Culture For Us

The Help – Special Assignment

Submission date: Monday 28th

1) Choose two of the following questions and answer them. Your answers should be full, concise and at least two lines long:

a) How is the movie setting (time and place) related to the movie plot?

b) Aibileen is at first reluctant to participate with Skeeter in the writing of her book. She mentions that taking part in it “scares me more than Jim Crow”. Why does she mention that character? Why is this character relevant in American history?

c) Before starting with the writing of her book, Skeeter reads the Mississippi Laws Governing the Conduct of Nonwhites and Other Minorities, which read: “Books shall not be interchangeable between the white and colored schools, but shall continue to be used by the race first using them.” (…) “No person shall require any white female to nurse in wards or rooms in which negro men are placed.” What policy do these laws subscribe to? Explain it in your own words and include at least two more examples of the state law comparing them with what you saw in the movie.

d) The assassination of John F. Kennedy is a turning point in the story. What was his approach to civil rights and what did his death mean in this context? What other death is important in the movie? Who was this man and why do you think his death made black people feel the way they did?

e) When she realizes Skeeter has been reading the Mississippi Laws Governing the Conduct of Nonwhites and Other Minorities, Hilly asks Aibileen if she likes her new toilet. Then she adds: “Separate, but equal”. What doctrine does she refer to and what did it mean for African Americans?

f) Aibileen and Minnie are seen throughout the movie attending religious services. In one of the masses, they read the Exodus. What impact did the book of Exodus have in African Americans?

2) Read the following extract from a magazine article and, using it as an argument in favour or against your opinion, write an opinion essay entitled: “The movie The Help does not properly portray the lives of black maids”. Your essay should be at least 150 words long and you should follow the regular layout (introduction – body – conclusion). Include examples from the movie as well as examples from the research you did to answer questions in exercise 1.

The Help movie: Black Women Historians slam 1960s race drama

By Karen Valby August 11, 2011 at 12:00 PM EDT

The Association of Black Women Historians released a statement today, urging fans of both the best-selling novel and the new movie The Help to reconsider the popular tale of African American maids in 1960s Jackson, Miss., who risk sharing their experiences with a young white journalist. “Despite efforts to market the book and the film as a progressive story of triumph over racial injustice, The Help distorts, ignores, and trivializes the experiences of black domestic workers,” the statement read.

The group of scholars took issue with novelist Kathryn Stockett’s use of “black” dialect, her nearly uniform portrayal of black men as cruel or absent, and the lack of attention paid to the sexual harassment that many black women endured in their white employers’ homes. “The Association of Black Women Historians finds it unacceptable for either this book or this film to strip black women’s lives of historical accuracy for the sake of entertainment.” They further made clear that while they may disapprove of The Help as storytelling, they very much admire and respect the “stellar performances” of the movie’s black actresses like Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer.

In EW’s cover story on the film, Davis (who plays Aibileen, the first maid to talk frankly with the white journalist, played by Emma Stone) acknowledged the charged conversations that were sure to accompany the film’s release. She says she too approached the novel with enormous suspicion, “because a white woman was writing what I felt was our story, and once again she’s going to get it wrong and she’s only going to skim the surface,” she said. Yet the story, and what she calls the deep humanity of the characters, won her over. “That’s what people bristle at: the maids,” she says. “I’ve played lawyers and doctors who are less explored and more of an archetype than these maids.”

The ABWH statement takes the film to task for seeming to suggest that after the assassination of Civil Rights pioneer Medgar Evers, the sole response of the black community was to quake in fear and anxiety. But it should be noted that at a recent special screening hosted by the NAACP, his widow, Myrlie Evers-Williams, bestowed upon The Help her most passionate blessing.

TODAY'S CLASS

THEMES

Toxic love:

Hermia and Lysander: Does Lysander love Hermia or he wants to show Demetrius that he has power over her?

Hermia and Demetrius: Demetrius thinks he has the right to marry Hermia

Helena and Demetrius: She is obsessed with him and has a very low self-esteem.

Titania and Oberon

Hippolyta and Theseus

Power:

Patriarchal power > Egeus thinks his daughter belongs to him and should die if she doesn’t follow his orders.

> Theseus is a patriarchal ruler. He doesn’t pay attention to his wife’s opinion. He "wooed" her with "his sword".

> Women as servants to men.

