delineating between the two.  Until then, I’ll leave it as it stands, pondering the overlap.

Note: I’m not a fan of the “white” and “black” distinction because it’s invalid and perpetuates insider/outsider divisions.  See Paul Gilroy’s Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line, in which he contends that racism is fascism. Gilroy insists that we must rethink our “intellectual, ethical, & political projects in the critical scholarship

of ‘races’”.  We must ask ourselves, as intellectuals if we have “become complicit in the reification of racial difference?” Scholars must pursue their studies as ethical members of the human “race.”  I agree.  So if you can suggest a better rhetoric, please do.

Chris Cleave: Little Bee

Cleave, Chris.  Little Bee.  New York: Simon and Schuster Paperbacks, 2008.

I don't recommend this book although parts are interesting.  Unfortunately the end is a Romanization of white saviors, a reduction of globalization to face-to-face encounters, and a PollyAnna perspective that names are more important than lives.

I’ll explain briefly.  Little Bee has escaped a bad place where very bad men did a horrible, horrible thing—repeatedly—to her sister in Little Bee’s presence.  By the end of the novel, Little Bee is back there with those men and soon to be their next victim.  According to her, it’s OK though as she explains:

"…in that moment that the soldiers’ leader gave me, that one minute of dignity he offered me as one human being to another before he sent his men across the hard sand to fetch me.  Here it was then, finally: the quietest part of the late afternoon.  I smiled down at Charlie, and I understood that he would be free now even if I would not.  In this way the life that was in me would find its home in him now.  It was not a sad feeling.  I felt my heart take off lightly like a butterfly that does not need to run anymore, because it is worth more than all the money in the world and its currency, its true home, in the living.  And not just the living in this particular country or in that particular country, but the secret, irresistible heart of the living.  I smiled back at Charlie and I knew that the  hopes of this whole human world could fit inside one soul.  This is a good trick.  This is called, globalization" (264).

I’ll catalogue my objectives…

First, there is no one moment of dignity.  These guys are out to torture and dispose of Little Bee just like they did her sister.  They are evil men without conscience.  Plain and simple.  Zero dignity for either oppressor or oppressed.

Second, Charlie will soon be free to live his life back home.  However, as he can’t live without his cape and accompanying hero imago to cobble his daily events into an anesthetized routine, it’s not much freedom. 

Third, Little Bee's becoming a butterfly?  No, she’s a little bee.  Stick with the metaphor, Clive.

Fourth, in this scenario, I have no idea what our narrator means by “the secret, irresistible heart of the living.”  Why is the heart secret if the end supports disclosing your real name, which, it claims, is what “peace” is?  Seriously, that’s the end…"Peace is a time when people can tell each other their real names"  (265).  Wrong. Peace is when people aren’t enslaved, raped, cheated, abducted, deceived, scorned, and rejected.  These are the outcomes that Little Bee faces, and no disclosure that her name is “Udo” changes that.

Fifth, I’m equally confused by how the hopes of the world that reside in one soul constitute globalization, which, evidently is why ”now we are all speaking the same language” (266).  Gee, you think it's English?  Those of you who follow this blog know that it is opposed to such solipsism. 

Here’s how Cleave should have ended the novel: No amount of US money, female gumption, and face-to-face do-goodness can save a girl who is forced to return to Nigerian murderers and rapists.  One white woman with a fistful of cash who can’t even properly mother her own son will not be able to save this girl from a war-torn country.  The end should be a wake-up call for all of us who throw our money at causes and walk away humming "It’s a small world after all."  Individually, we can’t correct and reverse human horror that exists to this extent.  Face-to-face, we don’t hold the hopes of the world between us when human misery takes this level and kind of toll.  Cleave should have bravely and authentically de-romanticized Little Bee’s final conjectures by showing us just what is going to constitute her last hours on this earth. 

We simply cannot self-actualize when we delude ourselves that ethic--in the face of far-reaching evil--comes so easily.

Laura Hillenbrand's Unbroken

Hillenbrand, Laura.  Unbroken.   New York: Random House, 2010.

Nb: Although this is a male biography, it’s a self-actualization story for anyone.  

Although most of the book is violent and disturbing, I continued to read to the end--500 pages—in order to learn how Louis Zamperini could emotionally and physically survive combat, prisoner of war camps, and a clueless post-war society.  I want to know if his endurance would ever fail him.  And when it finally (and I mean, finally) did fail him—when he was no good to himself and his families—I read to discover how he found ultimate comfort.  I won’t say what that is, but I will say that it wasn’t the answer I was reading for. 

