...In the 1960’s, racial tension was extremely intense in the United States. Examples of these racial tensions can be seen all throughout the United States. The Church bombing of Birmingham and Bloody Tuesday are just a couple of the many hundred events during the 1960’s that were the consequences of racial tensions. The novel, “The Help”, by Kathryn Stockett, focuses on the social issue of segregation in the United States, specifically in the south. Stockett demonstrates the issue of racial segregation between blacks and whites in the 1960’s by applying allusions, imagery, and point of view. In “The Help”, Stockett utilizes allusions to focus on the social issue of racial segregation in the United States. Firstly, the setting of the book is an allusion, as it takes place in Mississippi, a place which in the sixties was notorious for being a state full of racism and pro segregation. Furthermore, the book alludes to a significant amount of civil rights movements and figures such as Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr., The March on Washington, sit ins, and Medgar Evers. These allusions bring substantial meaning to the book’s purpose as the book is mainly about maids who are black, such as Aibileen and Minny, who help out ladies which are white, such as Hilly and...
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...freedom, equality, and opportunity held to be available to everyone living in the U.S... But this was not the case in the 1960’s for African Americans. This chance was taken away from them because of racial prejudice. Slavery still did exist in a sense. Blacks had been discriminated against for generations and separated from whites by law. Segregation had oppressed blacks for so many years. Kathryn Stockett, the author of The Help, shows how racism and discrimination destroyed the chance for African Americans to achieve the American Dream. In her book, The Help, Kathryn Stockett writes a realistic fiction story about the life and roles of black maids in the 1960’s in Jackson Mississippi. Skeeter Phelan, Minny Jackson and Aiblieen narrate the story. Skeeter is a 23-year-old educated white woman who is coming home from college. She lives at home on her family's cotton plantation. She is different from most women in her town mainly because of the maid that raised her, Constantine. “All my life I'd been told what to believe about politics, coloreds, being a girl. But with Constantine's thumb pressed in my hand, I realized I actually had a choice in what I could believe.” She slowly realizes she does not to be a part of the racism her town holds. She loves to write, so she soon devotes herself, at a high risk, to write a book featuring the real stories of the black women who work for the white families in her hometown of Jackson, Mississippi. The book will be published if she meets...
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...The 2011 The Help, an adaptation of a 2009 book of the same name, was one of the most acclaimed movies of the film season. It was nominated for many industry awards, including Academy, Golden Globe, and Screen Actors Guild awards. The Help is based off the relationship of a white female journalist and two black maids in Jackson, Mississippi during the 1960’s. Eugenia “Skeeter” Phelan is the main protagonist. As a “home help” columnist for the Jackson Journal, she interviews Aibileen Clark (the second protagonist) for some remedial advice. Ms. Clark worked for Ms. Leefolt, who had a daughter Mae Maubly whom she adored. These interviews eventually evolve into journals about Aibileen’s life as a maid for white households. Although Aibileen is reluctant to tell her story (due to the danger), the death of Medger Evers and a sermon by her church minister convinced her to “do the right thing”. Ms. Clark manages to convince her good friend Minny Jackson into telling her story. Ms. Jackson was a maid for Mrs. Walters, an elderly woman and her daughter, Hilly Holbrook. Ms. Holbrook, the town’s racist gossip, advocated for separate bathrooms for house help because of “different diseases”. This belief lead to Minny’s firing after refusing to walk through a tornado to an outhouse to use the bathroom. Phelan grew disenfranchised with Holbrook’s racist attitudes, in part to her affection for her house help—Constantine Bates. She then got into contact with Harper & Row Publishing, which agreed...
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...in the early 1960′s, “The Help” by Kathryn Stockett is told from three alternating viewpoints. One narrator is Eugenia “Skeeter” Phelan, a progressive young college graduate from an upper middle-class, white family who dreams of becoming a writer. Another narrator is Aibileen, a middle-aged African American woman who has been a maid her whole life and who has raised no less than 17 white children in the process. The last narrator is Minny, another African American maid in her thirties. Minny is Aibileen’s best friend, despite the fact that the two women could not be more different. All three women narrate around the same event: the publishing of Skeeter’s novel about working for white women. The story commences in August of 1962 in the kitchen of Elizabeth Leefolt. Aibileen is caring for Leefolt’s plump, two-year-old, Mae Mobley Leefolt, whom she calls Baby Girl. Aibileen's own son, Treelore, was killed months before she began working at the Leefolt residence. Treelore fell from a loading dock and was crushed under a tractor trailer. When the story opens it is the fourth Wednesday of the month, bridge club day, and Aibileen straightens up the house, manages Baby Girl, serves the women food, and overhears their conversation. The women discuss the upcoming Junior League Benefit, and Miss Hilly tells the women present, Elizabeth, Skeeter, and Hilly's mother, Miss Walter, about the Home Help Sanitation Initiative, a bill that requires a separate bathroom for blacks in every white...