The test will cover:

1) character analysis

2) themes

3) quotes analysis

SHAKESPEARE'S TIMES

http://shakespeare-gesellschaft.de/en/info/faqs/shakespeare/shakespeares-times.html

POWER AND AUTHORITY

If we take the example of Midsummer Night's Dream, a play surely characteristic of Shakespeare's romantic comedies, we can see that the problem which authority has to master is a problem with authority itself, authority grown archaic. At the outset, the law seems to serve only the will of the father. A comedic resolution obviously requires either the independence of the law or the generosity of the father. It requires, in other words, a more inclusive order. Given that romantic comedy invariably poses this problem, only one form of resolution will do, the formation of an authority figure who overrules the existing law of the father. Oberon represents the traditional alternative to patriarchal law. He is the figure of carnival, and the introduction of this principle into the play triggers a series of inversions. As if Titania's playing the role of an unruly woman was not enough to tell what this is all about, Puck reproduces similar forms of inversion among the Athenians – both lovers and mechanicals - who have wandered into the woods. Such inversions - of gender, age, status, even of species - violate all the categories organising Elizabethan reality itself. This Renaissance nightmare can occur precisely because patriarchal law is initially so closely identified with political authority that to violate the will of the father is to return to what Hobbes would later represent as the horrors of a state of nature.

The figures of festival operate to break down the hierarchical distinctions organising Elizabethan society, only - in the end - to be taken within the social order where they authorise a new form of political authority.5 This mutually transforming exchange places disorder within the framework of festival and displaces it on to art, as illustrated by 'the story of the night told o'er', Bottom's 'dream', as well as the mechanicals' production of the tragedy of Pyramus and Thisbe. When Theseus and his party come upon the sleeping couples lying intermingled on the ground, the Duke surmises, 'No doubt they rose up early to observe I The rite of May . . .' (IV.i. 1 3 2-3 ). By identifying the lovers as revellers, Theseus does more than decriminalise their transgression of the law; he identifies their state of disarray with the order of art. 'I know you two for rival enemies,' he says to the young men, 'How came this gentle concord in the world . . . ?' (IV.i. 1 4 2-3 ). At the same time, however, the inclusion of filial disobedience within a field of permissible illegalities, changes the construction of political authority. What had been a violation of the father's law, in other words, thus becomes a scene of harmony. Indeed, when Egeus presses Theseus to punish the youthful offenders, the Duke overrules the father.

But if Theseus authorises certain inversions of power relations by situating them within the framework of festival and art, then it is also true that the introduction of disorder into the play ultimately authorises political authority. Once Theseus includes the rites of May within the domain of the permissible, the revellers in turn fall on their knees before him. Thus brought together, revellers and Duke can comprise a harmonious political body where the juridical power of the monarch exists independently from that of the patriarch. When Theseus overrules the angry father, juridical power can no longer be identified with patriarchal power. A new set of political conditions appears where competing bases for authority are held in equipoise by the Duke. That is, his ideal role is an improvement, in terms of the play, over the punitive power he threatened to exercise at its opening. The entire last act of the play consequently theorises the process of inversion whereby art and politics end up in this mutually authorising relationship. This process is then reproduced on the stage in the form of an Elizabethan tragedy which has been converted into comedy as rude mechanicals play a range of parts from those of noble lovers to the creatures and objects of the natural world.

The popularity of such inversions becomes clear when we see how Elizabeth herself used various forms of authority against one another. It is not enough to say that the transfiguration of authority in romantic comedy resembles Elizabeth's actual style of exercising power. To be sure, she used her power as a patron to affect the power of the ruling families and thus set economically-based political authority in opposition to that based on blood. Yet this strategy was more than personal ingenuity on her part, for her characteristic strategies for expressing power were just as dependent upon the political conditions of the time as the form of a comedy such as Midsummer Night's Dream.

MARRIAGE AS COMIC CLOSURE

The most outstanding feature of Shakespearean comedy is its pervading obsession

with marriage. In many instances single or multiple marriages are used to

provide comic closure, as in As You Like It and Love’s Labour’s Lost, in which

four couples marry or are expected to marry, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and

Twelfth Night, in each of which three couples marry, and Much Ado About

Nothing and Two Gentlemen of Verona, in each of which two couples marry.

