흑인의 억양, 백인의 목소리: 캐쓰린 스타킷의 [헬프]와 흑백 저자권의 문제

Abstract

A popular narrative centered on African American lives by a white woman writer, Kathryn Stockett’s The Help is an intriguing successor of Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe and Imitation of Life by Fanny Hurst. While the novel gloriously portrays black and white sisterhood and its struggle against racial injustice in 1963 Mississippi, its crucial dependence on African American racial stereotypes often becomes the target of heavy criticism. Among the three female characters who alternately narrate each chapter, Stockett peculiarly chooses the voice of Aibileen, a middle-aged African American help, for the beginning and ending of the novel. Aibileen’s cooperation with Skeeter, a well-intentioned young white woman writer, builds the main plot throughout the novel, but what is at stake is the African American woman’s authorship, which is constantly praised but never rightfully authorized. From her emotional and literary investment to the inevitable renunciation, Stockett’s curious experiments with the character of Aibileen call for readerly exploration. Her creation of Aibileen as an author is fascinating even subversive as it allows the African American woman to inscribe her own voice and thereby resist the white woman’s pen. The power of Aibileen’s written account apparently reverses a long standing power dynamic of “slave narrative” African American woman talking and white woman writing to the degree that it overshadows Skeeter’s design as a fledgling writer. Ultimately, however, Aibileen the author is submerged by Aibileen the Mammy. Stockett’s authorial stance unmistakingly reinscribes the “white ventriloquism” that projects what the white listener would wish to hear through her African American characters. Aibileen speaks in Mammy’s language to ameliorate the young white woman’s guilt,and her writing ends up serving to liberate Skeeter from the stifling South. The white feminist cause of “lending a voice to the voiceless” purported by Stockett is not legitimate within this context. She only borrows Mammy’s accent to deliver the white female author’s voice.