I have recently readed the book called The Help by Kathryn Stockett. A few years ago it was made into a movie that was really famous and capture the attention of many. The main story is about a group of African American maids, that with the help of a unique fresh out of college journalist write a book about their experiences as maids for the upper middle class of Jackson Mississippi society in the 1960’s. The book deals with a lot of racism towards the maids portrayed by their employees. But above all this what I wanted to focus on is a theme that I found in the book that is complete opposites from the main themes that the book wants us to look at. I want to focus on the famous journalist who help the maids write the book, Eugenia Phelan or …show more content…
better known as Skeeter. I want to focus on her relationship with her mother. Skeeter is seen through the whole book having a constant fight with her mother. Her mother once a very prominent person on the society of Jackson wants Skeeter to act more like the other girls who are from the same class as Skeeter. While Skeeter wants nothing to do with the lifestyle of her so called friends. She wants total different things for example she want to pursue a career in journalism she doesn’t want to get married yet or have children. The Help introduces a broken relationship between a mother and daughter and how sometimes it can’t be amended until something unexpectable happens. Skeeter and her mom Charlott don't get along much they tend to have this constant silently fight with each other.
They are different as the day and the night. Skeeters mom was a southern belle. She was considered by society as a very prominent woman with a great beauty. A woman who fitted quite well with the notions of Jackson Mississippi. While our dear Skeeter in the other hand didn’t inherit the beauty of her mother or quite fit on the society. When she was born her brother Carlton named her Skeeter because he though she didn’t look like a baby, but a Skeeter instead. Because she wasn’t beautiful she didn’t fit on the ideal expectations for beauty in her society. This put a great weight on Skeeter feeling more a like a outcast in her own community. She is best friends with two of the most important women on their society Hilly Holbrook and Elizabeth Leefolt. This two women are consider like her mother a great example of how a southern woman should be. Skeeters mom thinks that a woman is valuable if you get married, have children and ran a successful household. That what Skeeter mom thinks women a born and raise to …show more content…
do. Having Skeeter going to college and planing to do a career as a writer doesn’t sit well with Mrs.Charlotte Phelan.
“Her mother's sole desire to get her married sharply contrasts with her desire to become a writer”(Ifeany). Mrs.Phelan thinks Skeeter is just wasting her time in pursuing a really unthinkable notion. Much is her pressure for Skeeter to find a husband that she even starts thinking that Skeeter might not like men and instead she has feelings for women. But Skeeter tells her that this isn’t the case. She does like men and the idea of marriage doesn't sound bad, but the problem is that none of the men she could like have ever giving her a second thought because of her looks. That's why she focus more on her career prospect instead of her love life, but her mother doesn’t understand that, she wants her
married. Skeeter feels like her mother and her have always been distance since her birth. Skeeter thinks she doesn’t fit into the expectations of her mother. Like some how she has let her mother down by not been pretty like the other girls or getting married and having a family. But she also feels like her mother doesn’t let her take her own decisions. She has always done what she was told to do, but going to college and coming back to her hometown has made Skeeter look at her past life in a different way. She felt like she didn’t quite fit in before, now she feels like she doesn’t fit all. And her relationship with her mother starts to take an abrupt turn. When Skeeter comes back home from college she is meet with the news that her nurse Constantine is not working for her family anymore. Skeeter asks around trying to see what happen to Constantine, but nobody wants to tell her anything. Now that Constantine is gone Skeeter feels more the gap between her and her mother. To make matters worse Mrs. Phelan pressure on Skeeter becomes more intense now that Constantine is gone. She push Skeeter to find a man and get settle. Something that makes Skeeter feel really overwhelmed. She doesn’t understand what is her mother’s rush for her to get married and settle. As the story progressives Skeeter’s gets all her answers. While Skeeter was away in college Mrs.Phelan had a fall out with Constantine and dismiss her from the plantation. Constantine left with a broken heart because she would not get to see Skeeter again. Mrs.Phelan later saw her error search for Constantine and found out that it was too late. Constantine had died. Trying to hide what happen from Skeeter she told her that Constantine had