Ain’t Nothing Like the Real Thing: Dialect, Race,

and Identity in Stockett’s novel The Help

CONSTANCE RUZICH AND JULIE BLAKE

Introduction
STOCKETT’S NOVEL THE HELP WAS NAMED USA TODAY’S BOOK OF THE YEAR

K
ATHRYN
for 2009, and by the early fall of 2011 it had sold over seven million copies
(Lewis). A popular-culture sensation, The Help was released in hardcover in July
2009, was one of only three trade paperbacks to sell over one million copies in 2010,
and was the only newly released e-book to sell over one million copies in 2011(MacGre-
gor). The 2011 film release of the novel earned over $150 million in domestic box office
sales, and, combined with international box office receipts, brought in over $200 mil-
lion, while American DVD sales earned another $83 million (The Numbers). The novel
was immensely popular with women, and, for over six months in 2009, Stockett was
receiving on average two requests per day from book clubs wanting her to teleconference
with them (Memmott), while a major library reported over 930 hold requests for the
novel after the release of the film (Lewis).
Set in 1962, The Help has been described by Publisher’s Weekly as an “optimistic,
uplifting debut novel [. . .] set during the nascent civil rights movement in Jackson,
Miss., where black women were trusted to raise white children but not to polish the
household silver” (“Pick of the Week Review”). The novel is the account of a book
project: Eugenia “Skeeter” Phelan has just returned from college to her hometown.
There, she is struck by the injustices meted out to the help, the black women who work
for her well-to-do friends who make up the city’s elite. Wanting to become a writer,
Skeeter determines to collect and publish the black women’s stories, and she enlists the
help of Aibilene, a maid who works for a close friend of Skeeter’s, and Aibilene’s best
friend, Minnie. The story is told from the perspectives of these three different narrators
(Aibilene, Minnie, and Skeeter) in alternating chapters.
Many positive reviews of the novel have praised it for its skillful use of language that
brings to life the book’s three female narrators. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution wrote,
“Through the unique voices of Skeeter, Aibileen and Minny, Stockett explores the com-
plicated relationships between black and white women on the cusp of change. Her atten-
tion to historical detail, dialect and characterization create a beautiful portrait of a
fragmenting world” (Dollacker). The publisher Penguin’s reading group guide Web site
promotes the book with this claim: “In pitch-perfect voices, Kathryn Stockett creates
three extraordinary women” (“The Help: a novel”).

The Journal of Popular Culture, Vol. 48, No. 3, 2015

© 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
534
Ain’t Nothing Like the Real Thing 535
However, reception of the novel has not been wholly positive; numerous reviewers
have strongly criticized The Help as a racist text for its demeaning depictions of African
Americans, and, specifically, for its use of stereotyped African-American dialect. A New
York Times review by Janet Maslin, published February 18, 2009, states, “The trouble
on the pages of Skeeter’s book is nothing compared with the trouble Ms. Stockett’s real
book risks getting into. Here is a debut novel by a Southern-born white author who ren-
ders black maids’ voices in thick, dated dialect” (Maslin). The Association of Black
Women Historians expresses similar outrage:
Both versions of The Help [the book and the movie] also misrepresent African Ameri-
can speech and culture. Set in the South, the appropriate regional accent gives way to
a child-like, overexaggerated “black” dialect [. . .]. In the book, black women refer to
the Lord as the “Law,” an irreverent depiction of black vernacular. (Jones et al.)
Characterized as either “pitch perfect” or “an irreverent depiction,” as either demon-
strating “attention to historical detail” or as “thick” and “dated,” the voices in the novel
and the responses to them mirror wider cultural differences relating to identity, class,
and race. This paper presents the results of a textual and linguistic analysis of characters’
speech patterns and discusses the racial and cultural implications of the ways in which
dialects are represented in the novel.

Literature, Identity, and Ideology

In his essay, “Passages into the World: South African Literature after Apartheid,” Johan
Geertsema asserts that literature provides “a space for self-aware engagement with
current issues and thus forms an important cultural substratum for intellectual responses
to such issues” (7). He argues, “I take literature to be a mediation of the social and thus
[. . .] an imaginative engagement with society that helps shape it. Seen in these terms,
literature is closely tied up with identity” (7). Geertsema claims that we must
understand fictional (and narrative) literature as the imaginary negotiation of identity
[. . .]. From this perspective one might then say that literature is a way of negotiating
difference: it is a means of constructing a self and therefore necessarily a way of relat-
ing to others. [. . .] Literature is a way of dealing with history, of coming to terms with
the inaccessible otherness of time that has passed. [. . .] It is a textual mediation of
the past, a passage toward the future through the past. (8)
These theories argue that popular literature such as The Help serves as a site for nego-
tiating American racial identity, as well as a site for contending with America’s painful
and guilt-ridden racial history. The representation of dialects in The Help allows us to
understand how language may be used as a short-hand code to establish racial identities
that largely ignore class. As well, the conflicting public responses to Stockett’s repre-
sented dialects and identities reveal persistent differences in understanding and interpret-
ing America’s history of race relations.