Let me back up.  I read 500 pages for several reasons.  First, because one of my daughters was reading Unbroken for her book club meeting, which was two nights away.  Second, because I sort of know the author because she once lived in the house that my daughter moved into and because she moved next door, becoming my daughter’s next door neighbor, whom we never saw because Hillenbrand suffers from chronic fatigue syndrome and rarely leaves.  So…sort of. Third, because I suspected that Zamperini’s story inspired Hillenbrand to work and create amidst her own limitations and sufferings.  By extension, I hoped that discovering how Louis Zamperini could self-actualize while being tortured, neglected, and misunderstood would assist my self-actualization. 

I won’t recount or critique the book except to say that it’s an amazing story that couldn’t be more thoroughly researched (50 pages of notes!).

What I’m wondering weeks after I finished the book is why am I still so disappointed in how Zamperini self-actualized after the war.  What I struggle to determine is if Zamperini found peace and even happiness by succumbing  to a popular master narrative in order to escape his nighttime terrors and daytime traumas.  What I’m still asking myself is this:  Did he, after holding out on the raft and with the Japanese to keep his dignity, sanity, and health, end up yielding to US propaganda?  Taking a step back, I’m reminded that self-actualizers don’t merely reject master narratives and live marginally.  They also assess master narratives and subscribe to those that are healthy for their self-actualizing.  They are not all women who reject patriarchy, slaves who reject slavery, and POWs who reject brainwashing.  They are often Tea Partiers, Fundamentalist Baptists, DAR members, and NRA advocates. I am reminded that humans self-actualize by not only rejecting inappropriate master narratives, but also, by embracing appropriate ones.

For Louis Zamperini, his choice is not mine.  I couldn’t believe that so quickly his nightmares end.   He expels such little effort compared to the rest of his story.   He quickly transforms from an absolutely dysfunctional husband and father who is enslaved by nightmares and doubts into a functioning person who spends the rest of his life improving himself and the world.  So what’s my gripe?  It’s a two-for.  First, his choice seems absurdly easy after all that he’s endured.  Second, his choice mimics social mores.  You see, this guy who fought against unbelievable odds to stay alive and keep his dignity, gives up his uniqueness to join an enormously popular organization.  He actually chooses to fit in, get in step, and become one of the masses.  So what I’m struggling to accept is that he has the choice to agree to social acculturation.  I’m struggling with my disapproval of his choice because I’d hands down reject it.  That’s wrong.

Both repulsion of and attraction to social norms can lead to self-actualizing.  I need to remember that.

   

Hamlet's BlackBerry and Self-actualization

 For Christmas, my step-daughter gave me Hamlet's BlackBerry: A Practical Philosophy for Building Life in the Digital Age.  She explained:  "You like Hamlet, and you like technological."  If only her choice were that simple.  I'm afraid that whether or not she knew it, I am in desperate need of William Powers' cautions and advice--to such a degree that  my New Year's resolution will be what I’m calling, “Gridless Sundays.”  Although I'm allowing myself television, word processing, movies, music, and phone (I'm not a barbarian, after all), I'm taking myself off the Internet grid.  No browsing on Sundays.   

I'm writing this explanation as a Saturday night introduction to my reflections on self-actualizing and the digital age.  You see, my hip aches from sitting at the computer most of the day.  And I need to shower and cook dinner before I can escape to a novel I began yesterday.  So I'm pulling the plug on this critique, disconnecting my modem (at least, metaphorically for my Wi-Fi sharer's sake).  Although I may finish writing it tomorrow--Sunday--I won't be posting it until Monday.  I rest assured that the world will function fully despite my truncated blog post.  

Monday...  I missed even less than I predicted.  Other than a student’s email, which could wait one day, the rest wasn’t utterly unimportant.   So back to Powers: ”What I’m proposing here is a new digital philosophy, a way of thinking that takes into account the human need to connect outward, to answer the call of the crowd, as well as the opposite need for time and space apart. The key is to strike a balance between the two impulses” (4).

