Isolation In The Help, By Kathryn Stockett

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, and point of view.

Fear, confusion, and hopelessness are just a few emotions that plague Annabel Lee in the novel Annabel Lee by Mike Nappa after her Uncle Truck locks her in a hidden shelter until he can ensure her safety and returns to free her. Annabel Lee has lived with her Uncle Truck for as long as she can remember, but when Truck shows up to her room in the early hours of the morning and tells her to follow him, she instantly grows afraid. Truck then leads her to a safe shelter that she had never even known existed and gives her his ravage dog that she can command using her limited knowledge of German. Once she is secured in the shelter, he gives her a key and tells her to lock the three dead-bolts until he returns and tells her the safe code. In this

Kathryn Stockett takes a daring step in writing this amazing novel - The Help. In Sockets’ novel, which takes places in Jackson, Mississippi in the early 60s, a time in which race was a problem in society. African Americans had a much harder lifestyle than any other race, some of their job opportunities were labor in the fields, for men and for women house work was their highest opening. Having a little work opportunity in this novel Stockett takes two African Americans as her main characters. Kathryn, a white women, with no experience in house work writes this magnificent novel of equal rights for African Americans.

The movie “The Help” was based In the early 1960’s in Jackson, Mississippi. During this period of time it was very segregated, very much so that whites did not want African Americans to have contact with them, but were expected to fully take care of their children from birth to adulthood. Most of the African American maids later developed a strong bond with the children that they looked after. They tried teaching the kids to see no color, just to later witness them grow up to be brainwashed by the world to think of African Americans as less than. Except for one southern girl named Skeeter Phelan, who saw the equality in everyone. And one day she decided to interview the maids to get their perspectives on life and to get their story out to the world. At first the maids were hesitant because it would be serious consequences if anyone knew who exactly spoke up, but Skeeter did whatever she could to make sure all the maids were anonymous and no one knew. She risked many hardships like losing her relationship with her boyfriend and also building tension with the women of the Junior League. Successfully the maids stories got out and it opened eyes little by little.

The movie, The Help, is based on the book written by Kathryn Stockett. It was released in 2011 and directed by Tate Taylor (Taylor, 2017). The Help is set in Jackson, Mississippi in the 1960’s, and it is about the experiences black women had as maids for white families. These women decided to risk it all and tell their stories in an effort to show what is was really like for them (Taylor, 2011). The Help illustrates how these women fought racism and prejudice by becoming unified with one another. This paper will address how prejudice, discrimination, stereotyping, and inequality affect the characters and their relationships in the story.

Yet another stereotype attributed to blacks is that they are unclean and diseased. Historically, this stereotype is rooted partly in their African ancestry and partly in their living conditions.This is represented in the film when Elizabeth Leefolt and Hilly Holbrook, white employers, work to pass the “Home Health Sanitation Initiative”, a bill that requires every white home to have a separate bathroom for the colored help. As aforementioned, Hilly is concerned that the supposed “diseases” that the blacks carry as a result of their race will infect whites thus threatening their health and safety. Laws like the one Hilly wants passed, which is shown endorsed by the Surgeon General, legalize discriminatory practices and reinforce racist opinions.

African American’s role in this country has been long and has never been easy. During the early years of the United States, African Americans endure the hardship of slavery and had to deal with beatings, harsh working conditions and constant yelling from their racist white owners. Even after the abolishment of slavery, African Americans still endure another one hundred years of discrimination. A perfect way to examine a pivotal time in American History of African Americans and the racism they went through is seen in the movie “The Help”. The movie is set to take place “in Mississippi during the 1950s-1960s, Skeeter is a southern society girl who returns from college determined to become a writer, but turns her friends ' lives -- and a Mississippi town -- upside down when she decides to interview the black women who have spent their lives taking care of prominent southern families.” (The Help) The movie was originally based on a book written by

Do you ever wonder what it was like living a day in the life of an African American woman, stuck in the middle of the 60’s civil rights movements? If yes, the film The Help would certainly paint a vivid picture from beginning to end what it was like being a woman during civil rights. This movie gives a new and audacious outlook on a very critical and crucial time for our country history and the woman who had a huge impact on the history and hidden stories involved during. The color of your skin, the position you have in society, and who you are were very important factors during those hard racial times.

