Teach American Culture
Comparing Yo! And The Help: How Authors Use Their Styles to Teach American Culture
Paul Pittman
Rasmussen College
Author Note
This essay is being submitted on June 18th, 2013, for Dr. Candy Henry’s G435 Literature of American Minorities course.
ABSTRACT
The cultural history of America includes much more than what our history books teach us. In fact, it is not until you open books and read stories written by those who have experienced the undisclosed elements of America’s past do you begin to understand how we as a country have developed. Two such stories are Julia Alvarez’s Yo! And Kathryn Stockett’s The Help. But it takes more than a good storyline to bring the past to life. The storyteller must be able to convey the emotion …show more content…
and experiences to the reader in such a way that they understand and feel the emotions that were happening. The writer needs to have a firm background in the past with a flair of relating the experiences to the future. In this paper, we will take a look at both authors and how they use their education and past experiences to tell their stories.
Comparing Yo! and The Help: How Authors Use Their Styles to Teach American Culture
History’s most notable authors are those who helped to change how we as a society perceive the world we live in. Time and again, civilization has evolved towards a better understanding of human nature through the thoughts and words written in books. Though time itself will tell if Julia Alvarez can be compared to the likes of Charles Dickens or William Shakespeare, she has certainly won her share of acclaim already in the world of literature. Her ability to use stories to help us understand situations through the eyes of others as she sees them is a method that has been recognized by other authors as an effective means of communicating the trials and tribulations of cultures in history.
In her novel Yo! (1997) Julia Alvarez relates the issues of the Latino community conforming to what is and is not accepted in American culture. Similarly, Kathryn Stockett used Alvarez’s style in an effort to bring about the struggles of African Americans during the Southern race wars in Mississippi in her book The Help (2009). By comparing Alvrez’s Yo with Stockett’s The Help, we as Americans tend to read these stories and without realizing that we are actually reading a part of American history, begin to understand the reasoning why these and others novels written in this manner have helped to bring the struggles of minorities in America.
The Development of Julia Alvarez the Author
To begin to understand the style that Julia Alvarez uses to convey the subject matter within her stories in the novel Yo!, it is best to understand her as a person. What she experienced as a person dictated her life’s direction and as a result, it helped to form the way she writes. She writes stories in a way that put you the reader in the first person, as if you are watching the storyline unfold in front of you, much as you would a movie or television show. Perhaps this could be attributed to the generation that she grew up in. Like us, we were all raised in an era of watching stories being told from a particular person’s point of view on television and in the movies, but Alvarez’s stories are of life and the real lessons that her characters have experienced.
Her own experiences began as a child through the involvement of her father, and indirectly her family’s involvement with the rebellion that began in the home country of her parents, the Dominican Republic. As a very young child, she was at ground zero while watching her family and other loved ones fight the dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo, only watch it fail as her family fled to New York in 1960 (Walker, 2012). This perhaps set the stage early for her to grow and mature quickly by having to adapt quickly to changes in her life, reacting to any development in the best way possible.
It was her early years in school that began her interest in being able to relay stories the way she interpreted them. “I couldn 't tell where one word ended and another began,” Alvarez related in her biography. She relates that she frequently misinterpreted words such as “Speak” into slang such as “Spic”, which seemed to fuel the torment she received from the playground. Reasons such as this, Alvarez points out, is just one of the reasons she became interested in being a writer; the need “to pay close attention to the each word” (Potts, 2013).
Receiving her education in boarding schools, it was not until her high school years before she came to realize that she wanted to pursue a career as a writer. She began her college studies at Connecticut College and eventually transferred to Middlebury College. Alavrez completed college by receiving her Bachelor’s of Arts at Middlebury and then later received her Master’s of Fine Arts degree from Syracuse University (Walker, 2012). Much like her life as a small child, Alvarez seemed compelled to travel throughout her formulative years.
Her drive to become a writer grew from the acceptance of African-American writers into American culture while the Latino writers were still being overlooked. While she watched this unfolding, she knew that her writing was much the same. Focusing on life of minorities living in a socially dominant white society was more than a study of ethnic interest, for her, it was real life and she was determined to get her stories heard (Potts, 2013).
Alvarez refers to herself as a “migrant writer” (Potts, 2013) in her biography referencing the common term used in American culture for low income workers who continually travel the land in search of work. Taking odd teaching jobs, she finally ended up back where she had received her Bachelor’s degree, Middlebury College. Here in 1991, she was finally able to publish her first book How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents (1991) when her editor was looking for “a new voice”. Finally after over twenty years of writing, she finally landed her first book (Potts, 2013).