In other examples the very fact of marriage is used as the mainspring of the

comedy, as in The Merry Wives of Windsor, where the very title of the play

indicates the importance of marriage, or, to a lesser extent, The Comedy of

Errors, The Merchant of Venice and The Taming of the Shrew, in each of which

a marital relationship plays a central part. Indeed, marriage is so central a topic

in Shakespearean comedy that it is the presence of marriages in their plots

which has problematised the genre classifications of both the late romances

and the two ‘dark’ comedies, Measure for Measure and All’s Well that Ends Well,

and which provides the main justification for whatever claim they are accorded

to be treated as comedies.1 We know, moreover, that many of Shakespeare’s

comedies bear clear marks of having been written expressly for performance

as part of the celebrations surrounding the solemnisation of actual marriages,

so that the connection would have been still more obvious to their original

audiences.

But for all that the plays can indeed be grouped together with reasonable

accuracy into these broad classifications, to do so obscures both some significant

and some interesting differences between them, and also the problematic

36 Genre

ways in which marriage is generally treated in these plays. For one thing,

despite the traditional view that marriage provides comic closure, this is,

in fact, very rarely achieved.2 The idea is of course drawn on – the audience is

repeatedly encouraged to expect that the proceedings will be appropriately

closed with a wedding – but these expectations are then either disappointed,

or gratified in such a way that the spectator will be forced to question both

the meaning of the events he or she has witnessed and also the assumptions

underlying his or her response to the events.

Marriage is appropriate as a provider of closure for comedy because it

focuses primarily on the experience of the group, as opposed to the individualist,

isolationist emphasis of tragedy. The tragic hero lives and dies a

fundamentally lonely figure, traumatically separated from his God, his society

and his surroundings. Marriage both counters this element of separation by

showing humans in a relationship which is, in theory at least, one of indissoluble

bonding, and also holds out the promise of renewed life in the birth

of offspring (referred to both in the words of the marriage ceremony and in

Elizabethan wedding customs, and assumed to be the inevitable product of all

heterosexual intercourse).3 The ultimate polar opposite of the tragic closure

provided by death would of course be birth itself, which is indeed sometimes

used in this symbolic sense (All’s Well that Ends Well may be taken as an

example of this); but birth, too, places primacy on the experience of the isolated

individual, and the social ritual of marriage, with its stress on continuity

and group survival, therefore provides a more effective counterbalance to the

finality implied in the death of the tragic individual.

Such an emphasis on continuity is undoubtedly present in much of

Shakespeare’s work. It can be traced explicitly through the first 18 of his

sonnets, and it can also be detected in Oberon’s blessing of the bridal bed in

A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and in Rosalind’s reference to Orlando, almost

as soon as she sees him, as ‘my child’s father’.4 It is also possible to discern in

Shakespeare’s comedies clear signs of the conservatism which is so often felt

to flourish in comedy: the lovers in A Midsummer Night’s Dream may flee from

Athens at the outset of the play in rebellion against the patriarchal order articulated

by Theseus and Egeus, but they do so only to find themselves in a wood

ruled by a patriarch just as powerful (a point neatly made by the theatrical

tradition of using the actor who plays Theseus to double Oberon), and at the

end of the play the two couples willingly return to the society from which they

had fled to take their allotted parts as leading members of it and, no doubt,

to assist in its perpetuation.

(...)

In A Midsummer Night’s Dream the difference in the nature of the experiences

offered by marriage to men and to women is signalled right at the outset, in

the opening dialogue between Theseus and Hippolyta. The couple seem to be

united in their eagerness for the approach of their ensuing wedding:

Theseus: Now, fair Hippolyta, our nuptial hour

Draws on apace; four happy days bring in

Another moon: but O, methinks, how slow

This old moon wanes! She lingers my desires,

Like to a step-dame or a dowager

Long withering out a young man’s revenue.

Hippolyta: Four days will quickly steep themselves in night;

Four nights will quickly dream away the time;

And then the moon, like to a silver bow

New bent in heaven, shall behold the night

Of our solemnities.16

In fact, Hippolyta’s lines are susceptible of a very different interpretation, as

was shown by the way that Penny Downie played the role at Stratford-upon-

Genre 43

Avon in 1982. Her Hippolyta was a deeply reluctant, indeed sullen, bride: her

statements that the time would pass quickly were motivated not by joy but by

a disempowered acceptance of the inevitable, and her flat future tenses, without

any use of the optative, reflected this sense of despairing entrapment.