Powers’ first point is that we all claim to be busy.  In fact, we’re all so proud of being busy that that’s all we aspire to.  “We’re so busy, sometimes it seems as though busyness itself is the point” (10).  Thoreau, Powers recalls, nails it:  “the man who goes desperately back to the post office over and over hasn’t heard from himself in a long time.” Thoreau saw him as ridiculous.   I confess that this is a pet peeve of mine.  I constantly hear some of my colleagues, students, and family members bragging that they’re busy as if that’s some badge of honor. Last semester, I bravely--but cautiously--suggested to a student or two that if he/she could replace “busy” with “productive,” I’d then be impressed.  After all, “I was so productive this morning” reveals a potential for self-actualizing that “I was crazy busy” just doesn't.  What’s so wrong with the “busy” whirlwind?  Powers explains via William James: Life’s richness “all depends on the capacity of the soul to be grasped, to have its life-currents absorbed by what is given” (qtd. on p. 12). Being busy is being grasped by life, not grasping life.  

To illustrate James’s point, Powers tells a story:  While driving to see his mother, Powers calls to tell her that (as usual) he’s going to be late.  He mashes one button, which triggers his mom’s photo to appear, and the call goes through.  It’s a short call but accomplishes the notification he desires.  Thereafter, as he drives on, he muses about his mother—what he thinks of her, how he feels about her, what they've done together, and how much he’s looking forward to their upcoming dinner.  Powers explains the significance of his illustration:  “The total number of mobile phones in the world went from about 500 million at the beginning of this century to approaching 5 billion today.  But there’s a missing piece: the real magic of these tools, the catalyst that transforms them from utilitarian devices into instruments of creativity, depth, and transcendence, likes in the gap that occurred between my phone call to Mom and the powerful experience that followed.  That gap was the linchpin, the catalyst.  It allowed me to take a run-of-the-mill outward experience and go onward.  It’s the same for every kind of digital task.  If you pile them on so fast that screen life becomes a blur and there are no gaps in your connectedness, you never get to that place where the most valuable benefits are.  We’re eliminating the gaps, when we should be creating them” (31). 

Powers' next point is that technology isn’t the problem.  It’s our rapid use of technology that closes the gaps of reflection and appreciation.  Powers explains that “as the gaps between my digital tasks disappeared, so did the opportunities for depth. Sereen [sic] life became more rushed and superficial, a nonstop mental traffic jam.  Second, because I was spending as much time in the digital sphere, I was less able to enjoy my own company and the places and people around me” (48).  Rather, we need to pause for the awe of what we’ve just encountered on our screens.  Powers evokes Great Expectations’  Joe Gargery’s exclamation, “What larks!”  In self-actualization terms, let’s review the “What larks!” potential of “minding the gap” and enjoying our own company.

Previously, I’ve synthesized Maslow’s work with self-actualizers into 3 categories.  For the sake of this discussion, I’ll show how attending to the gaps between tech experiences and fostering our solitariness can enhance our self-actualizing. 

1.  Self-knowledge & self-acceptance: For this quality, we need the ability to see “reality more clearly” without “defensiveness.”  We need to avoid the “pose, hypocrisy, front, face, playing a game, trying to impress” approaches to life.  We need to foster a “continued freshness of appreciation,” and “oceanic feeling,” and a “philosophical, unhostile sense of humor.” Finally, we need to explore our own “creativeness” (Motivation 208-223).  It’s easy to see that unless we pause and reflect in private between our tech checks, we have given ourselves no opportunity to understand, enjoy, and appreciate life to this degree and in these ways.  Without that level of experiential embrace, we can’t know ourselves fully.

2.  Resistance to acculturation:  Self-actualizers intentionally create a “dialectic between growth-fostering forces and growth-discouraging forces” (Toward  204-205) in order to establish a “quality of detachment,” their privacy (Motivation 212), and a sense of  autonomy (Motivation 213).  This creates a discontentment necessary for resisting unhealthy forced cultural assimilation (Motivation 224)  through a  “continual series of choices for the individual” (Toward 193).  Resisting being “rubricized,” self-actualizers strive to be “role-free” (Farther 273) and, instead, create their own self-narratives. For example, after  reading one NPR Story of the Day, it behooves us to consider its effect on the world and us.  Does the story call us to action or acceptance?  Does the story disturb our sense of communal connections or foster it?   These are important questions if we seriously want to re-evaluate our place among other humans instead of self-identifying as members of a group—Republicans, Baptists, lawyers, capitalists, homosexuals, Stoics, etc.  Self-actualization demands that we resist inappropriate, forced enculturation.  To do so, we must at least temporarily withdraw from society and self-reflect.  While society’s meta-narratives constantly bombard our resistance to them, we must vigilantly reinterpret those myths for our own self-worth.  We must disconnect in order to reconnect—to ourselves and to others.

