Corporeal Legacies in the US South by Christopher Lloyd

Author:Christopher Lloyd
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783319962054
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Materiality

The frequency with which Stockett’s characters (and thus the novel itself) speak about, and concern themselves with, feces and urine testifies to a psychosomatic processing of race, racism, and race relations in the southern home. Before outlining the theoretical underpinnings of this argument, I offer a brief survey of how bodily waste is commented on so frequently, by both black and white characters. On the first page, Aibileen tells us of her white employers’ children: “I know how to get them babies to sleep […] and go in the toilet bowl before they mamas even get out a bed” (1). In the relations between black and white, adult and child, toilet habits are set from the start. It is as though Stockett wants us to see toileting as central to this domestic southern world. Later on, a workman at the home of the Miss Lefolt (a family friend of Miss Skeeter) asks Aibileen: “Where might I go to make water?” (20). Describing these facilities, Aibileen says how “[i]n the mornings, that bathroom seat get so cold out there, give me a little start when I set down” (90). The physicality of both needing the toilet, and using it, are given due attention in this narration. Further on in the novel, Aibileen asks Skeeter (referring to the current state of race relations): “Did you hear about the colored boy this morning? One they beat with a tire iron for accidentally using the white bathroom?” (103). The political (and physical) stakes of using the “correct” bathroom—expelling waste properly—are clear to see here. In these examples, and so many more as we will see, the toilet and bodily waste are highly charged sites of corporeal and racial regulation.

Other than Tikenya Foster-Singletary (2012), Stephanie Rountree (2013), and Nicole Racquel Carr’s (2015) studies of the novel, the significance of corporeality in The Help has been largely overlooked; the Southern Cultures special issue on the novel from 2014 investigates many aspects of the text, but little time is spent discussing the role of the physical lived body in it. I will intervene in critical accounts of the book—building especially on the work of Rountree—by focusing on the matter of embodiment and bodily processes, suggesting that Stockett’s novel demonstrates the central tensions and disavowals of race relations in the Civil Rights South through its attention to toilets, feces, and urination. I thus borrow from southern studies, Black studies , and psychoanalysis to unpack the novel’s imaginative work. For example, in History of Shit (1978), Dominique Laporte suggests that “socialization is regularly subverted by the politics of waste” in that “To touch, even lightly, on the relationship of a subject to his shit, is to modify not only that subject’s relationship to the totality of his body, but his very relationship to the world.”13 Thus, reading The Help’s representations of toileting can illuminate the workings of socialization as it emerges in the distance from, and proximity to, human waste. Additionally, Karl Abraham argues that in the psychoanalysis of

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