THE HELP by Tate Taylor Based on the novel THE HELP by Kathryn Stockett DreamWorks. JACKSON MISSISSIPPI. TWO BLACK STATION ATTENDANTS rush over to help her. The Help is a 2009 novel by American author Kathryn Stockett. The story is about African Americans working in white households in Jackson, Mississippi, during the. “The Help” by Kathryn Stockett *From the Penguin Group. Fai Bei Sogni Ebook Epub. Contains discussion questions, critical response to the novel and historical extension activities. The Help is a 2009 novel by American author Kathryn Stockett. The story is about African Americans working in white households in Jackson, Mississippi, during the.
It is August 1962 in Jackson, Mississippi and Aibileen Clark, a 53-year-old African American housemaid, narrates her experience working in white households. She has taken care of seventeen white children in her life and now she helps raise one more: the 2-year-old Mae Mobley Leefolt. Miss Elizabeth Leefolt, the 23-year-old mother, feels little love for her child, even avoiding any physical contact with her.
Aibileen provides Mae Mobley with the nurturing affection that Miss Leefolt refuses to give. Aibileen remembers losing her own son, Treelore, two years earlier. At twenty-four, Treelore was writing a book on his experiences being black in Mississippi. One night at the lumber mill where he worked, he slipped off the loading dock and was crushed by a trailer. For three months after her son’s death, Aibileen was unable to leave her bed. When the money started to run out, she took a job raising the newborn Mae Mobley. The death of her son makes Aibileen feel as if a “ bitter seed” is growing inside of her, making her less accepting of the people around her.
Aibileen resents Miss Leefolt for taking pleasure in telling her what to do. Miss Leefolt lives in a small house with her husband and child and pays Aibileen only ninety-five cents an hour. On this day, Miss Leefolt holds a luncheon for her friends Miss Eugenia “Skeeter” Phelan and Miss Hilly Holbrook. Both women are also twenty-three. Miss Hilly’s elderly mother, Miss Walters, also arrives.
Miss Skeeter offers a friendly greeting to Aibileen but Miss Hilly walks right past her without saying a word. Aibileen serves the women food and overhears Miss Hilly accuse her mother’s maid Minny Jackson, Aibileen’s best friend, of stealing family heirlooms. Miss Hilly tells them about a sanitation bill she and her husband are sponsoring.
If passed, the bill would require every white household in Mississippi to have a separate bathroom for black housekeepers. Miss Hilly claims black people “carry different kinds of disease than we do.” Shocked by her ignorance and lack of compassion for the maids, Miss Skeeter quips that maybe she should have a separate bathroom outside. Insulted, Miss Hilly threatens to remove her from her position as editor of the local women’s Junior League newsletter. By legitimizing segregation on the basis of “sanitation,” Hilly tries to make her personal racist practice of having a separate bathroom for the maids a law for everyone in the state. As a result of Hilly’s bill, bathrooms in the novel become symbols of how white people’s personal racist social practices and beliefs reinforce and uphold institutional segregation.
In the same vein, the bathroom represents a battleground over segregation in the home, a traditionally feminine space, rather than in the public sphere, which, at this time, men almost exclusively controlled. After Miss Hilly and Miss Walters leave, Aibileen finds Miss Skeeter waiting for her in the kitchen. She asks Aibileen if she ever wished she could change things. Without any sign of emotion, Aibileen says that everything is fine.
Miss Leefolt interrupts their conversation and Miss Skeeter leaves. Upset that Aibileen was talking to her white friend, Miss Leefolt stares with disapproval at Aibileen. To avoid her gaze, Aibileen sticks her head deep into the oven to clean it.
She knows that tonight she’ll have the recurring dream of being stuck inside the oven when someone turns on the gas.
Set in Jackson, Mississippi, the novel begins in August 1962 with Aibileen Clark, a middle-aged black domestic worker, taking care of Elizabeth Leefolt’s only child, Mae Mobley. Miss Leefolt, a white housewife, neglects her daughter, but Aibileen showers Mae Mobley with affection. The novel opens with a luncheon at Leefolt’s house where the 23-year-old white women Hilly Holbrook and Eugenia “Skeeter” Phelan discuss Hilly’s initiative to pass a bill that would require every white household to have a separate bathroom for black housemaids.
Disgusted by Hilly’s idea, Skeeter finds Aibileen and asks if she ever wished she could change things. Unwilling to express her true feelings to a white woman, Aibileen says that everything is fine. A few days later, Minny Jackson, another black maid and Aibileen’s best friend, loses her job working for Hilly’s mother. Hilly has also spread rumors about Minny being a thief so none of the other neighbors will hire her. Minny tells Aibileen that she took revenge on Hilly, but she won’t give her the details, only telling her that it involved a pie. Minny ultimately finds work with the white housewife Celia Foote, a woman none of the white housewives in the community befriends because she comes from a working class background. Celia is kind to Minny and does not treat her any differently for being black.