ipl-logo

Goodread: The Help By Kathryn Stockett

549 Words3 Pages

The book I chose for this Goodread is The Help by Kathryn Stockett. This book is a fictional book that is mainly about the way African American maids were treated back in the day and how one white lady wanted to make a change in their lives.This book takes place in Mississippi in 1962, during the time of racism and segregation. The major characters in this story are Skeeter, Aibileen, and Minny. Skeeter is a 22 year old writer that has returned home from graduating from Ole Miss. She is pursuing a job as a writer as she lives with her mother. Aibileen is a black maid in Mississippi that has raised many white children and lost her only son because of racism. She cares a lot for the child she is currently raising. Minny is Skeeter’s best friend and also a black maid in Mississippi. She is very bossy, which makes her lose her job a lot, but is a wonderful chef. She is also a mother and is in an abusive relationship with her husband. …show more content…

There are deaths of innocent African Americans seen in the story and African Americans are excluded so much that there are only certain places they can shop, swim or even live. A young girl named Skeeter is trying to make a change to this problem by convincing maids to share stories about how they were treated unfairly so that she can create a book and share it with the rest of the world to know how horrible African Americans were treated. Although this sounds like a good idea, it’s very dangerous because if a person found out who was sharing stories, they can be targeted, terrorized and even fired. The solution to the story was satisfying because it created somewhat of a happy

Show More
Related
307 Words | 2 Pages

The character of Aibileen is often depicted as a symbol of courage and perseverance; throughout the story, she is often shown endangering her life in many different ways trying to contribute to Skeeter’s book. While she was overcoming the grief of her sole son’s unlawful death, Aibileen soon begins to realize that she wanted to make a change in the way Caucasians saw African Americans and ultimately achieve her son’s goal. Although the persona of Aibileen initially feared to help write Skeeter’s book, she later ends up agreeing. During the time she felt intimidated, she mentions the severity of punishments for crimes where African Americans express their political/social opinions and/or do something considered ethically wrong by

Read More
935 Words | 4 Pages

Skeeter Phelan is an aspiring writer who wants to tell the stories of underpaid, overworked, and underestimated black maids while sacrificing her own “friendships” to bring a big change to the world of writing and an even bigger change to the lives of her subjects. Skeeter brings light and hope into the dark story of The Help and gives the reader a new perspective of how common stereotypes were in Mississippi during the 1960s. Born to Carlton and Charlotte Phelan and raised by a black maid named Constantine, Skeeter grew up on her family’s cotton plantation as the oddball of the family. Constantine was the closest thing Skeeter had to a loving mother. What was most memorable about their relationship was when Skeeter recalls, “All my life I’d been told what to believe about politics, colored, being a girl.

Read More
629 Words | 3 Pages

As Skeeter, Aibileen, and Minny get closer finishing their book, Hilly gets more aggressive and serious with her threats. After Skeeter posted Hilly’s newsletter with a ‘typo’ that gave Skeeter a motive to place 32 toilets in Hilly’s yard, Hilly finally decided to remove her as editor of the League’s newsletter to save her and the League’s reputation (Stockett 412-3). Toward the end of the novel, Hilly has figured out the novel Skeeter has wrote is about the maids of Jackson, Mississippi, but she cannot tell anyone because of a story Minny put in there. However, it does not stop her from having people fire their maids even if she has no reasoning behind it. This leads to her convincing Miss Leefolt, Aibileen’s employer, to fire Aibileen as a maid for ‘theft’ of Hilly’s silver which was a cover up to Hilly’s real motive for firing her (Stockett 518-22).

Read More
1265 Words | 6 Pages

The Renaissance was a period in European history that triggered a region wide development in the fine arts, intellectual studies and technology. With the expansion of understanding in the fields of science, philosophy and technology and the accumulation of wealth of many European nations, it led to them to expand their own fleets and finance exploration missions throughout the world. The Columbian Exchange was a by-product of the Age of Exploration and was the transfer of plants, animals and technology between the “Old World” and the “New World”. The Columbian Exchange involved the entire modern world. Irrevocably, the Columbian Exchange helped trigger the largest population boom in world history, it led to a boom in the overall economy and

Read More
1746 Words | 7 Pages

Kathryn Stockett’s The Help, attests to the hateful and cruel reality that is the life of African Americans in Jackson, Mississippi circa the 1960’s. Stockett writes many anecdotes surrounding the relationship between Constantine, an African American maid, and the child she cares for, Skeeter. Skeeter reflects upon a memory of Constantine and

Read More
245 Words | 1 Pages

Aibileen assists her, with permission of Elizabeth, and she tells Skeeter about her son who had died in the midst of writing a book about his experiences. Then, at once, Skeeter realizes that she wants to make

Read More
1574 Words | 7 Pages

By an anonymous writer later revealed as Skeeter also known as Eugenia Phelan. Skeeter, a white woman, returns to her hometown (Mississippi) to discover that her motherly nanny Constantine has left but no one tells what happened. Soon Skeeter realizes the injustice her society practices and decides to write a book where voices of black will be raised. She approaches Aibileen for sharing her narrative to which Aibileen responds positively and also let’s Minny in their secret. Minny, Aibileen’s friend, another black help, reveals a secret about Miss Hilly that ensures Miss Hilly’s silence after the publication of their writing project.

