Abstract
This chapter looks at another charged site in the US (southern) imaginary: the home, and particularly the bathroom. It analyzes Kathryn Stockett’s novel The Help (2010) through the lens of embodiment in and around toilets, especially the materialization of feces and urine. Extending the psycho/somatic logics of Chap. 2, the chapter shows how the black body in this historical novel is shaped by Jim Crow segregation in the southern home. Beginning with a brief discussion of Claudia Rankine’s Citizen (2014), the chapter then goes on to survey the continual toileting of The Help’s characters and a major plot point that involves a chocolate pie filled with feces primarily through the lens of psychoanalysis. While academic commentators have largely critiqued the book, the argument here is that its representations of bodily waste and instability reveal legacies of the US past.
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Notes
- 1.
Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric (London: Penguin, 2015), 5, 6.
- 2.
Ibid., 6.
- 3.
Lauren Berlant, “Claudia Rankine,” BOMB Magazine, October 1, 2014, http://bombmagazine.org/article/10096/claudia-rankine.
- 4.
Rankine, Citizen, 7.
- 5.
Heather Love, “Small Change: Realism, Immanence, and the Politics of the Micro,” Modern Language Quarterly 77, no. 3 (2016): 441.
- 6.
Sharon Holland, The Erotic Life of Racism Racism (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2012).
- 7.
Berlant, “Claudia Rankine.”
- 8.
Kathryn Stockett, The Help (London: Penguin, 2010), 215. Quoted in text from here on.
- 9.
Russ Castronovo, Necro-Citizenship: Death, Eroticism, and the Public Sphere in the Nineteenth-Century United States (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2001), 183.
- 10.
Leigh Anne Duck, “Segregation,” in Keywords for Southern Studies, edited by Scott Romine and Jennifer Rae Greeson (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2016), 60, 67, 60.
- 11.
Riché Richardson, “Romance/Abjection,” in Keywords for Southern Studies, edited by Scott Romine and Jennifer Rae Greeson (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2016), 323.
- 12.
Astrid Erll, Memory in Culture, translated by Sara B. Young (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 171.
- 13.
Dominique Laporte, History of Shit, translated by Nadia Benabid and Rodolphe el-Khoury (Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press, 2000), 29.
- 14.
Karl Abraham, “The Narcissistic Evaluation of Excretory Processes in Dreams and Neurosis,” In Selected Papers, edited by Ernest Jones, translated by Douglas Bryan and Alix Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1927), 319.
- 15.
Richardson, “Romance,” 323.
- 16.
Jay Watson, Reading for the Body: The Recalcitrant Materiality of Southern Fiction, 1893–1985 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012), 9, 25.
- 17.
Stephanie Rountree, “Poop, Pie, & Politics in The Help: Rescuing the (Literary) Body from Political Obsolescence,” Word and Text: A Journal of Literary Studies and Linguistics 3, no. 2 (2013): 61.
- 18.
Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (London: Routledge, 2001), xii.
- 19.
Rountree, “Poop,” 70.
- 20.
Suzanne W. Jones, “The Divided Reception of The Help,” Southern Cultures 20, no. 1 (2014): 23.
- 21.
The cover and front pages of my paperback Penguin edition are emblazoned with the following (sometimes ridiculous) quotations: “The other side of Gone with the Wind—and just as unputdownable” (Sunday Times); “immensely funny, very compelling” and “Draws you […] into a world of okra and fried chicken” (Daily Telegraph); “laugh-out-loud” (Marie Claire); “a good old-fashioned novel” (New York Daily News); “wildly popular winning novel […] Book groups armed with hankies will talk and talk about [the characters’] quiet bravery and the outrageous insults dished out by their employers” (The New York Times). Indeed, book groups worldwide have embraced the text, and even Michelle Obama organized a screening of the film at the White House.
- 22.
Association of Black Women Historians, “An Open Statement to the Fans of The Help,” ABWH, August 12, 2011, http://truth.abwh.org/2011/08/12/an-open-statement-to-the-fans-of-the-help/.
- 23.