This new voice was one of a different perspective. A look at how Latinos work at adapting to life in their families and communities through give and take. It is about how America looks at other races and compares them to how they are living and judges them by their own standards. More importantly though, it is about how these people adapt to overcome these obstacles in order to survive and maintain their dignity in the face of adversity. Her stories are her own way of telling about the way she perceives her life.
The Development of Kathryn Stockett as a Writer
Born in 1969 and raised in Jackson, MS, Kathryn Stockett received her degree in English and Creative Writing through the University of Alabama. After receiving her degree, she then took a position at a magazine in New York city where she worked in publishing and marketing for nine years. Struggling to make her own mark in literature, Stockett finally published The Help in 2009 after 50 attempts to publish it had failed (AuthorBytes, 2013).
Being raised in Mississippi by the hired help because her parents were often absent, Stockett was established in her direction in New York when she began missing her roots in Mississippi. In the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attack, Stockett began to become even more homesick and her thoughts eventually became the book The Help. Stockett describes the story more about a way of comforting herself because of her life as a child than as a way of telling others about the story (Williams, 2011).
Stockett describes one of the biggest influences in her life growing up as the family’s hired African-American housekeeper.
“In 1970s Mississippi I didn’t have a single black friend or a black neighbour. Yet one of the closest people to me was Demetrie, our family’s black housekeeper” (Stockett, 2009). Stockett also related that because of the close relationship she developed with Demetrie, she was able to see things a bit differently and she is ashamed that it took her 20 years to come forward with the story of how her family participated in the affair. The story is about her effort to “find answers to my [her] questions, to soothe my [her] own mind about Demetrie” (Stockett, …show more content…
2009).
Growing up in Mississippi in the 1960s and 1970s, there was a very real separation between blacks and whites. Demetrie, who was born in 1927 just before the great Depression and in the wake of the Civil War, knew what it was like to be a share cropper picking cotton in the Deep South. Civil Rights were beginning to evolve and as the negative events unfolded, Stockett began to feel both pride and shame for the part their family was playing in Demetrie’s life. In her thoughts about Demetrie after 9/11, she felt compelled to write her story in a tribute to her relationship to her in a way that would help others see the events that occurred in Mississippi from the other point of view (Williams, 2011).
A Direct Comparison between Yo! and The Help
Despite both books being written at completely different times and for different reasons, there are several stark and dramatic similarities about the styles in which their authors use to tell their tales. The most obvious is the way both Alvarez and Stockett choose to write about their stories by using fictitious characters about real stories that occurred to them while growing up.
For example, Alvarez’s is telling her own story of how she and her book will be accepted in the Latino community, but through the eyes of someone else. By using a series of short stories, she is able to set up each viewpoint as if that story is how that particular person will see and accept it. Whether negative or positive, the basic idea is that each story is a tale of how they will accept the world knowing about them thanks to Yolanda’s book. Each of them know they are to play a character in the story, but they are not sure how they are going to be seen by others and they express it in their own ways. As for Stockett, she also uses the story to share her experiences through the use of fictional characters and in a very similar fashion, they too know that the story is about them and are concerned about how others are going to view them knowing that.
Even though the stories are classified as fiction, there are elements of the story that, because they are based on real life events, always pose a chance of the truth becoming public knowledge and because of that, a certain dread begins to compel the reader to continue on in an effort to find out the real story behind the novel. In fact, that twist became reality in 2011 when Ablene Cooper filed a civil suit against Stockett “she was upset by the book that characterizes black maids working for white families in the family 's hometown of Jackson, Miss., during the 1960s”. In response to the lawsuit to ABC’s Katie Couric in 2010, Stockett noted "Not everybody in Jackson, Mississippi 's thrilled" (Donaldson-James, 2011).
Other characteristics between the two books also come to light while reading. The way the authors bring the reader into the book almost making them feel that they are a part of the story is a way of maintaining the initial interest by developing a self vested interest in the storyline. Once the reader starts, they are compelled to continue reading the story in order to find out what is going to happen next. By using the dialects and speech characteristics as depicted by Alvarez while she was growing up, the reader feels as if they are actually witnessing the dialog in real time. This brings the story into focus and puts us right in the room as it is happening.
