The Help: Historically Inaccurate, Accurately Fictional

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Sean Mullen Ms. Demarest English 201A 3/1/12 Historically Inaccurate, Accurately Fictional Every once in a long while, there comes along a piece of art that makes society question the bounds of creativity. In the last couple of centuries, works such as, “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” and, “I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings,” walked a thin line that teetered on creative freedom and social taboo. Now in the twenty-first century, “The Help” is the most recent of novels that has vibrated the fibers of our society’s ethical standards, and in turn makes us question how much authority an author truly has when writing about the racially disturbing times we have gone through as a nation. Though set in the time period of the 1960s, Kathryn Stockett’s, “The Help” focuses very little on the major civil rights events happening during this time, and rather on the everyday lives of black maids in the south while this whole movement was occurring. Opposition of, “The Help,” such as Martha Southgate, believe that Stockett’s creative license is void due to her not being involved in the situations she writes about. Stockett’s story of a white woman being the savior of these maids is the main issue presented in Southgate’s, “The Truth about the Civil Rights Era,” begging the question, why is it always white characters in, “central, sometimes nearly solo, roles” that are the heroes of the civil rights movement? The answer from the other side is that though white characters may play the main roles in these novels, they are in no way undermining the importance and necessity of the black characters in the plot and storyline. Every character, no matter how small, plays a significant part in the novel and is essential to the foundation and development of the novel itself. Though there is much opposition to Stockett’s novel, there are also many in favor of her right to create such a

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