Duchess Harris, “Kathryn Stockett Is Not My Sister and I Am Not Her Help,” The Feminist Wire, August 12, 2011, http://www.thefeministwire.com/2011/08/kathryn-stockett-is-not-my-sister-and-i-am-not-her-help/.
- 24.
Lauren Berlant, The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2008), 6.
- 25.
Not to mention, the book garnered controversy when a lawsuit in 2010 was brought against Stockett for appropriating the story and name of her brother’s maid in the novel. The case was dismissed due to statutes of limitation.
- 26.
Shelley Fisher Fishkin’s short entry “Dialect” in Keywords for American Cultural Studies (2007) is useful here.
- 27.
bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (Boston: South End Press, 1981), 7.
- 28.
Robert Reid-Pharr, Conjugal Union: The Body, The House, and the Black American (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 6, 65–66.
- 29.
Grace Elizabeth Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890–1940 (New York: Vintage Books, 1999), 87, 88.
- 30.
Laporte, History, 28.
- 31.
Thadious M. Davis, Southscapes: Geographies of Race, Region, and Literature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 11.
- 32.
For more, see the definitive C. Vann Woodward’s The Strange Career of Jim Crow (1955), or the more recent The Jim Crow Routine (2015) by Stephen A. Berrey.
- 33.
Hale, Making, 94.
- 34.
Patricia Yaeger, Dirt and Desire: Reconstructing Southern Women’s Writing, 1930–1990 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2000), 153, 154.
- 35.
Hale, Making, 113.
- 36.
Richard Godden, Fictions of Labor: William Faulkner and the South’s Long Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 4.
- 37.
See David M. Oshinsky, “Worse than Slavery” (1997) and Ron Eyerman, Cultural Trauma (2001).
- 38.
Melanie Klein, “Mourning and its Relation to Manic-Depressive States,” in The Selected Melanie Klein, edited by Juliet Mitchell (New York: The Free Press, 1987), 162.
- 39.
Sigmund Freud, “Character and Anal Erotism,” In The Freud Reader, edited by Peter Gay (New York and London: W.W. Norton and Co., 1995), 294, 296 (my emphasis).
- 40.
For further analyses of the lady figure, see Tara McPherson, Reconstructing Dixie (2003) and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household (1988).
- 41.
Another scene involving Celia, Minny, and the bathroom comes when Celia’s husband returns home early from work one day (ostensibly, he knows nothing of Minny’s working at the house). Minny rushes into the bathroom to hide from him: “I see myself in the mirror over the sink. Crouched like a fool on top of a white lady’s toilet” (53). The bathroom continuously acts as a locus for power, race, and corporeality.
- 42.
Rountree, “Poop,” 64.
- 43.
Jennifer C. Nash, “Black Anality,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 20, no. 4 (2014): 439 (my emphasis).
- 44.
Richardson, “Romance,” 322.
- 45.
Rountree, “Poop,” 66.
- 46.
Sándor Ferenczi, “The Phenomena of Hysterical Materialization: Thoughts on the Conception of Hysterical Conversion and Symbolism,” In Future Contributions to the Theory and Technique of Psychoanalysis, edited by John Rickman, translated by Jane Isabel Suttie and others (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1927), 89–90.
- 47.
Ibid., 94.
- 48.
Karl Abraham, “Contributions to the Theory of the Anal Character,” In Selected Papers, edited by Ernest Jones, translated by Douglas Bryan and Alix Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1927), 377.
- 49.
Ferenczi, “The Phenomena,” 95.
- 50.
Ibid., 104.
- 51.
Rountree, “Poop,” 63.
- 52.
Ferenczi, “The Phenomena,” 103.
- 53.
Butler, Bodies, xviii (my emphasis).
- 54.
This is a project that Butler has considerably expanded in her more recent books Precarious Life (2004) and Frames of War (2009).
- 55.
Butler, Bodies, xxiv, xxx.
- 56.
McPherson, Reconstructing, 5.
- 57.
Valerie Smith, “Black Women’s Memories and The Help,” Southern Cultures 20, no.1 (2014): 28, 29.
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Lloyd, C. (2018). The Home of Jim Crow: Toilets and Matter in Kathryn Stockett’s The Help. In: Corporeal Legacies in the US South. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96205-4_4
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