The Help
The book , The Help by Kathryn Stockett, is about a women named Aibileen who is a black maid. She is taking care of her 17th white baby now. She works for a woman named Miss Leefolt. Aibileen has never disobeyed an order in her life and never intends to do so. Her friend Minny is the exact opposite. When she is around her boss, she has to hold herself back from sassing them all the time. Skeeter Phelan is different than the rest of the white ladies. She thinks that blacks aren’t all that bad. She decides to write a book about the lives of maids for white ladies. Otherwise known as the Help. She with the help of Aibileen and Minny hope to create a book that starts a revolution about what white people think about blacks.
Each of the main characters are very different. First off is Aibileen. She is a quite women who never disobeys orders from her white woman even if she doesn’t want to do it. “ ‘So you’ll use that one out in the garage now, you understand?’ I don’t look at her. I’m not trying to make no trouble, but she done made her point.”- (Page 34) Miss Leefolt built a “special” bathroom for her to use so that she won’t use the white bathrooms. The reason that the author was to show that Aibileen did what she needed to do to keep her white women happy. Aibileen also is polite to people that she needs to be polite to. Even in her own home she is nice to Skeeter. “ ‘Anything…you’d like to add…about that?’ ‘No ma'am’ ‘Aibileen, you don’t have to call me ‘ma'am’ not here’ ”- (Page 169) Minny on the other hand is the exact opposite. She doesn’t care about what other people think. If it’s a white women that’s tipping her off and she doesn’t work for her then she’ll tell her off. “ ‘What makes you think colored people need ...
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...o the next with the next point of view. For example, when Skeeter was interviewing Minny, Kathryn didn’t have that event explained three times. She only had it explained once from one person’s point of view. In this case, it was Skeeter’s. “I start with background questions and some how we back our way to Minny’s work.” (Page 192) When Kathryn switches points of view, she switches events. Sometimes there will be a flashback that the character has but it’s not a long one. Sometimes, when the point of view switches, she goes into an event that only that character takes part in. Overall she does a very good job with transitioning the events between character’s points of view.
Overall The Help is an amazing book by Kathryn Stockett. The three characters Skeeter, Aibileen, and Minny all are different people. But somehow, they manage to become close friends. Or almost.
Minny, Aibileen and the other maids are seen as unequal towards the rest of the community, or the whites. They are treated coarsely and like they are less of a person because they have different color skin. The maids were also not allowed to use the same bathroom as the rest of the people. “She's upset because the n**** uses the inside bathroom and so do we” (pg 7). At some parts in the book the women in the bridge club would talk about the maids in a mean way and make fun of them and talk bad about them. “I keep telling her, if that Minny can’t cook she needs to just go on and fire her”.....”Minny cooks fine.” say ole Miss Walter. “I’m just not so hungry like I used to be”. The book was set during the time with all the civil rights movements so this conflicts shows up a lot. “Yet I am neither thrilled or disappointed by the news that they might let a colored man into Ole Miss…..Roger Sticker, our local reporter, is nervous, smiling, talking fast. “President Kennedy has ordered the governor to step aside for James Meredith, I repeat, the President of the United---”. People of color were also being killed because they were who they were or for accidentally doing things. “ Did you hear about the colored boy this morning? One they beat with a tire iron for accidentally using white
There are six main characters in this story: Mark, David, Susan, Jeff, Betsy, and Mr. Griffin. The most influential would be Mark. He is the one who comes up with the plan to kidnap Mr. Griffin. He is not a very good student and has a reputation of being a "bad boy." Next there is David. David is supposed to be one of the better kids in the story. He is a senior who is in the same class as Mark and the other characters. His role in the kidnapping is to get Susan to go along with the plan., and to help with the kidnapping itself. He seems to be a rather good kid in the beginning of the story but he progresses to be one of the bad ones. He has a very stressful home life with his mom and grandma. Then there is Susan. Susan is the good student and kid of the group. She is thought of as unpopular and a geek. She is very bright considering that she is a junior and is taking an English IV class. She is supposed to distract Mr. Griffin by having a meeting with him after school on the day of the event. She then gets pulled into the conflict even further when she wants to go to the police when Mr. Griffin dies. She almost gets
Isaac- Friend of hazel’s, also has cancer, is about to have surgery that will make him blind, becomes good friends with Hazel , caring, sympathetic , sometimes has a temper when upset, the type of person that listens to every ones problems and still cares.
The book is narrated from the first person perspectives of three women: Skeeter,Aibleen and Minny.The twenty two year old Eugenia “Skeeter” Phelan is the daughter of a prominent white family who has just graduated and wants to pursure her career as a writer but it’s 1960s and her mother will not be happy if she doesn’t have a ring on her finger. She has been brought up by black maids since she was young, and longs to find out why her much-loved maid, Constantine, has disappeared.Aibleen is a black,wise maid who is raising her seventeenth white child.She dedicates all her work time to Miss.Leeflot,while trying to heal the scars left by her own son’s death.Minny,Aibleen’s best frend is short,fat and the sassiest women in Mississippi.She is the best cook but she cannot mind her tongue resulting having being fired from nineteen jobs. Stockett’s characters are strong, sometimes bold, yet sometimes silent. She adds humor and fun, as well as danger and intrigue in the novel. She has done a great job writing from the point of view of numerous characters. All three of them had their own chapter.Every character has a personality, goals, and a backstory.