Conclusion
In reading both stories Yo! and The Help, we the readers are rewarded with a view of American culture that we may not normally see. Certainly we are able to experience it seemingly first hand because of the styles and way the authors convey their stories. These are not stories that the either author are proud to bring to the spotlight and definitely not in such a public way. Perhaps that is why each chose to do so in a fictional fashion? Obviously both felt compelled to tell their stories despite that feeling so that the world would know.
By bringing these stories out to the public, not only do we get to see the ugly side of American culture through the eyes and emotions of those who experienced them first hand, we also get a glimpse of the fears and anxiety the authors themselves are feeling in making these stories public: It is not an easy task. Perhaps both are ridding their closets of specific demons that haunt them but the end result is the same. They are able to tell their story in a way that is not only entertaining to read but also in a way that educates us as to some of the conflicts that has made America what it is today.
References
Alvarez, J. (1997). Yo! New York: Plume.
Alvarez, J. (2010). How the García girls lost their accents. Chapel Hill, N.C.: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill.
AuthorBytes.
(2013). Kathryn Stockett. Retrieved May 28, 2013, from Kathryn Stockett.com website: http://kathrynstockett.com/
Donaldson-James, S. (2011, February 22). Black Maid Sues, Says 'The Help ' Is Humiliating [Newsgroup post]. Retrieved from ABC News website: http://abcnews.go.com/Health/lawsuit-black-maid-ablene-cooper-sues-author-kathryn/story?id=12968562#.UaVK7Z3D9Fo
Potts, S. M. (Ed.). (2013). About Me [Fact sheet]. Retrieved April 26, 2013, from Julia Alvarez website: http://www.juliaalvarez.com/about/
Stockett, K. (2009). The help. New York: Amy Einhorn Books.
Stockett, K. (2009, July 18). This Life: Kathryn Stockett on her childhood in the Deep South [Blog post]. Retrieved from Mail Online website: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/you/article-1199603/This-Life-Kathryn-Stockett-childhood-Deep-South.html
Walker, S. (2012, March). [Alvarez, Julia] [Fact sheet]. Retrieved April 26, 2013, from Postcolonial Studies @ Emory website: http://postcolonialstudies.emory.edu/julia-alvarez/
Williams, W. (2011, August 4). Kathryn Stockett: Life in the belle jar [Blog post]. Retrieved from Creative Loafing website:
http://clatl.com/atlanta/kathryn-stockett-life-in-the-belle-jar/Content?oid=
Paul Pittman
Rasmussen College
Author Note
This essay is being submitted on June 18th, 2013, for Dr. Candy Henry’s G435 Literature of American Minorities course.
ABSTRACT
The cultural history of America includes much more than what our history books teach us. In fact, it is not until you open books and read stories written by those who have experienced the undisclosed elements of America’s past do you begin to understand how we as a country have developed. Two such stories are Julia Alvarez’s Yo! And Kathryn Stockett’s The Help. But it takes more than a good storyline to bring the past to life. The storyteller must be able to convey the emotion …show more content…
and experiences to the reader in such a way that they understand and feel the emotions that were happening. The writer needs to have a firm background in the past with a flair of relating the experiences to the future. In this paper, we will take a look at both authors and how they use their education and past experiences to tell their stories.
Comparing Yo! and The Help: How Authors Use Their Styles to Teach American Culture
History’s most notable authors are those who helped to change how we as a society perceive the world we live in. Time and again, civilization has evolved towards a better understanding of human nature through the thoughts and words written in books. Though time itself will tell if Julia Alvarez can be compared to the likes of Charles Dickens or William Shakespeare, she has certainly won her share of acclaim already in the world of literature. Her ability to use stories to help us understand situations through the eyes of others as she sees them is a method that has been recognized by other authors as an effective means of communicating the trials and tribulations of cultures in history.
In her novel Yo! (1997) Julia Alvarez relates the issues of the Latino community conforming to what is and is not accepted in American culture. Similarly, Kathryn Stockett used Alvarez’s style in an effort to bring about the struggles of African Americans during the Southern race wars in Mississippi in her book The Help (2009). By comparing Alvrez’s Yo with Stockett’s The Help, we as Americans tend to read these stories and without realizing that we are actually reading a part of American history, begin to understand the reasoning why these and others novels written in this manner have helped to bring the struggles of minorities in America.
The Development of Julia Alvarez the Author
To begin to understand the style that Julia Alvarez uses to convey the subject matter within her stories in the novel Yo!, it is best to understand her as a person. What she experienced as a person dictated her life’s direction and as a result, it helped to form the way she writes. She writes stories in a way that put you the reader in the first person, as if you are watching the storyline unfold in front of you, much as you would a movie or television show. Perhaps this could be attributed to the generation that she grew up in. Like us, we were all raised in an era of watching stories being told from a particular person’s point of view on television and in the movies, but Alvarez’s stories are of life and the real lessons that her characters have experienced.
