Friendship in The Help - Emily Rolls In the film The Help directed by Tate Taylor and based off the novel written by Katherine Stockett, the theme of the worth (value sounds better) of friendship is prominent to all viewers. The friendship between Minny and Aibileen, and Aibileen and Skeeter are excellent examples of lifelong friends, interracial friends, and friends who hold a firm place in each other’s hearts. However, Hilly and Elizabeth’s friendship is purely structured off jealousy, false perceptions of people, the need to impress and feel accepted, and the need for being Queen Bee and having a large crowd of people around them. These friendships are examples of how we should and should not use our superiority and social rank to influence …show more content…
Aibileen is an African-American maid working for a white woman named Elizabeth Leefolt. Skeeter is a young white woman, fresh out of university and wishing to become a “serious writer”. Skeeter asks Aibileen for help with a cleaning column for the Jackson Journal newspaper in Mississippi as a distraction for asking Aibileen for help with writing a book that shows the blacks perspective of working for white families. During the writing of The Help, Skeeter delves deeper into becoming a civil rights activist which brings her and Aibileen closer as friends, also opening them both up to a whole new world of perspective. Although, living in Mississippi during the 1960’s, they forget about the heavy racism of their town and focus on each other. Skeeter and Aibileen can happily joke and feel comfortable enough around each other to snort while laughing. Katherine Stockett and Tate Taylor show us the importance of the ability to not judge a book by its cover or a person by their skin colour. Skeeters’ and Aibileen's’ friendship is loving, caring, trusting, and understanding – all very important traits of an interracial friendship of that era and area. However, I do believe that these are all qualities of any relationship in any era or area. Their friendship also …show more content…
Katherine Stockett has written Hilly to be an overly racist, hypocritical, cruel, exceptionally wealthy and a “godless woman”, with her only intention to achieve ‘Queen Bee’ status and to obtain a large crowd of ‘worker bees’ or admirers. Whereas, Elizabeth was written to be a pathetic young woman who tries too hard to impress Hilly, she is not as wealthy as Hilly and can never achieve the level of acceptance from Hilly. Sadly enough, being accepted from a horrible person like Hilly is her only goal. Elizabeth sews her own dresses because she can’t afford a new dress for every occasion, like Hilly can, and Hilly never compliments her effort. She also buys crystal-looking op-shop glass ornaments to place in her living room to make it look like she has more money than she actually does. Elizabeth also owns a piano that sits in her living room and is never played; it most likely is out of tune and has missing keys. Elizabeth allows Hilly to walk all over her like a doormat in order to hopefully be accepted into her clique. In a scene at the diner, Hilly and Elizabeth are sitting opposite each other however, when Skeeter arrives, Hilly nudges her head to the side to tell Elizabeth to move aside rather than doing it herself. Hilly even fires Elizabeth’s’ beloved main Aibileen for a false accusation for stealing silverware. To me, it is sad to see such a lovely young woman being
Race manifests itself as a key challenge to Jeannette’s views on freedom and immaterial love. She never truly saw people of other races in a different light until the family arrived in the small town of Welch, West Virginia. In Welch, racial divides were
The award-winning book of poems, Brown Girl Dreaming, by Jacqueline Woodson, is an eye-opening story. Told in first person with memories from the author’s own life, it depicts the differences between South Carolina and New York City in the 1960s as understood by a child. The book begins in Ohio, but soon progresses to South Carolina where the author spends a considerable amount of her childhood. She and her older siblings, Hope and Odella (Dell), spend much of their pupilage with their grandparents and absorb the southern way of life before their mother (and new baby brother) whisk them away to New York, where there were more opportunities for people of color in the ‘60s. The conflict here is really more of an internal one, where Jacqueline struggles with the fact that it’s dangerous to be a part of the change, but she can’t subdue the fact that she wants to. She also wrestles with the issue of where she belongs, “The city is settling around me….(but) my eyes fill up with the missing of everything and everyone I’ve ever known” (Woodson 184). The conflict is never explicitly resolved, but the author makes it clear towards the end
Kathryn Stockett's book The Help has sold over five million copies and has spent more than 100 weeks on The New York Times Best Seller list. Stockett's book has also been made in to a major motion picture. The Help is a story about African American house maids based in 1960's Jackson, Mississippi. The story is told by three main women, Minny, Aibileen and Skeeter. Aibileen and Minny are both African-American maids, while Skeeter is the daughter of a privileged family. Aibileen is raising another white child by the name of Mae Mobley whose mother does not participate in her care. Minny is working for an outcast, newlywed, white woman who is keeping her employment a secret from her husband. Skeeter is working on becoming a journalist and takes the risk of interviewing Minny and Aibileen for her book that she publishes. All meetings are done in secret. All of the maids Skeeter interviews talk of a woman named Hilly, who holds the ideal that whites are superior to African-Americans and intends to get everyone in her “ladies group” ( in which Skeeter is a member) to join in the ideal and embrace it. Hilly is one of the specific antagonists in this story, which ends in her demise. This story describes everyone in Hilly’s circle to a T, but it is published with an anonymous author and the names get changed so that no one can figure out who wrote it. Most people will “rant and rave” that Stockett's book is an amazing story of the struggle for African American's in
To the modern white women who grew up in comfort and did not have to work until she graduated from high school, the life of Anne Moody reads as shocking, and almost too bad to be true. Indeed, white women of the modern age have grown accustomed to a certain standard of living that lies lightyears away from the experience of growing up black in the rural south. Anne Moody mystifies the reader in her gripping and beautifully written memoir, Coming of Age in Mississippi, while paralleling her own life to the evolution of the Civil Rights movement. This is done throughout major turning points in the author’s life, and a detailed explanation of what had to be endured in the name of equality.
