Kathryn Stockett’s The Help: A Voice against Racial and Patriarchal Prejudice
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Department of English
Abstract
This study explores the story of black women’s melancholy and recovery of
their life represented in Kathryn Stockett’s The Help. The narrative depicts the status
of black women who are proficient in their work, but they are not justified with their
capabilities and pushed to the margin by two agencies: whites and black males. It
proves that black women are always constructed as substandard and incapable to think
and act reasonably. The society is more offensive towards the blacks whether they are
male or female. Black women’s experience of life is far more complex than any other
white women like Hilly or black men like Leroy. Thus, the state of black women like
Aibileen and Minny is troubling: it is due to two-fold oppressors – white people and
black males. It is concluded that black women become the object of violence,
exploitation, hatred and neglect on the level of race and gender. This study, therefore,
presents the condition of double marginalization of black women in Stockett’s novel
through the spectacle of feminism.