left from her own choose and they haven’t heard from since then. Mrs.Phelan tells everything to Skeeter at the peak point of the story. Skeeter can’t understand why her mother did such a thing to her and Constantine. She doesn’t think she has the heart to forgive her. Later on Skeeter finds the forgiveness in her heart for her mother. Her mother tells her that she has cancers and that diagnosis is not promising. She doesn’t know how long she is going to live, but that she want to tell Skeeter that she loves her no matter what and asks her to forgive her actions. She just want her to be safe and settle when she was gone. That’s why she insisting that on getting her married. Skeeter, after learning this from her mother doesn't see why to keep fighting with her. After all this it seems that they finally have a chance to build a really mother and daughter relationship. But the only thing is that suddenly that she might have a really mother life seems to be conspiring to take her away. At the end Skeeter and Mrs.Phelan decide to make the best of their time together before it's too late. Mrs.Phelan comes to accept Skeeter how she is and only wish to see her daughter happy. Skeeter doesn’t want her mother to die, but is grateful that life has giving each a opportunity to amend their problems. Even if it wasn’t how they both had dream off. But it could had been worse. In conclusion Ms.Stockett did a excellent job showing a broken relationship between a mother and daughter. I thinking she did this so well that many could find similarities with their own relationship with a parent. I like how she makes us see that we sometimes don’t try to make amends with each other until we are in a life threathing situation. What could had happen if Skeeter’s mom didn’t had cancer would they had made amends. I don’t know, but I do know that we need to forgive each other before it goes to far.
The drama, Mission of Mercy, by Esther Lipnick is a very inspiring read. It tells about a girl who doesn’t want to be like her proper, fancy family at all. Instead she wants to become a nurse. She leaves her home and becomes a nurse. It inspires me because both of my parents, and other family members of mine, are teachers, although I’m not going to be one. Mission of Mercy is a drama that could inspire many people to go for what they want, even if other people don’t always approve of it. Florence changes throughout all of the the scenes 1, 2, and 3.
Home of the Brave by Katherine Applegate is the story of an African boy, Kek, who loses his father and a brother and flees, leaving his mother to secure his safety. Kek, now in Minnesota, is faced with difficulties of adapting to a new life and of finding his lost mother. He believes that his mother still lives and would soon join him in the new found family. Kek is taken from the airport by a caregiver who takes him to live with his aunt. It is here that Kek meets all that amazed him compared to his home in Sudan, Africa. Home of the brave shows conflicts that Kek faces. He is caught between two worlds, Africa and America. He feels guilty leaving behind his people to live in a distant land especially his mother, who he left in the midst of an attack.
The Help is a novel written in 2009 about African-American maids working in Southern homes in the 1960’s and a young white woman pursuing to write a book about the maid’s lives. Stockett was born in 1969 in Jackson, Mississippi. She worked in magazine publishing in New York before attempting to publish The Help, which was rejected by 60 different literary agents. Stockett’s personal background played a major part in her ability to tell this story so well. She grew up with African-American maids working in her household and grew up shortly after the decade in which this novel takes place. The society that she grew up in and her experience working in a magazine helped her to write from the personal viewpoint of African-American help and a woman striving to become a journalist in America during the 1960’s. In The Help, Stockett uses specific setting, point of view, and allusions to tell the incredible story of three young women of different ages, backgrounds, and race that join together in a work that readers will never forget.
I picked Miss Skeeter to write about, Miss Skeeter was raised in a home where she was brought up by a black woman as her nanny and maid of the house. For that era it was normal for kids to be raised that way. Miss Skeeter’s life was simple and she was rich, she didn’t know what it was like to need or want anything in life. She wasn’t exposed to many of the hardships that many of the black characters in the book suffer or go through. Her life was really good, she was fortunate to have all that she did. It wasn’t until she went away to college and spent some time away from her family and her friends influence. Miss Skeeter was the only one out of her friends that actually went away to college and was able to see the world through another viewpoint and I think that affected her, she was able to see what life is really about she realized what a privileged life she really did live.