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...severely. When thinking about the struggle it has been for those with African heritage and the people who have fought to reach equality, Martin Luther King and Megdar Evers come to mind. The novel The Help by Kathryn Stockett, adapted for the screen by Tate Taylor, is set in Jackson, Mississippi in the 1960’s. A young girl, Eugenia “Skeeter” Phelan aspires to become a writer and averse to the way her friends treat the African American maids and driven by the love for her own maid Constantine, she decides to document the life stories of the servants and tries to get them published. Throughout the story, a realistic representation of the 1960’s society is being viewed and there are several sides to the story. Firstly a side that describes the inequality, secondly the struggle with the law and its representatives and thirdly a relationship of love and respect between the help and the children they nurture. 2. Inequality represented in The Help and Beloved One of the main characters is black maid Aibileen Clark. She has been a maid since she was a teenager. She has known she would be one since her mother was a maid and her grandmother was a house slave. Aibileen is a loving woman and cares for the white babies as if they were her own even though she caries with her a very dark...
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...First: the belief that race accounts for differences in human character or ability and that a particular race is superior to others. For instance, back when slavery was practised in the United States, black people were not only considered inferior to white people. They were looked down on as they were property and not human beings. Secondly: Discrimination or prejudice based on race. In 1994, a book called The Bell Curve posited that genetics were to blame for why African Americans traditionally scored lower on intelligence tests than white people, meaning that their colour was to blame for lower intelligence among many other things people accused were to blame on their colour or where they came from.Sadly, racism in the form of discrimination persists in society also. Like for instance, black people have traditionally suffered from higher rates of unemployment than white people. The Help is about African American maid's working in white peoples households in Jackson Mississippi during the 1960's. To make it short, the film is about the young white woman, Eugenia a.k.a. “skeeter” Phelan, who wants to tell the stories of the domestic help, from the maid's perspective and publish it as a book. The main characters in this film would be the black middle-aged maid, Aibileen Clark, who's telling the story and she's spent her life working as a maid, raising white children and she's also...
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...Eugenia Phelen, better known as “Skeeter,” is a fictional character that changed history in the 1960’s. Skeeter makes the book flow. You can see her change throughout the book as a whole and is a very relatable character. Skeeter is a young woman who went to college to get her writing degree. She lives on a family farm with her parents and is part of the social elite group with her best friends, Elizabeth and Hilly. She starts to write a book based on black maids in their home town. Skeeter Phelen is a brave, intelligent, risk taking character that is a huge asset to “The Help.” First, Skeeter Phelen is a very brave character. “Maybe we should just build you a bathroom outside, Hilly,” (Stockett page 10). What is happening here is that...
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...The Help is a 2009 novel by American author Kathryn Stockett. The story is about African American maids working in white households in Jackson, Mississippi during the early 1960s. The novel is told from the point of view of three narrators: Aibileen Clark, a middle-aged African-American maid who has spent her life raising white children, and who has recently lost her only son; Minny Jackson, an African-American maid whose back-talk towards her employers results in her having to frequently change jobs, exacerbating her desperate need for work as well as her family's struggle with money; and Eugenia "Skeeter" Phelan, a young white woman and recent college graduate who, after moving back home, discovers that a maid that helped raise her since childhood has abruptly disappeared and her attempts to find her have been unsuccessful. The stories of the three women intertwine to explain how life in Jackson, Mississippi revolves around "the help", with complex relations of power, money, emotion, and intimacy tying together the white & black families of Jackson. A USA Today article called it one of 2009's "summer sleeper hits".[1] An early review in The New York Times notes Stockett's "affection and intimacy buried beneath even the most seemingly impersonal household connections" and says the book is a "button-pushing, soon to be wildly popular novel".[2] The Atlanta Journal-Constitution said of the book, "This heartbreaking story is a stunning debut from a gifted talent".[3] The...
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