Accurate or Authentic? Language, Identity, and Ideology

The Help takes its place in a long American tradition of white writers’ representations of
African-American speech, a tradition that has been described as a “richly conflicted
536 Constance Ruzich and Julie Blake

history of appropriating and reworking African-American folk forms in American

comedy and literature” (Soper 1084–85). Situated within the tradition are authors such
as Joel Chandler Harris (best known for the Uncle Remus stories), Mark Twain, William
Faulkner, and Margaret Mitchell. White authors’ appropriations of black language often
are evaluated as to a sense of their authenticity, in attempts to determine whether the
white-authored representations of black identity are punishing distortions, sentimental
stereotypings, progressive reworkings, or some other act on the spectrum of borrowings.
Critics and readers who have evaluated Stockett’s novel seem to be participating in a
similar kind of evaluation when they ask if the language used in The Help is authentic
and if it accurately represents the speech patterns of racial and social class identities.
For many in the black community and/or for those with experience and understand-
ing of African American Vernacular English (AAVE), Stockett’s representation of the
maids’ language does not ring true and thus is perceived as insulting, demeaning, and
racist, highlighting the linguistic principle that “The closer we get to home, the more
refined are our perceptions” (Wells 33). Critics of the novel have accused Stockett of an
inaccurate portrayal of AAVE language. For example, in the first chapter of the book,
Aibilene says, She skinny and Mae Mobley so fat, instances in which it is argued AAVE
would instead use the habitual “be” to indicate a state of being that is ongoing and
habitual (She be skinny; Mae Mobley be so fat). Additionally, Stockett represents African-
American characters’ speech with spelling variations that indicate casual Southern pro-
nunciations. In “Writing in dialect,” Beal notes that these variant spellings (also called
eye-dialect markers) are commonly used to give “an impression of uneducated, or at
least, very informal usage” (84). Stockett frequently substitutes a for of in the speech of
black characters, as in these examples: taking care a white babies, she look terrified a her own
child. But these representations of African-American pronunciations do not consistently
or accurately reflect actual speech habits, for it is unlikely that the final g in taking
would be pronounced in the same phrase in which a is used in place of of. The language
used by Stockett’s black characters is not internally consistent, and, as one critic notes,
the grammar and pronunciations used by the maids
does not appear to be consistent with itself, does not necessarily represent the way
any one individual actually speaks, but does appear (to me) to mash together features
from several varieties of AAVE and in the process perhaps unintentionally prolong
sociolinguistic stereotyping. (“Analyzing The Help Dialogue”)
The frequent use of marked language and nonstandard dialect features that Stockett
assigns to African-American characters repeatedly cues readers to associate these women
with stereotypical representations of being black, poor, and uneducated.
However, even in discussions concerning authentic language used in The Help, there
is strong disagreement and debate. In “Reading race beyond black and white,” a study
of high school students’ contentious discussions and interpretations of racial behaviors,
Elaine Chun argues that reading race “was not an objective description of an existing
world of racial signs, but a subjective practice that not only assigned signs with racial
meanings but often designated them as racially authentic or inauthentic” (406). The sub-
jective and problematic nature of designating a language sample as authentic is also rele-
vant to the argument made by Patrick Johnson in Appropriating Blackness. Johnson
asserts that in order to pronounce a language sample racially authentic, one must first
Ain’t Nothing Like the Real Thing 537
presume that there exists a single, stable, and homogenous racial identity (3). In other
words, how can black speech be judged “authentic” without recourse to oversimplified
stereotypes of black identity?
Just as there is not a single form of language used by blacks, neither are black assess-
ments of Stockett’s representation of AAVE unanimous. Octavia Spencer (who plays
Minnie in the film adaptation of the novel) has said in an interview,
I think Kathryn Stockett does an excellent job in capturing the voice of that era espe-
cially in regards to Aibileen. Using dialect to portray characters of a certain social
class is not a new concept. I’m reminded of Twain’s Huck Finn [. . .]. In my opinion,
Stockett’s use of dialect is authentic and not at all racist. (Cantrell)
Viola Davis (who plays Aibilene in the movie version of the novel), has also responded
to interviewer questions about the authenticity of AAVE in The Help, explaining that
while she originally thought that “a white woman can’t write about black women,” the
novel drew her in and, “from the very first page [of The Help], the dialect didn’t turn me
off. And what intrigued me was that she captured the humanity of these women so well
that I recognized them” (Yamoto). As Chun’s research suggests, just as there is no single,
objective description of black dialect or AAVE, so the interpretation of language practices
and their accompanying racial meanings is a subjective and situated practice.
Given the problematic nature of determining the authenticity of dialect, Asif Agha’s
theory of enregisterment “The Social Life” may provide an alternative way to examine
meanings that are carried in linguistic markers of dialect. According to Agha, enregister-
ment describes the process by which a collection of linguistic forms or features becomes
linked to a social identity and its accompanying ideological and cultural values (231–
32). Johnstone, in her research on the enregisterment of the Pittsburgh dialect, explains,
“if hearing a particular word or structure used, or a word pronounced a particular way,
is experienced in connection with a particular style of dress or grooming, a particular set
of social alignments, or a particular social activity, that pronunciation may evoke and/or
create a social identity” (“Dialect Enregisterment” 4). Agha further explains that in liter-
ary works, “novelistic depictions of accents do not merely represent the reality of social
life, they amplify and transform them into more memorable, figuratively rendered
forms” (255). He illustrates this claim with an example from Dickens’s David Copperfield:
the character Uriah Heep exhibits inconsistent or selective “h-dropping,” preserving the
“h” in words such as he, how, and have, while dropping them every time he uses the word
humble/’umble. Agha argues that Uriah Heep’s pronunciation of the word humble is a trope
that “links an image of social personhood neatly to a single word, one that is repeatable,
humorous, memorable, and hence capable of widespread circulation” (256). More signifi-
cantly, in Uriah Heep’s selective h-dropping, Dickens communicates “to the reader of
the novel there is a message here, of course, a message that links accent to social
persona” and that “the message has become more implicit in certain ways. Yet it has also
become more concrete and palpable to the reader” (257). Relating this discussion to The
Help, enregistered language acts are employed to do far more than impart local color or
flavor: the novelist’s representation of characters’ speech patterns draws upon readers’
implicit valuations of cultural stereotypes. The language of Stockett’s novel (or of any
novel) performs not the author’s own voice and racial identity, but her constructed
understandings of others’ identities. Additionally, readers of the novel also participate in
538 Constance Ruzich and Julie Blake