I picked Miss Skeeter to write about, Miss Skeeter was raised in a home where she was brought up by a black woman as her nanny and maid of the house. For that era it was normal for kids to be raised that way. Miss Skeeter’s life was simple and she was rich, she didn’t know what it was like to need or want anything in life. She wasn’t exposed to many of the hardships that many of the black characters in the book suffer or go through. Her life was really good, she was fortunate to have all that she did. It wasn’t until she went away to college and spent some time away from her family and her friends influence. Miss Skeeter was the only one out of her friends that actually went away to college and was able to see the world through another viewpoint and I think that affected her, she was able to see what life is really about she realized what a privileged life she really did live.
Quickly regretting telling the “white lady” this. Around this time the New York journal, Missus Stein, she applied for contacts her saying a more original idea is needed to impress her, aibileen might have given skeeter an idea! Skeeter, thinking about Treelore book about Mississippi life, tells Aibileen her idea to write the book. Aibileen is shocked she would mention it, but she wants to do what her son
Today, blacks are respected very differently in society than they used to be. In “The Help”, we see a shift in focus between what life is like now for the average African American compared to what it was like for them to live in the 1960’s.“The Help” teaches readers the importance of understanding and learning from our history. The novel is a snapshot of the cultural, racial and economic distinctions between blacks and whites in a particularly tumultuous time in American history. “The Help” encourages readers to examine personal prejudices and to strive to foster global equality.
Growing up as the young child of sharecroppers in Mississippi, Essie Mae Moody experienced and observed the social and economic deprivation of Southern Blacks. As a young girl Essie Mae and her family struggled to survive, often by the table scraps of the white families her mother worked for. Knowing little other than the squalor of their living conditions, she realizes this disparity while living in a two-room house off the Johnson’s property, whom her mother worked for, watching the white children play, “Here they were playing in a house that was nicer than any house I could have dreamed of”(p. 33). Additionally, the segregated school she attends was a “one room rotten wood building.” (p. 14), but Essie Mae manages to get straight A’s while caring for her younger sibli...
The purpose of this essay is to highlight the issues that Dana, a young African-American writer, witness as an observer through time. As a time traveler, she witnesses slavery and gender violation during 19th and 20th centuries and examines these problems in terms of how white supremacy disrupts black familial bonds. While approaching Octavia Butler’s novel Kindred, this essay analyses how gender and racial violation relates to familial bonds through Dana 's experience in Tom Weylin 's plantation. It is argued that Butler uses pathos, ethos, and in rare cases logos, to effectively convey her ideas of unfairness during the American slavery, such as examining the roots of Weylin’s cruel attitude towards black people, growing conflicts between
Not only did “Help” influence the thoughts of society in regards to racial segregation but it also created an opportunity for Skeeter and Aibileen to challenge sex segregation or the norm that said women are homemakers and men work. “My eye’s drift down to HELP WANTED: MALE” (Stockett, 69). During the 1960s women such as Skeeter, who were not yet married with children by the age of 23 were seen as social outcasts. Few women worked because their job in society was to be home, caring for the family. Being a social outcast didn’t bother Skeeter and writing “Help” allowed her to get a job at Harper & Row Publishing in New York which during that time, most ...
When living sometimes we are faced with difficult decisions that affect our friendships. If you knew you were in a jam, what would you do? Who would you run to? Despite the greasers’ reputation as heartless young criminals, they live by a specific code of friendship and honour. In the novel The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton, there are many instances in which the gang members make selfless choices by putting the needs of others ahead of their own. Three examples are, when the gang has each other’s back, Johnny and Ponyboy’s friendship, and Dally risking his life for Johnny.
Although this central idea can be universal, it is imperative to the story. The story is set in Harlem, NY and is assumed to be in the 50’s due to the information that they both went to war, but is not specified the war in particular. The setting is an actual setting and a particular one as well; it is not vague. The background is important to the plot because it provides essential information on the framework of these characters and the period the story is set. The character’s in this story are both African American and have grown up in a widely rough known residentially segregated area. Throughout the setting, descriptions are very precise helping the reader understand the intensity of the environment. Discusses the women of color who have been beaten up that walk the street, to the houses and apartments that they have created adolescent memories in no longer present. In the article “The Perilous Journey to a Brother’s Country: James Baldwin and the Rigors of the Community” by Keith Clark, he explains the “encoded” acceptance of the reality of space the characters lived in and he outcomes they face in their neighborhood. An area that is dominantly occupied by African Americans this gives larger historical and societal information on racial
Aibileen was the first maid to come forward to tell her story about what it's like to live in a small town of Mississippi down South. See in her mind she hates those white women because her son got taken away from her, and in her place she blames all white men and women. But toward the end skeeter put her own perspective in there she said she wanted to write what is was like for her growing up having an African American raise her for her to get fired for getting old.
The Help chronicles a recent college graduate named Skeeter, who secretly writes a book exposing the treatment of black maids by white affluent women. The story takes place in 1960s Jackson, Mississippi, during the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement. The death of Medgar Evers triggers racial tension and gives the maids of Jackson the courage to retell their personal stories of injustice endured over the years. The movie depicts the frustration of the maids with their female employers and what their lives were like cleaning, cooking, and raising their bosses’ children. The Help shines a light on the racial and social injustice of maids during the era of Jim Crow Laws, illustrating how white women of a privileged society discriminated not only against black women, but also against their own race. The movie examines a very basic principle: the ethical treatment of other human beings.
Friendship is the most wonderful relationship that anyone can have. Ideally a friend is a person who offers love and respect and will never leave or betray us. Friends can tell harsh truths when they must be told. There are four different types of friends: True friends, Convenient friends, Special interest friends, and historical friends. To have friendship is to have comfort. In times of crisis and depression, a friend is there to calm us and to help lift up our spirits.