Her own experiences began as a child through the involvement of her father, and indirectly her family’s involvement with the rebellion that began in the home country of her parents, the Dominican Republic. As a very young child, she was at ground zero while watching her family and other loved ones fight the dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo, only watch it fail as her family fled to New York in 1960 (Walker, 2012). This perhaps set the stage early for her to grow and mature quickly by having to adapt quickly to changes in her life, reacting to any development in the best way possible.
It was her early years in school that began her interest in being able to relay stories the way she interpreted them. “I couldn 't tell where one word ended and another began,” Alvarez related in her biography. She relates that she frequently misinterpreted words such as “Speak” into slang such as “Spic”, which seemed to fuel the torment she received from the playground. Reasons such as this, Alvarez points out, is just one of the reasons she became interested in being a writer; the need “to pay close attention to the each word” (Potts, 2013).
Receiving her education in boarding schools, it was not until her high school years before she came to realize that she wanted to pursue a career as a writer. She began her college studies at Connecticut College and eventually transferred to Middlebury College. Alavrez completed college by receiving her Bachelor’s of Arts at Middlebury and then later received her Master’s of Fine Arts degree from Syracuse University (Walker, 2012). Much like her life as a small child, Alvarez seemed compelled to travel throughout her formulative years.
Her drive to become a writer grew from the acceptance of African-American writers into American culture while the Latino writers were still being overlooked. While she watched this unfolding, she knew that her writing was much the same. Focusing on life of minorities living in a socially dominant white society was more than a study of ethnic interest, for her, it was real life and she was determined to get her stories heard (Potts, 2013).
Alvarez refers to herself as a “migrant writer” (Potts, 2013) in her biography referencing the common term used in American culture for low income workers who continually travel the land in search of work. Taking odd teaching jobs, she finally ended up back where she had received her Bachelor’s degree, Middlebury College. Here in 1991, she was finally able to publish her first book How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents (1991) when her editor was looking for “a new voice”. Finally after over twenty years of writing, she finally landed her first book (Potts, 2013).
This new voice was one of a different perspective. A look at how Latinos work at adapting to life in their families and communities through give and take. It is about how America looks at other races and compares them to how they are living and judges them by their own standards. More importantly though, it is about how these people adapt to overcome these obstacles in order to survive and maintain their dignity in the face of adversity. Her stories are her own way of telling about the way she perceives her life.
The Development of Kathryn Stockett as a Writer
Born in 1969 and raised in Jackson, MS, Kathryn Stockett received her degree in English and Creative Writing through the University of Alabama. After receiving her degree, she then took a position at a magazine in New York city where she worked in publishing and marketing for nine years. Struggling to make her own mark in literature, Stockett finally published The Help in 2009 after 50 attempts to publish it had failed (AuthorBytes, 2013).
Being raised in Mississippi by the hired help because her parents were often absent, Stockett was established in her direction in New York when she began missing her roots in Mississippi. In the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attack, Stockett began to become even more homesick and her thoughts eventually became the book The Help. Stockett describes the story more about a way of comforting herself because of her life as a child than as a way of telling others about the story (Williams, 2011).
Stockett describes one of the biggest influences in her life growing up as the family’s hired African-American housekeeper.
“In 1970s Mississippi I didn’t have a single black friend or a black neighbour. Yet one of the closest people to me was Demetrie, our family’s black housekeeper” (Stockett, 2009). Stockett also related that because of the close relationship she developed with Demetrie, she was able to see things a bit differently and she is ashamed that it took her 20 years to come forward with the story of how her family participated in the affair. The story is about her effort to “find answers to my [her] questions, to soothe my [her] own mind about Demetrie” (Stockett, …show more content…
2009).
Growing up in Mississippi in the 1960s and 1970s, there was a very real separation between blacks and whites. Demetrie, who was born in 1927 just before the great Depression and in the wake of the Civil War, knew what it was like to be a share cropper picking cotton in the Deep South. Civil Rights were beginning to evolve and as the negative events unfolded, Stockett began to feel both pride and shame for the part their family was playing in Demetrie’s life. In her thoughts about Demetrie after 9/11, she felt compelled to write her story in a tribute to her relationship to her in a way that would help others see the events that occurred in Mississippi from the other point of view (Williams, 2011).
