“Spoilt Like a Rotten Oyster”: Fictive Sterilization in Kathryn Stockett’s The Help

NICOLE RACQUEL CARR SUNY New Paltz “Spoilt Like a Rotten Oyster”: Fictive Sterilization in Kathryn Stockett’s The Help ON OCTOBER 15,2010,HEROIC MEDIA,A FAITH BASED NON-PROFIT GROUP, unveiled a billboard displaying a photograph of Anissa Fraser, a fouryear -old African American girl. Above Anissa’s head read the caption: “The most dangerous place for an African American is the womb.” Initially debuting in Texas, the controversial billboard resurfaced approximately four months later in New York and Florida. When Anissa’s mother, Tricia Fraser, sued the anti-choice group for using her daughter’s image without permission, Fraser’s lawyer condemned the sign’s depiction of “African American women [as] dangerous to their children”(Kumeh).Mostremarkably,thebillboardembedsseveralracist stereotypeswithinasinglesentencebyconceptualizingAfricanAmerican children as an endangered species; African American neighborhoods as inherently more violent than Caucasian neighborhoods; and African American women’s bodies as perpetually hazardous spaces. In one fell swoop, the ad depicts black women as the locus of the black community’s ills while touting its legitimate concern about black children. The billboard’s traversal through competing and intersecting images of pathological blackness visually reproduces Kimberlé Crenshaw’s theory of intersectionality. Articulating the distinctive pressures that black women experience, Crenshaw explains that the “intersection of racism and sexism factors into Black women’s lives in ways that cannot be captured wholly by looking at the race or gender dimensions of those experiences separately” (1244). Triply oppressed by their race, gender, and subjugated status, black women experience a unique form of oppression which positions them as “de mule[s] uh de world.”1 Quite impressively, Kathryn Stockett’s The Help etches tripartite stereotypes onto black women’s bodies in much the same way that the billboard rolls out competing and interlocking systems of 1 Here, I allude to the advice that Nanny gives Janie about black women’s oppression in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (14). 532 Nicole Racquel Carr oppression specifically targeting black women’s reproductive health. Stockett’s crafty melding of the matriarch/breeder woman, mammy, and black lady stereotypes constructs black motherhood as the perpetual cradle of contamination. Widely panned by critics as an updated version of the mammy mythology so readily apparent in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. and Gone with the Wind, The Help.’s portrayal of Aibileen’s steadfast devotion to Mae Mobley most certainly dredges up nostalgic yearnings for a return to the days when enslaved black women first toiled on the plantation and later in white women’s homes as domestic maids. As historian Micki McElya posits, both the film and book “present us with a Mammy narrative for the twenty-first century” (“The Help. Doesn’t Help Domestic Workers”). Stockett herself confessed her primary motivation for penning the 2009 novel was the somewhat desperate attempt to “hear [her maid] Demetrie’s voice again” (“Kathryn Stockett”).Yet the pathological tropes of black womanhood in The Help complicate the general consensus that the text is little more than trite regurgitation of the mammy mythology. The mammy narrative is but one myth Stockett launches at black women; The Help traffics in a slew of pernicious stereotypes. With its consistent portrayal of black people as an uncontrollable horde of black bodies, The Help is a text thoroughly concerned with black women’s fertility as their abnormallyfecundyetdiseased bodies prove responsible forproducingscoresofill-behavedchildren.Fromitsopeningpages,The Help. paints a disturbing portrait of blackness with Aibileen as the chief illustrator: Down the road from Belhaven is white Woodland Hills, then Sherwood Forest, which is miles a big live oaks with the moss hanging down. Nobody living in it yet, but it’s there for when the white folks is ready to move somewhere else new. . . . So Jackson’s just one white neighborhood after the next and more springing up down the road. But the colored part a town, we one big anthill, surrounded by state land that ain’t for sale. As our numbers get bigger, we can’t spread out. Our part a town just gets thicker. (12) Conceptualizing “the colored part a town” as a swarming throng of insects, Aibileen suggests that the swelling number of blacks in Jackson, Mississippi, will eventually overpower the...