Overall, the purpose of the movie is to recreate life in the early 1960’s of black maids, white women, and their relationships with each other. The unspoken stories of black women and their experience’s in providing services to white women are a narrative of civil rights in America1.The Help is not so much about the degraded black servants as it is about their white sympathizers.
Margaret Atwood’s “Happy Endings” is an Author’s telling of societal beliefs that encompass the stereotypical gender roles and the pursuit of love in the middle class with dreams of romance and marriage. Atwood writes about the predictable ways in which many life stories are concluded for the middle class; talking about the typical everyday existence of the average, ordinary person and how they live their lives. Atwood provides the framework for several possibilities regarding her characters’ lives and how each character eventually completes their life with their respective “happy ending”.
Dystopian literature brings warning to the modern world and allows the audience to experience a new perception of life. The 1993 novel, The Giver, by Lois Lowry, fits into the dystopian genre because it makes judgment about modern society. She inscribed her novel “For all the children to whom we entrust the future”, which serves as a hope for a better future (Franklin). She targets the younger generation because they are the future. In Lowry’s novel, The Giver, Lowry’s perspective on modern society is that it tends to stay within its comfort zone, which creates limitations in life. The dystopian characteristics of the novel, importance of memory, the history surrounding the novel, and Lowry’s personal background all convey the notion that modern society should freedom bestowed it and to fully appreciate life in itself; society tends to take life’s freedoms for granted.
Margaret Atwood’s novel, Alias Grace, nominated for the Arthur Ellis Award for Best Novel, depicts a young 16 year old girl who is found guilty of murdering her employer and his lover in conspiracy with James McDerrmott. James McDermott is put to death by hanging, but Grace is brought to prison because she is of the “weaker sex.” This is a reflection of the construction of femininity and masculinity of the mid and late nineteenth century. A social issue of the Victorian age was women being treated as subordinate to men. Queen Victoria says, “Victorian ideology of gender rested on the belief that women were both physically and intellectually the inferior sex”(YILDIRIM). Women were seen as highly susceptible to becoming mentally ill because of this belief. Women were subject to only be “housewives.” The novel, Alias Grace, accurately shows the construction of this gender identity through society, sexuality, and emotion while challenging it through Grace’s mother and Mrs. Humphrey.
Feminist theory is a term that embraces a wide variety of approaches to the questions of a women’s place and power in culture and society. Two of the important practices in feminist critique are raising awareness of the ways in which women are oppressed, demonized, or marginalized, and discovering motifs of female awakenings. The Help is a story about how black females “helped” white women become “progressive” in the 1960’s. In my opinion, “The Help” I must admit that it exposes some of our deepest racial, gender, and class wounds as individuals and social groups, and that the story behind the story is a call to respect our wounds and mutual wounding so that healing may have a chance to begin and bring social injustice to an end. The relationship between Blacks and whites in this novel generally take on the tone of a kindly, God-fearing Jesus Christ-loving Black person, placidly letting blacks and whites work out their awkwardness regarding race and injustice. Eventually both the black and white women realize how similar they are after all, and come to the conclusion that racism is an action of the individual person, a conclusion mutually exclusive of racism as an institutionalized system that stands to demonize and oppress people based on the color of their skin and the location of their ancestry.
One of the major projects of Hilly Holbrook’s is to get a law passed requiring white families to build bathrooms for their black children to use. At one point in the story, Skeeter finally realizes that what is going on is wrong. She grew up with these women but realized she knew them. After she reads the Jim Crow laws in the library, she starts to understand. “But then I realize, like a shell cracking open in my head, there’s no difference between those government laws and Hilly building a bathroom in the garage, except ten mines worth of signatures in the state capital.”