A Direct Comparison between Yo! and The Help
Despite both books being written at completely different times and for different reasons, there are several stark and dramatic similarities about the styles in which their authors use to tell their tales. The most obvious is the way both Alvarez and Stockett choose to write about their stories by using fictitious characters about real stories that occurred to them while growing up.
For example, Alvarez’s is telling her own story of how she and her book will be accepted in the Latino community, but through the eyes of someone else. By using a series of short stories, she is able to set up each viewpoint as if that story is how that particular person will see and accept it. Whether negative or positive, the basic idea is that each story is a tale of how they will accept the world knowing about them thanks to Yolanda’s book. Each of them know they are to play a character in the story, but they are not sure how they are going to be seen by others and they express it in their own ways. As for Stockett, she also uses the story to share her experiences through the use of fictional characters and in a very similar fashion, they too know that the story is about them and are concerned about how others are going to view them knowing that.
Even though the stories are classified as fiction, there are elements of the story that, because they are based on real life events, always pose a chance of the truth becoming public knowledge and because of that, a certain dread begins to compel the reader to continue on in an effort to find out the real story behind the novel. In fact, that twist became reality in 2011 when Ablene Cooper filed a civil suit against Stockett “she was upset by the book that characterizes black maids working for white families in the family 's hometown of Jackson, Miss., during the 1960s”. In response to the lawsuit to ABC’s Katie Couric in 2010, Stockett noted "Not everybody in Jackson, Mississippi 's thrilled" (Donaldson-James, 2011).
Other characteristics between the two books also come to light while reading. The way the authors bring the reader into the book almost making them feel that they are a part of the story is a way of maintaining the initial interest by developing a self vested interest in the storyline. Once the reader starts, they are compelled to continue reading the story in order to find out what is going to happen next. By using the dialects and speech characteristics as depicted by Alvarez while she was growing up, the reader feels as if they are actually witnessing the dialog in real time. This brings the story into focus and puts us right in the room as it is happening.
Conclusion
In reading both stories Yo! and The Help, we the readers are rewarded with a view of American culture that we may not normally see. Certainly we are able to experience it seemingly first hand because of the styles and way the authors convey their stories. These are not stories that the either author are proud to bring to the spotlight and definitely not in such a public way. Perhaps that is why each chose to do so in a fictional fashion? Obviously both felt compelled to tell their stories despite that feeling so that the world would know.
By bringing these stories out to the public, not only do we get to see the ugly side of American culture through the eyes and emotions of those who experienced them first hand, we also get a glimpse of the fears and anxiety the authors themselves are feeling in making these stories public: It is not an easy task. Perhaps both are ridding their closets of specific demons that haunt them but the end result is the same. They are able to tell their story in a way that is not only entertaining to read but also in a way that educates us as to some of the conflicts that has made America what it is today.
References
Alvarez, J. (1997). Yo! New York: Plume.
Alvarez, J. (2010). How the García girls lost their accents. Chapel Hill, N.C.: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill.
AuthorBytes.
(2013). Kathryn Stockett. Retrieved May 28, 2013, from Kathryn Stockett.com website: http://kathrynstockett.com/
Donaldson-James, S. (2011, February 22). Black Maid Sues, Says 'The Help ' Is Humiliating [Newsgroup post]. Retrieved from ABC News website: http://abcnews.go.com/Health/lawsuit-black-maid-ablene-cooper-sues-author-kathryn/story?id=12968562#.UaVK7Z3D9Fo
Potts, S. M. (Ed.). (2013). About Me [Fact sheet]. Retrieved April 26, 2013, from Julia Alvarez website: http://www.juliaalvarez.com/about/
Stockett, K. (2009). The help. New York: Amy Einhorn Books.
Stockett, K. (2009, July 18). This Life: Kathryn Stockett on her childhood in the Deep South [Blog post]. Retrieved from Mail Online website: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/you/article-1199603/This-Life-Kathryn-Stockett-childhood-Deep-South.html
Walker, S. (2012, March). [Alvarez, Julia] [Fact sheet]. Retrieved April 26, 2013, from Postcolonial Studies @ Emory website: http://postcolonialstudies.emory.edu/julia-alvarez/
Williams, W. (2011, August 4). Kathryn Stockett: Life in the belle jar [Blog post]. Retrieved from Creative Loafing website:
http://clatl.com/atlanta/kathryn-stockett-life-in-the-belle-jar/Content?oid=