the construction of those fictional identities, bringing their own language use and
experiences to bear on their understandings of the text’s language and its message about
race, class, history and culture. Because of this, readers’ responses to Stockett’s language
choices are key. In Language and Social Relations, Agha argues that audience is critical to
any understanding of a performed identity:
An individual’s register range equips a person with many identities in the sense of
‘many performable identities.’ [. . .] let us consider someone who has a narrow register
range, someone who (more or less) always speaks the same way. Even a person of this
kind has many construable identities depending on who is doing the construing. In
this case we are dealing with differences in ascription by others. (250–51)
Readers and critics of The Help have ascribed different motivations and interpretations
to Stockett’s use of dialect markers in the novel. In The Help, Stockett’s representations
of Southern American speech and African-American vernacular evoke ideological mean-
ings about racial and socio-economic identities, most strikingly when comparing the
ways in which dialect is used to develop white identities as compared to black identities.
Many critics have charged that the speech of Southern whites is infrequently marked for
dialect in the novel, while the speech of Southern blacks is heavily marked so that the
outsider status and Otherness of black characters is repeatedly and implicitly reinforced.
Kaplan, a reviewer writing for Ms. Magazine, says,
As an African American, I accept black idioms as an aesthetic choice, but they none-
theless grated. Why must blacks speak dialect to be authentic? Why are Stockett’s
white characters free of the linguistic quirks that white Southerners certainly have?
The blog A Critical Review of the Help, one of the most-often cited critiques of the
novel, asserts that “a major source of disagreement over The Help is the missing southern
accent for the white characters, and the oversimplified dialect and very broad accent
given to the black characters” such that “the white residents of this book, (who live
in Jackson, Mississippi but sound as if they’re residents of Martha’s Vineyard), are
devoid of southern accents and vernacular” (Onyx M.) This research objectively assesses
the ways in which Stockett assigns dialect markers to the various characters in her novel.

