THE HELP by Kathryn Stockett
Write a summary of the plot .
The story begins with a few households. On first sight, very normal. But when you read a little further you discover that they have a housekeeper. And not just a housekeeper, but a black one. Just like all the other households in Jackson, Mississippi in the south of America in the early 1960’s. You’ll also discover that the maids aren’t treated as well as they should be.
The store is read in three characters: Aibileen Clark, Minny Jackson, and Skeeter Phelan. Aibileen and Minny both work for a white woman that treats them badly. Skeeter is a white girl who thinks that it is weird and awkward that she has to ignore the help. As Minny puts it nicely: ‘She’s one of those that thanks us maids.’ Skeeter wants to be a writer and what is a better way to make a name for yourself then to document this barrier between black and white?
She first talks to Aibileen, who is sceptic of this plan. But finally she agrees to go along and she convinces other housekeepers to also tell their story to Skeeter. Skeeter publishes her book anonymously and it sets in the fictional town Niceville. This book soon becomes a best-seller, and the women of Jackson begin realizing that the characters are an awful lot like themselves.
They’re all convinced, but there is one woman that particularly has an interest in finding out who it is all about: Holly Holbrook. Skeeter and Holly were best friends once, but they have very different opinions about the racial matter. In the end, it is a secret about Hilly that Minny reveals in Skeeter's book that silences Hilly. The book becomes a powerful force in giving a voice to the black maids and causes the community of Jackson to reconsider the carefully drawn lines between white and black.
Explain the title.
the title is very easy explained. This book is about the housekeepers, ‘the help’-s. In the book the white women are particularly cruel to their maids. They barely normally talk to them and even though you would think they would be somehow grateful, they seem to barely care. Nevertheless, it would be hard for them to live without their ‘helps’. They do the household, they even raise the children! The black women sincerely hate their bosses, especially Minny. She is very sassy and if she doesn’t like something, she says it. She has been fired over this multiple times. Aibileen says: ‘The only thing that kept you from being fired at Miss Holbrooks place, was that you cook so nice and she was deaf.’ For the black women, it is not just helping. It is their job, but also their burden, because they keep getting treated very poorly.
Discuss the themes of your novel.
I think the main theme is racism. The black women can’t be more than helpers. They have nothing to say in the house that they work in. Their lives and families are less important than the white women’s ‘problems’. They are often accused of stealing and lying, and they’re helpless because they can’t defend themselves.
But it is also about courage. Courage to speak up to everyone you love, because you believe something. Skeeter was almost engaged to a guy, but when she told him she had written the book, he never returned her calls. Her family is against it, and so are her friends. And Minny and Aibileen off course, they face another hard fact: they could lose their jobs, reputations, and a white woman can ruin a black woman’s whole life.
What is the setting of the story? When and where does it take place. How do you know? something about the social/cultural setting?
The tory takes place in Jackson, Mississippi. You know that because it is told repeatedly. The importance of this is that Jackson lays in the south of America, where the racial issue was the biggest. It’s set in 1963, in the heat of the moment.
It somehow had become natural that you had a black housekeeper, nobody thought twice about it. There used to be cotton fields in that area, where the black people also worked for the white people. In the book it sometimes does say; ‘Up in the north of this country, they stood up against the racial problem.’
Is the story told with flashbacks or flash forwards, or is the story chronological throughout?
It is pretty chronological. Sometimes there are flashbacks, but they’re more memories.
Aibileen has a memory when she thinks of her son that passed away a few years before the story begins. She blames it on his white bosses, because they didn’t hurry to get help for him. Also, the writer shows how good Aibileen is in praying, when she talks about the people she’s prayed. All of them got what Aibileen prayed for.
Minny also gets a few flashbacks. She thinks about the things she said that got her fired. Also, she did this ‘great bad thing’ that remains unknown until the last chapter. But she does think about it a lot. Minny does really like what she did a lot, but she never talks about it, because she is also very embarrassed of it.
The memories of Skeeter are mostly of her being bullied for being so tall and of her family’s former housekeeper and her former nanny, whom she saw more as a mother, Constantine. Skeeter goes looking for her, because when Skeeter returns from university in the beginning of the book, all of a sudden Constantine is gone. Nobody will answer her when she asks about Constantine. That’s a trigger for Skeeter to investigate the position of the black women in her hometown.
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