Gendered Agency in the Help (2011): A Subaltern Reading

Abstract

The double marginalization of black-American women has been a concern widely depicted and actively debated in literature across the world, films being no exception.  This research paper is an inquiry into how Tate Taylor’s film The Help (2011) - an adaptation of the novel by the same name (2009) by Kathryn Stockett - represents the agency of black-American housemaids through an anonymously published book recounting their marginalizing experiences with their white masters.  The paper scrutinizes how gendered agency is channelized through certain filters that seem to endorse the racist ideology rather than subverting it superficially. The theoretical framework is built on the ideas of subaltern theory suggested by Gayathri Chakravorty Spivak with interventions from theories of gender and agency. The major findings of the paper focus on how Skeeter (a white journalist) is an inevitable presence for the agency of the black-American housemaids - primarily Aibleen and Minny - to find its complete expression. The paper holds up Spivak’s question, “Can the subaltern speak?” The scope of the research lies in exploring how art and literature that try to subvert colonial narratives unconsciously become proponents of the same, as a result of their

interpellation in the dominant ideologies.