Such a reading also serves to highlight the fact that Theseus insistently

perceives all the blocking figures to their marriage as female. He alludes, in

turn, to the moon (most usually figured in Elizabethan discourse in her classical

personae as Cynthia, Diana, Dictynna or Artemis, and as such associated

with the Virgin Queen herself ), a step-dame and a dowager.17 Hippolyta, in

marked contrast, concurs in imaging the moon as female, but views it as a

symbol of empowerment, a representation of the ‘bow’ (I. i. 9) which was once

her weapon. Theseus’ assumptions are even more remarkable in a play where

the blocking figures are in fact uniformly male – Egeus, who objects to his

daughter’s marriage, and, arguably, Oberon, though, like Theseus, he himself

constructs the cause of the quarrel between the fairies as the opposition of

Titania – and where the women tend to be unusually powerless for representatives

of the comic feminine.18 But if the plot of the play minimises the power

of women, its imagery maximises it, and concomitantly figures men as weakened,

clearly suggesting a deep-rooted fear, as in Titania’s elegiac comment

that ‘the green corn / Hath rotted ere his youth attained a beard’ (II. i. 94–5).

Even the play-within-the-play may encode a fearful female. ‘Ninny’s tomb’

may be funny, but it also memorialises Ninus, King of Assyria, whose wife, as

Sir David Lindsay of the Mount recorded in his attack on female rulers, was

the ‘proude and presumptious’ Semiramis,19 who is one of the examples

Lindsay cites to prove the innate unfitness of women to occupy posts of power.

The idea briefly indicated in Hippolyta’s speech that women may be unwilling

to marry recurs throughout the play.20 In many of Shakespeare’s romantic

comedies, the women are seen as being very actively in search of a husband:

Viola has barely landed in Illyria before she is enquiring about Orsino’s marital

status, Olivia rapidly proposes marriage to the supposed Cesario, and Feste is

able to tease Maria by alluding to the possibility of Sir Toby marrying her;

both Julia and Silvia in The Two Gentlemen of Verona actively seek their lovers

out, and Rosalind in As You Like It effectively engineers her own marriage when

Orlando, blinded by her male disguise, does not take the initiative. In A

Midsummer Night’s Dream, Helena does indeed actively pursue Demetrius,

but whereas the other heroines who do this are presented as spirited and

determined, and invariably preserve their dignity and their self-respect, she is

seen as merely ridiculous:

I am your spaniel; and, Demetrius,

The more you beat me, I will fawn on you.

Use me but as your spaniel, spurn me, strike me,

44 Genre

Neglect me, lose me; only give me leave,

Unworthy as I am, to follow you.

What worser place can I beg in your love –

And yet a place of high respect with me –

Than to be used as you use your dog?

(II. i. 203–10)

Titania, who (although for very different reasons) similarly pays court to the

man of her choice, is equally seen as a butt of jokes. Far more popular, both

with the men of the play and generally with audiences and critics, is Hermia,

who, unlike the majority of Shakespeare’s heroines, shows a distinct concern

for propriety – ‘Nay, good Lysander; for my sake, my dear, / Lie further off

yet; do not lie so near’ (II. ii. 42–3). In fact, if Hermia and Lysander had

decided to perform a contract of per verba de futuro in front of a witness such

as Helena and had then consummated their marriage in the woods, it would

have become immediately legal; but that is never suggested, and Hermia’s

behaviour is presented instead as the polar opposite to Helena’s. When

attitudes such as this are highlighted, the decision to set the opening scene of

the 1982 Stratford-upon-Avon production in the Victorian period becomes a

highly suitable one.

Hermia’s concern to protect her virginity had previously gone even further,

when, unamazed by the choice she is offered between enforced marriage,

execution, and the cloister, she unhesitatingly chooses the lifelong chastity of

sisterhood rather than marriage with Demetrius.21 Here, of course, her decision

is perfectly understandable, since the partner offered her is one she has

no liking for; but taken along with other instances of women not wishing to

marry or to live within marital relationships in the play, it may nevertheless be

seen as significant.Titania may be eager enough for Bottom, but she is undergoing

what seems to be an effective separation from her ‘lord’ Oberon; and

whatever Hippolyta’s feelings for Theseus may be now, we are told clearly

enough what they must have been initially when Theseus reminds her ‘Hippolyta,

I woo’d thee with my sword, / And won thy love doing thee injuries’

(I. i. 16–17). Moreover, the play even includes more or less direct reference

to that ultimate refuser of marriage, ‘the imperial votress’ (II. i. 163) herself,

