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What Is Aibileen In The Help

Decent Essays

As Zora Neale Hurston once said, “If you are silent about your pain, they’ll kill you and say you enjoyed it.” In The Help by Katherine Stockett, three brave women of different races join together to stand up for what they believe in and publish an anonymously written book based on the treatment of black maids working for white families in Jackson, Mississippi during the 1960s. In the novel, Aibileen, Minny, and Skeeter tell their stories from different perspectives in order to give voice to those who cannot be heard. Aibileen, a black maid working for Elizabeth Leefolt, has taken care of eighteen white babies and watched them grow from innocent children into children influenced by their parents beliefs of racism. When Skeeter is talking to Elaine Stein, she mentions that the help loves the children and the children love the help, but before they know it, the children are grown and become the employers of their once loved help. Aibileen is empowered to contribute to the novel because of her extreme love for Mae Mobley. Aibileen is able to empathize with Mae Mobley because neither Aibileen nor Mae Mobley fit in with society’s standards. Throughout the novel, Aibileen teaches Mae Mobley lessons of self-love and racism and prejudice. At first, Aibileen denies Skeeter’s proposal into writing the book. However, once the Home Health Sanitation Initiative is set into place and Aibileen hears all of the terrible things Miss Hilly has to say about blacks, such as the diseases the

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