The book “The Help” takes place in Jackson, Mississippi and is told in Miss Skeeter, Aibleen,and Minny’s perspective. The first chapter is told in Aibleen’s perspective. She begins to talk about Miss Elizabeth Leefolt’s 2 year old white daughter, Mae Mobley, a neglected and physically abused child. During the first chapter Aibleen begins to discuss the death of her beloved son, Treelore, who tragically died in a preventable accident. This devastating event happened a couple months before she started to work for Elizabeth Leefolt.The incident affects Aibleen internally throughout the story.
“Skeeter” is a white, privileged journalist graduate just returning from college. When her family’s maid is gone upon her return she has questions as to where she went and why but she can’t get an honest answer from anyone. Skeeter then tries to ask some of the other maids around town what happened to her but they don’t trust her. Gradually one of the maids named Aibileen starts to open up to Skeeter. Skeeter comes up with the idea to write a book about the secret life of African American maids. At first it’s only Aibileen and then one of her friends Minny who will share stories with Skeeter. Over time though the maids get more and more fed up with how their white bosses are treating them and they too open up to Skeeter. The book becomes a hit all over town and everyone starts reading it and learning things about everyone in town that they never knew. The maids finally feel like they have been
the protagonist is Janie, who comes back to her hometown unannounced and without her husband. When Janie comes back she is dressed in clothing women in that time period were not seen wearing, ‘“What she doin coming back here in dem overalls? Can’t she find no dress to put on?...”’ (Hurston 18). Janie goes against the status quos of the African-American woman during the Great Depression. When Janie comes back all the men were watching her walk to her house, “The men noticed her firm buttocks like she had grape fruits in her hip pockets; the great rope of black hair swinging to her waist and unraveling in the wind like a plume;...” (Hurston 18). Janie is very independent and does not care about what other people think or say about her. Pearl Stone is one of the woman who talked about Janie to the other women while she was walking home; Pearl does not like Janie and feels as if Janie being different is a bad thing.
Providing this background information intially aids the reader in understanding how Kahlil and Starr became friends. This also can lead the reader to make predicitons or assumptions about Starr and Kahlil’s future relationship as well as how Starr got her current boyfriend. However, the utimate purpose for Thomas’s use of a flash back is to lead Starr to consider her current situation in the ghetto. This leads Starr to criticize how she is dressed and remeber her boyfriend and life at her private school. By forgetting about this aspect, Starr clearly lives in two different and divided worlds: one where she is friends with a player and another where she is expected to dress nicely. Starr’s constant mental and behavoir switiching is clear aparent as she thinks about the apsects of one part of her life before changing thoughts to consider another. Thomas incoprporates a first person perspective when a shooter arrives at the party. Thomas describes Starr’s first hand experience as she tries to look for her half sister Kenya without being shot: “Pop! A shot rings out. I
Two important events happen early in the summer. A new girl, Kristi, moves in next door, and Catherine strikes up a unique friendship with Jason. Jason attends occupational therapy and is physically deformed, and is dump. Rather, he uses a book of word cards, pointing to cards in sequence to communicate. Catherine is at first overwhelmed and awful of Jason's disability. Kristi is a trendy, "cool" girl that Catherine admires to
Margaret Atwood’s “Happy Endings” is an Author’s telling of societal beliefs that encompass the stereotypical gender roles and the pursuit of love in the middle class with dreams of romance and marriage. Atwood writes about the predictable ways in which many life stories are concluded for the middle class; talking about the typical everyday existence of the average, ordinary person and how they live their lives. Atwood provides the framework for several possibilities regarding her characters’ lives and how each character eventually completes their life with their respective “happy ending”.
make it, or be somebody. She also shows how race, prejudice, and economic problems effect a black
Set in the Victorian era where women remained at the bottom of the social and economic ladder, Alias Grace's female characters emerged out of the stereotypes of its time. Not only were they unique and extremely dynamic but Margaret Atwood's characters stood for more than just the unconventional women of such a society. They were strong and able women who overcome the traumas in their lives. They chose not to be labelled by impressions of the ideal women rather they made their own mark in society. In addition, the central female characters each defied one central stereotype of the time by either their actions or their social position. In other words, Margaret Atwood's female characters opposed the stereotypical view of women in the Victorian era.
...ith the three of them? Minny thinks, “I don’t care that much about voting. I don’t care about eating at a counter with white people. What I care about is, if in ten years, a white lady will call my girls dirty and accuse them of stealing silver.” (Stockett 256) That is such a powerful thought from Minny. She is tired of white people looking down on her and at the end of the day she wants change not for her, but for her children. Minny knew what they were doing was for the greater good.
Kathryn Stockett is one of the most powerful, courageous, and bravest writers I have ever read about and that is why I have chosen to write about her. I read her book "The Help" and by reading this book it has shown me many things about history I had not known existed. This book is all about African American housekeepers in the 1960's and how they were treated, even though the laws may have made them equal, society did not. If it wasn't for books like this people like me may not know about these rough times and how life has changed drastically since then. Reasons like these are why I was inspired to write this paper about Stockett.
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.