Voicelessness In Kathryn Stockett's The Help

The Help

“If you want to tell the untold stories, if you want to give voice to the voiceless, you’ve got to find a language.”-Salman Rushdie. This quote says that if you want new interesting stories, then you should let the voiceless write them or have someone else write it for them. In the book The Help, the quote is exemplified perfectly, because Skeeter gives the voiceless maids a voice to be heard. Additionally, the book includes terrifying and sweet stories that the voiceless have to tell. In novelist Kathryn Stockett’s historical fiction, The Help (2009), she portrays the voicelessness of the maids in the 1960’s through the portrayal of their social inequalities to the white superior, their unjust firings by the people in power, and

In The Help, there are so many examples of this. For example, Mrs. Hilly persuades Mrs. Leefolt to make a separate bathroom for African Americans because apparently the help have “disease” that could get the wight sick. That is just not ok at all because there is no diseases that black and white people. Also, Mrs. Hilly started a program called “Home Help Sanitation Initiative” (Stockett, 60). That is just wrong and untrue and just lying, but if you have power and able to persuade people then you can feed lies to people. Another social inequality in The Help is it seems that the town is divided because there are black only neighborhoods or white only neighborhoods. Also, there is weight only or black only grocery stores and clothes stores. There was like no stores were both races could go in and not get strange looks. For example, when Skeeter went to go and meet Aibileen all of the African Americans would give her dirty looks. But African Americans would get those same looks if they went into a white neighborhood. Finally, there is clearly social inequalities between white people and black people and it pains the world; we should all be treated as