Comparing Narrators and Indicators of Dialect

To examine dialect markers in The Help, we examined an excerpt of approximately five-
hundred words from the first instance in which a character or narrator is introduced.
Each excerpt was analyzed using a combined linguistic/textual analysis that identified
instances of language features that are not used in Standard American English (SAE)
and/or that are considered particular to an American dialect. Examples of nonstandard
dialect features included sound features (e.g., eye-dialect cues such as gonna, ever four
weeks, and that kind a thing), vocabulary features (e.g., ain’t, yonder, and chilluns), and
phrase- or sentence-level grammatical features (e.g., that old woman eat two butter beans
and say she full).
Critics are accurate in charging that the speech of Stockett’s white characters, no mat-
ter their social class or rural/urban differences, is significantly less marked for dialect
than that used to give voice to the black characters in The Help. In the language of her
white characters, dialect markers occur approximately once in one-hundred words, as
Ain’t Nothing Like the Real Thing 539
compared to the language of her black characters, in which dialect markers occur
approximately once every ten words. Particularly striking is the way in which Stockett
attempts to suggest the accents and pronunciations of her black characters with variant
spellings or eye-dialect cues, while the accents and pronunciations of her Southern white
characters’ speech and accents are represented with SAE spelling conventions, despite the
linguistic reality that they also speak accented Southern American English.
Skeeter (or “Miss Skeeter” as chapter headings indicate this narrator, labeling her
with the honorific title used by the black maids) is an English major and recent graduate
from the University of Mississippi, as well as the daughter of a wealthy family who own
a cotton farm. We first hear Skeeter’s voice in Chapter five, and an analysis of the first
569-word excerpt of Skeeter’s narration identifies only two possible markers of dialect
(approximately one every 285 words), both vocabulary choices: my Mama’s Cadillac and a
description of the family dog licking his nether parts. That is, Skeeter is represented as
narrating her story in almost perfect Standard English, and even the sounds of her speech
are not represented as being from America’s South: Stockett uses no eye-dialect cues to
suggest a Southern drawl or any features of Southern American pronunciation. In dia-
logue, Skeeter’s speech is only slightly more marked for dialect; in the 209-word excerpt
of her conversation with other characters, Skeeter’s conversational exchanges include
three marked dialect features (approximately one every seventy words). Remembering
herself as a child, Skeeter echoes a question that the black maid Constantine poses to
her: Constantine asks Is you? and Skeeter replies, Is I what?, and there are two additional
dialect cues indicating casual language: Alright (eye dialect) and Gee.
In the same chapter, the speech of Hilly, Skeeter’s white and wealthy friend, is also
marked by only three linguistic forms that differ from SAE in a 102-word excerpt
(approximately one every thirty-four words), one associated with vocabulary choices
(I will snatch you baldheaded), one with the use of a preposition (I need you to come on by),
and one with the deletion of the verb “be” (You free?). Similarly, Skeeter’s mother’s
speech features only three linguistic markers of dialect in 388 words (approximately one
every 130 words): If you’d just show a little gumption, Eugenia; She went to live with her people
up in Chicago; and Come on to the kitchen. Repeatedly, Stockett gives only infrequent and
token indicators that these wealthy white women are from the South and are speakers of
Southern American English.
It is an interesting point of comparison to also examine the speech of Celia Foote, a
lower-class white woman who has married into the country club set. One of the black
maids, interpreting Celia’s nonverbal cues, observes, “I can tell right off, she’s from way
out in the country. I look down and see the fool doesn’t have any shoes on, like some
kind of white trash. Nice white ladies don’t go around barefoot” (Stockett 31). Celia was
raised in Sugar Ditch, an exceptionally poor rural area, and Minnie, the black maid who
works for Celia, explains that Sugar Ditch
is as low as you can go in Mississippi, maybe the whole United States. It’s up in
Tunica County, almost to Memphis. I saw pictures in the paper one time, showing
those tenant shacks. Even the white kids looked like they hadn’t had a meal for a
week. (32)
Stockett’s representation of Celia’s speech is only infrequently marked for dialect: in
the 531-word excerpt in which readers first hear Celia’s voice, there are only sixteen
540 Constance Ruzich and Julie Blake