Elizabeth I, whose decision to remain single had given rise to the cult of the

Virgin Queen.22

As if this were not enough, the play clearly warns of the possible dangers

of marriage: a wife risks quarrels and the curbing of her will, such as occurs in

the relationship of Titania and Oberon, and death in childbirth, as happens

to the mother of the changeling boy; or her children may be deformed –

although the fairies promise that this will not happen to any of the couples in

the play, their mere mention of deformity nevertheless serves to confirm it as

Genre 45

a real possibility.23 This last is an issue that would affect the husband too, and

the death of both Pyramus and Thisbe in the mechanicals’ playlet could

perhaps serve as a reminder that love offers perils for both sexes. Nevertheless,

neither Demetrius nor Lysander is threatened with anything like the

dreadful choice that is offered to Hermia, and both Theseus and Oberon end

the play with very much the upper hand in their relationships:Titania has been

thoroughly humiliated by the discovery of her love for an ass (an ironic and

radically reductive rewriting of Theseus’ much more heroic adventures with

the Minotaur), and Theseus at the banquet firmly overrules Hippolyta’s

distaste for the mechanicals’ play with her first lesson in theatre criticism and

public behaviour (V. i. 89–105).

Moreover, in this play too the marriages do not provide closure by occurring

at the end of the play.24 Almost all the plot material has been used up

by the opening of Act V: Titania and Oberon are reconciled, the lovers have

come together in mutually agreeable couples, returned to the city and been

reconciled with Theseus and Egeus, Bottom has been transformed back to

his normal shape, and all that remains is for the mechanicals to perform their

play. We may perhaps wonder to what extent the fairies Titania and Oberon

can be considered bound by the human rite of marriage at all – especially

since each accuses the other of having effectively conducted an open

relationship. As for the marriages of the mortals, they appear to have taken

place between Act IV, scene 1 and Act V, scene 1: in the first of these scenes

Theseus announces that ‘in the temple by and by with us / These couples

shall eternally be knit’, and in the second all are looking forward to the advent

of the evening which will allow them to consummate the marriages. It would

in fact be perfectly possible in narrative terms to end the play after Act IV,

scene 1.

What comes after that point is obviously important in terms of providing

a suitably celebratory finale, but it offers too a comment on what has occurred.

The tragic story of Pyramus and Thisbe may serve to remind us how very

easily the events of the play could have developed along the lines of Romeo

and Juliet; the fairies’ final benediction can be seen as indicating how much

such a blessing may be needed. Marriage then is not seen as some sort of transcendental

signifier which automatically confers meaning on events: its own

meaning is open to probing and exploration. Even when closure does finally

occur, its meaning is unmade even as it is made:

If we shadows have offended,

Think but this, and all is mended,

That you have but slumber’d here

While these visions did appear.

And this weak and idle theme,

46 Genre

No more yielding but a dream,

Gentles, do not reprehend:

If you pardon, we will mend.

And, as I am an honest Puck,

If we have unearned luck

Now to ’scape the serpent’s tongue,

We will make amends ere long;

Else the Puck a liar call.

So, goodnight unto you all.

Give me your hands, if we be friends,

And Robin shall restore amends.

(V. i. 409–24)

Puck’s paradoxes both return the play to the real world and, at the same

time as they offer a final comment on the play, they deny the possibility of

making any such comment at all, since the making of meaning must finally be

in our hands. In offering itself for approval the play finally abdicates control

over its own authority; and thus, although it has been careful to present itself

as an ostensible celebration of marriage, the diametrical antithesis of the ‘some

satire, keen and critical, / Not sorting with a nuptial ceremony’ (V. i. 54–5)

which Theseus fears, it ultimately acknowledges that the meaning-making

audience is equally free to construct out of it as potentially subversive a critique

as it wishes of contemporary marriage, and, above all, of the role of

women within it. As Christopher Brooke, in his history of marriage, observes

of the idea that A Midsummer Night’s Dream was an occasional play feting an

actual wedding, ‘I am glad it was not my wedding it celebrated, for it proceeds

by showing us the lowest view of human marriage we have so far

encountered.’25

If both As You Like It and A Midsummer Night’s Dream seem to offer sympathy

for the position of women within marriage, it must not be forgotten that

the issue of men’s role within marriage has, even if only marginally, also been

addressed in them.26 In The Two Gentlemen of Verona, as later in The Merry

Wives of Windsor where Herne the Hunter functions as a recuperative figure

in exactly the same way as the horn song does, this becomes of far greater

importance.

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