3. Cultivation of a better world: To improve the world, we need to live “vividly, selflessly, with full concentration and total absorption” (Farther 45), experience in full an “oceanic feeling” (Motivation 216) amidst our deep and “profound interpersonal relations . . . with rather few individuals” (Motivation 218).  This entails no Pollyanna view of life but accurate and efficient judgments of others (Motivation  203) and the strong belief that the “Good Person” creates the “Good Society” (Farther 19).  We strive to “love the world as it is and to improve it” (Farther 308); to enjoy other people’s happiness (Farther  309); and to fuse with others while allowing for personal freedom (Toward  91). One of my greatest attractions to Maslow’s work is that self-actualization demands living ethically, which depends on a calm mind, clear intentions, and purposeful actions.  Again, we’re back to creatin gaps and personal space in order to generate catalysts for self-actualization.  “What larks!”

Powers continues, arming his philosophical argument with examples from 7 famous lives. 

1. Socrates/Plato: Gain distance from your distractions.

2. Senaca: Calm your mind in order to create “flow” experiences.

3. Gutenberg: Reach within yourself despite your busy, crowded life.

4. Hamlet: Use 3-D tools to focus your mind and express your thoughts. 

5. Ben Franklin: Employ a positive approach to changing negative habits.

6. Thoreau: Create home zones for both solitary and social moments.

7. McLuhan: Choose the right medium to calm your mind and be creative.

Powers concludes with his suggestions for practicing his new philosophy for the digital age:

1. Create a living environment that supports both “communality and individuality” (226).

2. Nurture your capacity to be alone while among others.

3. Selectively limit your “screen” time and give yourself the occasion to properly reflect upon the content and experience that reading the screen has just afforded you.

4. Enjoy the company of others. 

5. Practice “technology-free introspection.”

Perhaps, you have additions: reading a sacred text, communing with nature, volunteering, exercising, listening to music, developing your creativity, etc.

I’d like to add one of my own: playing games.  Not computer games but games with at least one other person.  My husband and I play what we call “war solitaire” after each meal we eat together at home.  We have learned about each other through our fierce playing. I could not be more competitive—to the extent that I inflict bruising for the sake of playing a card.  We could not be more competitive together.  We have released more than a bit of tension between us through our ferocious carding, which involves body checking and ridiculous name calling.  It feels great to win, to beat the other guy, to console the card mate, to rationalize our errors, to concede defeat, and to accept a stalemate.  Could all this be accomplished using screens?  I suppose.  But there’s something to the physicality (the 3-Dness) of this particularly fast-paced card game that helps us fight for our own successes and grapple with each other’s defeats.  Perhaps, we don’t create an “oceanic feeling” or improve the world.  But I guarantee you that, as bizarre as it seems, we deepen our relationship and enjoy each other’s happiness.  Despite the name calling and bruising , when we play cards we both fuse together and allow for each other’s personal freedom. 

Right now, I’m listening to a soft jazz Pandora station, typing on my laptop keyboard, drinking my re-re-warmed coffee, and periodically, watching the snow fall.  Having grown up in the Chicago ‘burbs, I’m no stranger to snow.  But there’s something about snow falling in the South that’s different. “God brought it and he’ll take it away” is no exaggeration for where I live.  At 7 AM, the dentist closed his office for today and tomorrow.  The university conceded defeat at 7:30 AM, closing for the first day of the spring semester (despite the many hours I prepared yesterday to teach 2 hours of Kant.)  Looking up and out, I watch the snow falling.  I think it’s falling harder than when I started this paragraph.  I hear the jazz piece, which sounds prettier than when I began this paragraph.  My coffee is just the right temperature.  My husband may come down any minute now and give me another hug.  How can all that compare to checking my inboxes. 

Of course, I’ll go back on the grid and post this blog.  And you’ll read it on your screen.  Just promise me that you’ll spend a few moments considering what Powers, Plato, Maslow, and the rest have considered themselves.  And me, as well.   Thereafter, I wish you a pleasant “flow” to the rest of your day.