Read More
1584 Words | 7 Pages

The Help focuses on the story of a upper class writer that tries to find her social identity as well as others. With help from the maids of Jackson, Mississippi, they all overcome stereotypes and discrimination. Aibileen's story was the foundation idea for Skeeter because she had been through so much in her life that she decided to tell her story. The fact that she was black, and a woman the role of a maid for the upper class families were passed down from generations so she saw her fair share of being looked down upon. Being a part of the Black/African African race, there were certain things

Read More
1856 Words | 8 Pages

Skeeter is seen to develop in two different ways: a young woman who doesn 't have marriage as a first priority anymore and a woman who later sees an injustice to the black help. Skeeter is a white socialite who just graduated from college with a degree in writing. She came back to Jackson Mississippi with the idea of starting to write for book publishing companies but arrives home only for her mother to question her about marriage. Upon the many

Read More
808 Words | 4 Pages

Kathryn Stockett’s novel, The Help, is not just about overcoming racism, but also about overcoming the constant human power struggle. The novel also showed how people treated each others, regardless if they were the same race. Throughout the book, Skeeter is ignored and cut-off by her friends while Minny is abused by her own husband. These two events happened even though each was the same race. Even the woman Minny worked for was being ignored because of who she married.

Read More
939 Words | 4 Pages

The Help: Racial Prejudice The Help, written by Kathryn Stockett, offers the views of Black maids, during the time of adamant racism in the south, including what the black women had to suffer through. This is still a relevant issue in our media today. Aibileen, a black nurse/maid struggles with trying to raise the white children she cares for to be kind and unprejudiced children in a world and environment where racial prejudice is accepted as the norm. Miss Skeeter, a white upper class woman, has lived with the racism all of her life.

Read More
1003 Words | 5 Pages

Minny Jackson’s distinctive role in “The Help” The novel “The Help” by Kathryn Stockett deals with the living circumstances in Jackson, Mississippi in the 1960s, and focuses on the lives of two housemaids, Minny Jackson and Aibileen Clark, as well as Eugenia “Skeeter” Phelan, a young white college graduate, whose aim it is to write a book about the circumstances and the experiences of the “Help” in white families. The three characters take turns narrating the events happening in the novel, and occasionally bring in inner monologues in the form of their own thoughts and memories. One of them, Minny Jackson stands out from the rest of the characters, because of the language she employs. She utilizes Vernacular American English, like the other housemaids, but her use of the language varies and has a certain impact.

Read More
1018 Words | 5 Pages

Identify and describe the setting of your novel: The Help is set in Jackson, Mississippi from August, 1962 to late 1964. At this time African Americans were not treated equally as whites or given the same opportunities. Identify and describe the main characters: Minny and Aibileen are the main women representing ‘the help’- the black women who make life more comfortable for their white female employers.

Read More
759 Words | 4 Pages

The social groups focused on in this novel are white housewives, whose group consists of Skeeter, the privileged daughter of a farmer, who just returned from college, and “the help” or a group of maids who are of course of African American decent. The help is forced to obey their irrationally needy bosses, cooking for them, cleaning for them, and even raising their children, only to be treated inhumanely and unfairly by petty housewives. For example, one of the housewives, Hilly Holbrook, a seemingly conflicting character alone, was very suggestive of a bathroom act being enforced, which made it mandatory that every home have a separate bathroom for its help as a “safety precaution” because they could transmit diseases through their bodily functions. In situations like these, African Americans were very alienated, and it really displayed the gap in reality for the two groups. This in turn caused conflict between them, as African Americans were looked down at by whites and the whites were seen as threatening and wicked minded by African Americans.

Read More
3436 Words | 14 Pages

A young college graduate, Skeeter, returns home to be with her ailing mother, and in her ambition to succeed as a writer, turns to the black maids she knows. Skeeter is determined to collect their oral histories and write about a culture that values social facade and ignores the human dignity of many members of the community. Two maids, Aibileen and Minny, agree to share their stories, stories of struggle and daily humiliation, of hard work and low pay, of fear for themselves. It is a time of change, when

Read More

More about Goodread: The Help By Kathryn Stockett

Related Topics

Open Document