variations from SAE (approximately one every thirty-three words). In Chapter three,
Celia is interviewing Minnie, hoping to hire her as a maid, and the prospective employ-
er’s marked dialect is limited almost entirely to vocabulary choices. Celia mixes adjec-
tive/adverb forms (e.g., I was real glad; Those windows are awful high); she uses ain’t (It
ain’t working out too good), and she uses vocabulary associated with the Southern dialect
(e.g., There’s the poolhouse out yonder; He can’t stand to do-dad around here very long). In the
remaining and infrequent instances of marked nonstandard speech, Celia’s lower-class
Southern dialect is indicated by variant spellings or eye dialect (e.g., We’re gonna have
some kids; It’s alright; Dawgon it). In only one case does Celia’s verb use differ from SAE:
she uses the verb set rather than the standard sit as she invites Minnie to Set down. Stran-
gely, however, Celia mixes these down-home language forms with other ways of speak-
ing that are associated with formal and high-status SAE, such as the subjunctive voice.
Although many careful speakers of SAE do not regularly use the subjunctive voice, Celia
does when she says, and if I were you I wouldn’t want to clean this big house either. When
asked about Celia Foote’s dialect in an interview with the British newspaper The Tele-
graph, Stockett replied,
I had a lot of fun writing Miss Celia [. . .]. I wanted to create a character who’s so
poor that they’re beyond prejudice. But in terms of dialogue? Hers was the hardest to
capture. When you really get down into deep, thick redneck accents, you kinda have
to take out all your teeth before you can really pull it off. But I do love those accents.
(Calkin)
Stockett’s assertion that she depicts Celia with a “deep, thick redneck accent” is diffi-
cult to reconcile with the comparatively infrequent markers of dialect found in Celia’s
speech. In fact, after examining the linguistic features of Celia’s speech, it is unclear in
what sense Stockett “took out all her teeth” in order to represent a character she
describes as “so poor that they’re beyond prejudice.” Instead of highlighting differences
between rich and poor, Stockett’s novel underscores the differences between black and
white.
The novel opens in the voice of the black maid Aibilene, and her narration is marked
almost incessantly by nonstandard linguistic forms. In the first 487 words of Aibilene’s
narration, there are fifty-eight instances of marked dialect (approximately one every eight
words). The primary indicator of Aibilene’s dialect is the way in which her verb use is
represented in the text: nonstandard verb features occur approximately once every fifteen
words, in the deletion of be (She look terrified; She a year old) and in the deletion of –s that
in SAE indicates the third-person singular (She try to tease it up; I think it bother Miss
Leefolt). Stockett also marks Aibilene’s speech as being grammatically distinct from SAE
with nonstandard determiner-noun combinations (them babies, they mamas, in you armpit),
double negatives (Crying like I weren’t never coming back), the use of ain’t (I know they ain’t
discussing no politics), and nonstandard plurals (I seen plenty a womens). Aibilene also uses
vocabulary choices and idiomatic expressions not commonly found in SAE (I reckon; Her
legs is so spindly, she look like she done growed em last week). Additionally, Stockett fre-
quently represents Aibilene’s dialect with eye-dialect cues that indicate the maid’s casual
Southern American English pronunciation (twelve instances in 487 words, or approxi-
mately once every forty words). Stockett doesn’t allow readers to forget for one minute
(or one page) that Aibilene, as reflected in her speech, is an outsider, and her language
Ain’t Nothing Like the Real Thing 541
implicitly evokes stereotypical representations or enregisterments of being black, poor,
and/or uneducated.
The conversational speech of the maid Minnie, the second narrator of The Help, is
depicted similarly. In Minnie’s exchanges with Celia Foote (who is interviewing Minnie
for a job), Stockett includes fifty-four instances of nonstandard dialect in 475 words
(approximately one every eight words). There are numerous instances of eye-dialect
markers (I ain’t afraid a no windows), and again, verbs are used most frequently as mark-
ers of nonstandard speech. Minnie omits the use of do from questions (What your husband
say you can pay?), omits the use of be (She going up to the rest home), chooses got in place of
the more standard variant have (What time I got to leave?), uses gone and done as part of the
verb aspect (Last one done got shot), and varies from SAE in marking subject-verb agree-
ment (he don’t know; I gets some time for lunch). But Stockett doesn’t always seem to know
when or how to use features of AAVE; her characters don’t use the dialect features as real
people do. For example, when Minnie accepts Celia’s job offer, she says, I be happy to work
for you. Stockett’s “pitch perfect” dialogue seems off key in this instance; many speakers
of AAVE would be unlikely to use the habitual be to indicate an action that is in the
future, an action that is neither repeated nor habitual at this point in time.
It is also noteworthy to find that Minnie’s language as a narrator differs significantly
from the conversational language she uses in her job interview with Celia. That is, when
Minnie isn’t speaking out loud but thinking and narrating the action, there are only ele-
ven instances of dialect markers in the 513-word excerpt (approximately one every forty-
seven words), and the linguistic features that are marked for dialect are very different
from those occurring in Minnie’s conversational exchange with Celia. When thinking
and talking to herself, Minnie’s verb choices are all consistent with SAE except one
instance in which she uses an irregular form of do (Don’t you go sassing this white lady like
you done the other). She uses a double negative only once (but she ain’t ready for no screen
test), and most of the other variations from SAE are instances of marked vocabulary such
as occurrences of ain’t (she’s skinny in all those places I ain’t) or vocabulary choices that
tend to be less common in SAE (Or something kin to her; washes the muck off her hands).
What does it mean that Minnie’s language becomes increasingly marked with non-
standard features when she is conversing with whites? Actually, we would expect the
dialogue, which is dialogue with a white social superior, to be characterized by greater
frequency of Standard English as Minnie accommodates to the social situation, and we
might expect her interior monologue to use her down-home forms of language. When
we get the opposite, we need to ask why. It is vitally important to acknowledge that
black speakers have a wide linguistic repertoire to draw on, with features of both Stan-
dard English and AAVE, representing a totality of language its speakers can use—one
set of features or the other, in marked and unmarked ways, or codeswitching between
them in the same interaction. Research has demonstrated that this is not confined to
working class black speakers, but available to all black speakers (DeBose). Is the
increased frequency of Minnie’s dialect-marked speech when conversing with Celia a
racist depiction in which Stockett uses language cues to emphasize the difference
between the speakers in (fictional) interactions where power is a key dynamic in the
interaction? Other critics have noted that the black characters in The Help rarely change
their speech to accommodate or adjust to the audience or context at hand:
542 Constance Ruzich and Julie Blake