The film “The Help” (2011), is a story based on the daily lives of prominent white women and the relationships with their African-American housemaids in Jackson, Mississippi, during the 1960s Civil Rights movement in America. A well-to-do white woman and central character in this film, Eugenia “Skeeter” Phelan, aspires to be a journalist and decides to write and publish an exposé of the stories of the housemaids in Jackson to achieve this goal, however, only two maids, Aibileen Clark and Minny Jackson are willing to discuss their experiences with her. The other maid’s in Jackson resist telling Skeeter their stories, fearing the punishments they would endure if the authorities were to find out. In spite of this, after the malicious arrest of one of their befriended maids, all of the maids begin to share their experiences, which consist of racial hostility and being treated as intrinsically subservient to white people. The story Skeeter publishes entitled The Help, creates a disturbance among the white families in Jackson, by exposing the racism the maids are faced with, forcing the white families to reflect upon how they have treated their maids. The storyline represented in The Help exhibits examples of the primordial approach to race and ethnicity, as well as numerous sociological concepts including segregation, internalized oppression, and white privilege, which will be exemplified in this paper in order to uncover the race relations evident within this film.

The Help by Katherine Stockett takes focus on the struggle for equality between blacks and whites during the 1960’s in Jackson, Mississippi. While there are many characters throughout the novel striving to impose a positive change on society and work towards impartiality of the races, there are others who find gratitude in insuring that the implementation of “separate but equal” is maintained and can be characterized as the villain throughout the storyline. By Katherine Stockett’s inclusion of a villain, it exposes the immorality and shortcomings of the southern society during the 1960’s. As previously stated, those who serve as the villain throughout the novel can be identified as those who choose to work against Jackson’s advancement towards

The 2011 movie, The Help, based on the Kathryn Stockett novel by the same name, is centered around the inequalities that the black maids, and race in general, faced throughout the 1960s. From a sociological standpoint, the movie contains many concepts pertaining to race and ethnicity and helps others to better understand the differences between majority and minority groups. The Help is focused upon race, a socially defined category of people who share inherited physical characteristics and whom others see as being a distinct group, and the racism that the black maids faced throughout the 1960s in Jackson, Mississippi. Although the black maids are good people, they still face racism, an ideology or set of beliefs about the superiority of one

Although the maids were struggling and going through a difficult time in 1960’s, The Help portrays that their family members were too. Segregated society against the backdrop of the growing US civil rights movement in the 1960’s has an impacted. “Race also determines who has access to educational, occupational, and economic opportunity. Racial tensions are high as white community members employ violence and coercion to try to keep the Civil Rights Movement from sweeping into their Mississippi town” (Shmoop Editorial Team). The white community in the movie continue to keep the black women as their servants throughout their lives. As Skeeter the white lady, who writes a book about The Help and portrays through the book that the African American women go through. As the white women of Jackson, Mississippi read the book they began to act more violent to the black women. The book is away as the black women to make a statement about the civil rights they have.

Civil Rights literature has been in hiding from the millions of readers in the world. Kathryn Stockett’s book, The Help, widely opens the doors to the worldwide readers to the experiences of those separated by the thin line drawn between blacks and whites in the 1960s. Kathryn makes her experiences of the character’s, making their stories as compelling as her own.

Society has changed and evolved throughout time. Perhaps one of the most significant changed in contemporary American society is the treatment towards African Americans. “The Help” a feature film directed by Tate Taylor is based on the non-fictional novel “The Help” written by author Kathryn Sockett. The feature film explores the life of African American maids of Jackson Mississippi, in the early 1960’s. The 1960’s displayed all African Americans to being left out of the “American dream” through neglect and racism. African Americans faced prejudice and discrimination in almost every aspect of their life, from jobs to housing and even their education. They were denied the right to sit at the same lunch counter or use the same public rest

This code of conduct becomes the social norm, where most people see no other way of life.  They become completely oblivious to their wrong ways.  Provincialism of the caucasian minority is encapsulated by a quote from Mrs Holbrook, “They carry different diseases than we do.  That’s why I’ve drafted the Health Sanitation Initiative.”  Clearly ‘they’ is people of colour - this is absolutely false, yet people believed it.  A similar quote is used in ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ , “Prosecuting comes from people who are prejudice”.  It would be impossible for children to escape these beliefs if their  teachers, who are pillars in their community, are ignorant of their own bias.  Stockett incorporated many examples of inequality and discrimination in ‘The Help’ , and gives readers an insight into the prejudiced actions of people in the 1960’s.