In the novel The Giver by Lois Lowry, the receivers are the only people who have feelings and memories. The elders are the people who choose what the best is for their people in the community and sometimes they go to the receiver for help on making the right decisions. The people from the community do not see color, or have freedom on making a decision for them. There is no love, feelings, and grandparents. Jonas is assigned to be the next receiver of the community; He was trained by the giver, who transfers memories of the pain and pleasures of life, who also shows him the truth and reality that is hidden to the community. Jonas’s community does not represent the ideal of society because there are no choices or distinctions between men and women. This people from the community are assigned to a role in the community, where they do it until they are old and sent to the House of the old and wait for their release.
Throughout her life as a maid she has raised seventeen white children. Aibileen tries to teach the children that she raises that the color of a person’s skin does not matter. Unfortunately, this message is often contradicted by the racism in Jackson. During the movie she works for Elizabeth Leefolt and takes care of her toddler Mae Mobley Leefolt. The death of Aibileen’s son inspires her to help Skeeter write her book about the lives of colored maids in Mississippi. Aibileen experiences many forms of social inequality throughout the movie. For instance, throughout her life, Aibileen is forced to take care other people’s children while her son is at home taking care of himself. Additionally, at the end of the movie due to her involvement in helping Skeeter write her book, Hilly falsely accuses Aibileen of stealing silverware and convinces Elizabeth to fire her. She was fired for trying to show the social inequality between colored people and white
The Help describes white women to have a typical image by appearance and role. Aibileen describes Skeeter as "She wearing a white lace blouse buttoned up like a nun, flat shoes so I reckon she don’t look any taller. Her blue skirt gaps open in the waist. Miss Skeeter always looks like somebody else told her what to wear." (Stockett 4). This image is not typical for the American woman. Skeeter is not like the women in her town, so she looks funny from her hair to her feet. Unlike women of her age who wear their hair in puffs and bobs, Skeeter isn 't concerned about her frizzy hair. She dresses in ordinary clothes while the other women are fashionable and dressed in modern pleated and matched blouses, skirts and shoes. When Skeeter is not wearing common clothes people also get shocked, "And there Miss Skeeter in a red dress and red shoes, setting on my front steps like a bullhorn," her dress is too brightly colored for others (118). Skeeter doesn 't draw attention to her body when she dresses. However, Celia dresses different from
Mrs. Marian Forrester strikes readers as an appealing character with the way she shifts as a person from the start of the novel, A Lost Lady, to the end of it. She signifies just more than a women that is married to an old man who has worked in the train business. She innovated a new type of women that has transitioned from the old world to new world. She is sought out to be a caring, vibrant, graceful, and kind young lady but then shifts into a gold-digging, adulterous, deceitful lady from the way she is interpreted throughout the book through the eyes of Niel Herbert. The way that the reader is able to construe the Willa Cather on how Mr. and Mrs. Forrester fell in love is a concept that leads the reader to believe that it is merely psychological based. As Mrs. Forrester goes through her experiences such as the death of her husband, the affairs that she took part in with Frank Ellinger, and so on, the reader witnesses a shift in her mentally and internally. Mrs. Forrester becomes a much more complicated women to the extent in which she struggles to find who really is and that is a women that wants to find love and be fructuous in wealth. A women of a multitude of blemishes, as a leading character it can be argued that Mrs. Forrester signifies a lady that is ultimately lost in her path of personal transitioning. She becomes lost because she cannot withstand herself unless she is treated well by a wealthy male in which causes her to act unalike the person she truly is.
The Help chronicles a recent college graduate named Skeeter, who secretly writes a book exposing the treatment of black maids by white affluent women. The story takes place in 1960s Jackson, Mississippi, during the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement. The death of Medgar Evers triggers racial tension and gives the maids of Jackson the courage to retell their personal stories of injustice endured over the years. The movie depicts the frustration of the maids with their female employers and what their lives were like cleaning, cooking, and raising their bosses’ children. The Help shines a light on the racial and social injustice of maids during the era of Jim Crow Laws, illustrating how white women of a privileged society discriminated not only against black women, but also against their own race. The movie examines a very basic principle: the ethical treatment of other human beings.