Some of Stockett’s African-American characters speak in the broadest vernacular in

every context they speak, even in this discussion of Sigmund Freud from Chapter
12:“Oh, people crazy . . . I love reading about how the head work. You ever dream you fall in
a lake? He say you dreaming about your own self being born. Miss Frances, who I work for
in 1957, she had all them books.” Keep in mind this character [Aibilene] spends her
days moving between the world of the Southern gentry and the segregated poor com-
munities nearby. I have a hard time believing that nimble code-switching wouldn’t
be a part of her everyday discourse, and that she wouldn’t change her register some-
what when discussing psychoanalysis with her college-educated, standard-English-
speaking friend [Skeeter]. (Trawick-Smith)
Indeed, the fact that in this conversational exchange, as in others, black characters
seem incapable of codeshifting or adjusting their speech to the situation provides further
evidence that Stockett uses enregistered language as a linguistic short-hand to evoke ste-
reotypical reactions to black characters, characters whose language fails to represent their
nuanced and negotiated realities. In addition, the flatness of black characters’ language
choices flattens the characters themselves, giving them less humanity than a more
sophisticated representation of dialect or of code shifting between varieties and registers
might give. Additionally, there is little sense of the dialect functioning in any way,
shape, or form as part of an “outlaw code” (Soper 1086). Soper, in his examination of the
politics of dialect in the comic strip Pogo, argues,
African-American dialect is linked to trickster tales because the stories were a collo-
quial, oral form in African-American communities [. . .] the trickster used semantic
games to obey the letter of the law while flouting its essential spirit, or to pretend
ignorance – using malapropisms or mock eloquence – in order to fool or ridicule a
more powerful predator. (1086)
Stockett does not represent the language of Minnie and the other black maids as
clever, witty, subversive, or layered in the way that Soper describes, but instead offers it
solely as flat, black Otherness. The language of The Help underscores the ways in which
black characters are repeatedly marked as different from whites and other Southerners,
while far fewer language distinctions are drawn across economic class differences.
For readers who fail to note Stockett’s differential treatment of black and white char-
acters’ speech, the novel’s language choices may reveal another linguistic reality: every-
one believes that others speak with a dialect, but that one’s own speech (or the speech of
one’s own group) is perfectly normal. That is, Stockett and white readers may be less apt
to hear or to expect white speech to be marked for dialect. In an interview with Atlanta
Magazine, when asked about her use of dialect in the novel, Stockett said,
I wouldn’t know how to write it differently. It’s funny when you’re surrounded by
people who think something is normal, and then you go out and realize that everyone
has their own version of normal. All I can say is, that’s how I remember it now in
my mind. The dialect plays back like a tape recorder. My mother and stepmother
speak very properly. I really enjoyed putting two very different voices on the page
together. I don’t think I’d be capable of writing it any differently. (Weaver)
Stockett doesn’t argue that the language of her novel is inauthentic, that it is
constructed or shaped to serve an ideological end, or that, as a novelist, she is free to
sample and riff on AAVE to modify its forms and conventions to suggest character and
identity. Instead, her statement that “the dialect plays back like a tape recorder” offers
Ain’t Nothing Like the Real Thing 543
further evidence of the racial divide that continues to exist in America: she is unable to
hear the distinctions and divisions caused by her own racially differentiated language,
because as she artlessly comments, “everyone has their own version of normal.” Another
article appearing in the Charlotte Observer further illustrates the ways in which Stockett
appears to be tone-deaf to the racial overtones of her novel’s dialogue, as it reports
“Stockett, who grew up in Mississippi, said she ‘wrote it like I remember hearing it.’
And she happened to grow up in a family, she said, that ‘spoke the King’s English’”
(Kelley). Stockett’s description of Southern white speech as “the King’s English” reveals
her situated, privileged understanding of Southern history and language that others are
likely to judge as unrealistic, inauthentic, or even absurd.
In a letter to Jesse Kornbluth, a writer for the Huffington Post, a critic of the novel’s
language writes,
As an African-American woman with roots in Alabama, I’m familiar with our dia-
lect and vernacular. I’m not at all opposed to it being used, but I bristle when it’s
misused to create an image of us as ignorant and one-dimensional [. . .] the lan-
guage Stockett used—or misused in my opinion—reflects her own prejudices and
inability to “hear” the people about whom she is writing. In a way, this is worse
than the original heinous acts that preceded the Civil Rights era because one
assumes that a young, educated person writing today, has the means and opportu-
nity to “hear” the other without imposing his or her own prejudices on that voice.
(Kornbluth)
As this writer notes, in America today, deep divides and prejudices still exist between
blacks and whites, rich and poor, and the language of The Help, as well as the ensuing
debates about that language, highlight those divisions and prejudices. In writing for
readers like herself and in marking only the speech of her black characters, Stockett has
created a metadiscourse of constructed foreignness. In using enregistered language fea-
tures to represent black social identities as Other, she has mediated African-American
language and recontextualized it. Nikolas Coupland, in “The Mediated Performance of
Vernaculars,” asserts, “Recontextualizations of ‘the same’ performance [. . .] are always
new, and the ‘meaning’ of a performance necessarily includes how ‘old’ texts sit in their
new contexts” (298). That is, as enregisterment suggests, language can become a short-
hand method of drawing characters, one that relies upon readers’ stereotypical knowledge
and interpretations of groups. The meaning of the linguistic performances of characters
in The Help, the ways in which dialect features mark the language of black characters
while leaving unmarked the speech of white characters, ultimately works against the
novel’s central theme of “we’re all in this together” (Skeeter and the maids). Instead, the
language of The Help, by linguistically recreating and representing highly differentiated
treatments of speech and accent, exposes the striking differences in identity, agency,
profit, and power that continue to exist in America today.

