the help downloadable teaching unit kathryn stockett

“Honey Chile, I’ll work for anything you is willin’ to pay, and not take more’n mah share of your time for my young un, ef I kin get her and me a good roof over our heads. You see, black critics didn’t view Hurst’s maid character Delilah as a positive portrayal.

That is, until he was swayed by the critics of Hurst’s novel. This is how the original post looked in February of 2009 on the site The California Literary įor those unaware, Hurston promoted Fannie Hurst’s novel, even getting writer Langston Hughes on board. A stereotype is meant to appeal to the majority. And that “target” audience isn’t African American. ”įrom as far back as Uncle Tom’s Cabin, one of the first novels showing the qualities a good Mammy and Uncle Tom character must have, these “credit to their race” caricatures have an overdose of loyalty, humility, love for their white charges, religious fevor, humor, everything that would make them “admirable” and “heart-warming” to their target audience. And know that we have our own standard of excellence. At some point you just have to leave it alone. But it’s like Tate says, if you work from that point of pressure and fear, your work is gonna crack. And saw her as being seventy years old and about two hundred and fifty pounds or you know, yeah, I felt a lot of pressure. And then and of course pressure from the readers who all wanted Oprah to play the role. When you play a maid where a white woman has written a story and a white man is directing it, so there is no way that it’s gonna be. “I’m playing a maid, a black actress playing a maid in 2011 in Hollywood, is a lot of pressure. Why do I have to play the mammy? But what do you do as an actor if one of the most multi-faceted and rich roles you’ve ever been given is a maid in 1962 Mississippi? Do you not take the role because you feel in some ways it’s not a good message to send to Black people?” – Viola Davis, in a quote from Essence Magazine

In the book Skeeter claimed to be able to see the “blackness of Constantine’s gums.” Here the character of Constantine is used to provide humor, as many Mammy characters are enlisted to do.

The help downloadable teaching unit kathryn stockett