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Capitolo 2
Esempi di Unità di Apprendimento
165
www.
edises
.it
Fase 6.
tempo: 120’
Questa fase propone un’ulteriore analisi di testi letterari giornalistici e documen-
ti concernenti l’argomento, invitando gli allievi ad ampliare la loro riflessione e
stimolandoli con esercizi di comprensione e produzione, sia scritta sia orale. In
particolare, è possibile proporre loro articoli come quello riportato che costitui
scano esempi di cosa significhi elaborare una riflessione critica e consapevole
riguardo a un tema specifico.
Documento 2
Racial Insults and Quiet Bravery in 1960’s Mississippi
By Janet Maslin, February 18, 2009
In “The Help,” Kathryn Stockett’s button-pushing, soon to be wildly popular novel about
black domestic servants working in white Southern households in the early 1960s, one wom-
an works especially tirelessly. She labors long into the night. She is exhausted. Her eyes are
stinging, her fingers bloody and sore. Is she ironing pleats? Scrubbing toilets? Polishing silver
for an all-important meeting of the local bridge club? No way. She is Miss Skeeter Phelan,
a white woman. And the white women of “The Help” don’t do those demeaning jobs. They
don’t do much of anything else either.
But brave, tenacious Skeeter is different. So she is slaving away on a book that will blow
the lid off the suffering endured by black maids in Jackson, Miss. Skeeter’s going to call
the place “Niceville,” but she won’t make it sound nice. All of Jackson’s post-sorority girls
from Ole Miss will be up in arms if Skeeter’s tell-all book sees the light of day.
The trouble on the pages of Skeeter’s book is nothing compared with the trouble Ms.
Stockett’s real book risks getting into. Here is a debut novel by a Southern-born white
author who renders black maids’ voices in thick, dated dialect. (…)
Expectations notwithstanding, it’s not the black maids who are done a disservice by this
white writer; it’s the white folk. The two principal maid characters, the lovingly maternal
Aibileen and the angry, scrappy Minny, leap off the page in all their warm, three-dimen-
sional glory. Book groups armed with hankies will talk and talk about their quiet bravery
and the outrageous insults dished out by their vain, racist employers. (...)
News of the real world seeps into the book only occasionally, with a brief televised glim-
pse of James Meredith integrating Ole Miss or other muffled rendered news. “There is a
skirmish in Vietnam,” Skeeter notices. “The reporter seems to think it’ll be solved without
much fuss.”
The tide of soapsuds rises as Skeeter comes across a copy of Jim Crow laws and is galvani-
zed into action; as Skeeter the liberal-minded spinster begins dating the son of an intole-
rant local politician; as Skeeter begins wondering what happened to Constantine, the maid
who lovingly raised her; and as both Aibileen and Minny become increasingly privy to the
secrets of their employers’ households.
Though “The Help” might well have veered off into violent repression of these maids’
outspokenness (one character is blinded for having accidentally used a whites-only bathro-
om), Ms. Stockett doesn’t take it there. She’s interested in the affection and intimacy buri-
ed beneath even the most seemingly impersonal household connections.
Aibileen is this book’s loveliest character, especially in scenes that have her raising Mae
Mobley, the toddler now in her charge. (…)