Giving Voice to Class and Racial Identities: Stockett within the

Tradition
How can Stockett’s language choices in The Help be understood within the literary tra-
dition of white authors representing and appropriating African-American language and
history? Unlike Twain, Stockett’s use of dialect tends not to vary from character to
544 Constance Ruzich and Julie Blake

character: white characters speak dialect-free English, while black characters’ language
is heavily marked. The only exception is Celia, but, even here, the markers of dialect
we might expect to find are relatively infrequent. Unlike Huck Finn and Jim, whose
dialects are used “to dissect the pretensions, contradictions, and rationalizations of the
dominant culture,” Celia seems to want nothing more than to be accepted by that cul-
ture (Soper 1089). Stockett’s attempt to create a multivoiced novel fails when she flat-
tens white voices, marking only black characters’ speech in ways that, rather than
offering multiple perspectives, highlight the divisions between blacks and whites. The
use of dialect in the novel, rather than suggesting the creolized complexity of Ameri-
can society, highlights the sharp divide that exists between the perspectives of whites
and blacks.
We would argue that Stockett’s novel is more akin to the writings of Joel Chandler
Harris, in that both are ideological attempts to sentimentalize the past so as to “heal
rifts between the North and South” or between black and white America (Soper 1088).
In fact, the relationship between Aibilene and Skeeter can be viewed as a modern
reworking of Uncle Remus as narrator, and, just as Soper describes Harris’s narrative,
The Help is also “a white person’s ideal of the black slave who remained true to his mas-
ter after emancipation and chose to share his storehouse of wisdom primarily with a
privileged white child” (1088). In Stockett’s tale, the privileged white child is Skeeter, a
narrator who has yet to find her adult role, a young woman who has returned from col-
lege and becomes the repository of the black characters’ storehouse of wisdom and expe-
rience, thereby reinforcing their position as less fully adult than the white person who
takes up their cause. Stockett’s narrative, however, postdates Harris’s by over one-hun-
dred and thirty years (the Uncle Remus stories were published in 1881). As Alice
Walker, Toni Morrison and many others have shown, black women writers are perfectly
capable of telling their own stories—and in ways that resonate for us all.
The language of Stockett’s novel points to larger problems, as the dialect works in
the service of a narrative that presents a nostalgic, backwards-looking version of Ameri-
can racial and cultural realities. Stockett’s novel is directed by a single, shining view of
injustice, one shared by Skeeter and the maids, who all view and articulate the problems
in the racial tensions of the South from an oddly similar viewpoint. Just as Harris’s sto-
ries can be understood as “channeling and shaping some of the ideological anxieties and
wishes” of his readers (Soper 1099), so the commercial success of Stockett’s novel can be
explained by its attempts to meet the emotional and political needs of her audience. The
Help depicts a stable, modern reality, not a postmodern world that is deeply skeptical of
the ability of people to change, and although the story is told from different perspec-
tives, the narrative fails to include the postmodern acknowledgement that perspectives
and truths must be negotiated and that there may be no clear truth or solution.
The Help is a very nostalgic representation in other ways, too, as it explores the issue
of personal journeys that involve education. There is a traveling out and a traveling back
implicit in this story that reaches back to an authenticity whose loss is felt as one
becomes more educated and sophisticated, a nostalgia for a simpler world view where
black people and white people, and rich people and poor people, were delimited more
clearly (though less accurately). But as Stockett (and Skeeter) narrate this tale, they learn
that education changes you; you can’t actually ever go back to where you came from,
and, in this guilty soup, the white heroine travels back to an earlier world and redeems
Ain’t Nothing Like the Real Thing 545
it by acting as the champion for a group of black women. The representation of dialect
is then rather more complicated than simply good or bad. Its restricted nature allows
the author to represent a status quo of past power relations and to justify the educated
white woman’s intervention (like narrator, like author). It could be argued that the cen-
tral concern of the book is not about social justice for black people, but rather is about
white people trying to figure out what roles they will still get to play in a social land-
scape in which a black man is President of the United States—a black man from the
North who doesn’t talk like Uncle Remus.
Stockett’s novel can be compared to Harris’s writings in other ways: Harris also was
initially praised as “the first great ‘master’ of the Negro dialect,” but is now more com-
monly viewed as an exploiter of black language and culture who earned fame and fortune
through “taking communal tales whole cloth from the minority oral tradition, softening
their original ideological codings, and essentially making them his own” (Soper 1087).
Stockett has also reaped the financial rewards of cultural appropriation. Few would argue
that
If a Black author wrote the book, or if the story allowed for Aibilene to be in charge
of her own freedom, The Help would be relabeled as “African-American fiction” or a
“Black movie,” marginalized by its topic and not half as successful. Having Kathryn
Stockett express her interpretation of Black southern dialect to channel these women
sells more. (Scissors)
As sociolinguist Barbara Johnstone points out, “A linguistic variety or a set of varie-
ties is commodified when it is available for purchase and people will pay for it” (“Pitts-
burghese Shirts” 161). Given the multimillion dollar sales of the book and the film
version of The Help, black readers may object to this cultural commodification and to
Stockett’s appropriation for market purposes of their cultural property. The novel repre-
sents language as a weapon, but, in this case, it is a weapon that can only be safely
wielded in the hands of Skeeter, the white woman who reshapes and revoices black expe-
rience in an effort to achieve justice for the downtrodden blacks, who presumably cannot
be entrusted with their own language or who cannot be trusted to wield the weapon of
their own language.
As Geneva Smitherman has noted, “We cannot talk about BI [Black Idiom or Black
English] apart from Black Culture and the Black Experience” (828). In her essay, “‘God
Don’t Never Change’: Black English from a Black Perspective,” Smitherman argues that
America’s contradictory emphasis on “class flexibility and individualism with the con-
comitant stress on class conformity and group status” is “schizophrenic” and “reflected in
the area of language,” where white America’s class anxiety manifests itself in the deni-
gration of Black English (828). Similarly, H. Samy Alim, in “Critical Language Aware-
ness in the United States,” has argued that in America we tend “to discuss linguistic
stigmatization in terms of individual prejudices rather than discrimination that is part
and parcel of the sociocultural fabric of society” (28). The linguistic stigmatization of the
black characters in Stockett’s novel, then, needs to be viewed as something much larger
than a reflection of a single author’s individual prejudices, but rather, as a popular-
culture indication of the racial and class anxieties that are deeply woven into the
sociocultural fabric of American society, a society that embraces and popularizes such
linguistic choices.
546 Constance Ruzich and Julie Blake

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Constance (Connie) Ruzich is a University Professor of English and the Coordinator of

Innovative Teaching at Robert Morris University. She earned a Ph.D. in Writing at the
University of Pennsylvania and a Masters in Literature at the University of Pittsburgh,
and her research explores the ways in which language shapes identity. In the fall of
2014, she was awarded a Fulbright Scholar award hosted by the University of Exeter in
the United Kingdom, where she researched the history and literature of the First World
War, as well as the centenary commemorations of that war. She writes weekly blog posts
on the lost voices of First World War poetry on Behind Their Lines (behindtheirlines.
blogspot.com).
Julie Blake is reading for a PhD at the University of Cambridge, interested in quantita-
tive methods for exploring the nature of the literature curriculum as it is specified for
examinations. She has a Masters in Applied Linguistics from the University of Leicester.
She is codirector of The Full English (www.thefullenglish.org.uk), an independent
research-informed curriculum workshop whose resources for teaching and learning about
language and literature have been recognized in a number of prestigious awards for inno-
vation, including All Talk (www.bt.com/alltalk) for the study of spoken language. She is
also Education Director of the Poetry Archive in which role she is working to revive
popular enjoyment of poetry as a heard and spoken experience.
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