Characters & Plot
The story takes place in southern Mississippi during the 1960's. The story is told from three perspectives, Eugenia phelan (Skeeter), Aibileen clark, and Minny Jackson. Eugenia is a recent college graduate who has just returned home. She is also part of The Junior League, a group of high class society women, with her friends Hilly Holbrook and Elizabeth Leefolt. has dreams of becoming a writer which is fine till she decides to interview about the lives of the black maids that work for white families. Aibileen is a black maid for Elizabeth Leefolt and spends most her time caring for Mrs. Leefolt's Daughter, Mae Mobley. Aibileen is one of the maids interviewed by Skeeter. Minny was Hilly Holbrook's maid, but now she is the maid for Celia Foote. Minny and Aibileen are close friends and live in the same neighborhood, where it is a stressful time of civil rights activism.
Themes & Symbols
The Help is a loaded book of lessons and morals that even people today have trouble grasping. One lesson that stood out to me was that, "Love is natural but hate is learned". In the story Skeeter is very friendly with the black female help because skeeter was raised by Constantine, a black women, and she was never taught to hate her. So, naturally skeeter loved Constantine and she always treated her and everyone like her the same way her momma taught her to treat them. You also see this come up with Mae Mobley, Elizabeth Leefolt's daughter, and Aibileen a lot. When Mae is being potty trained she uses Aibileen's bathroom till her mother told her she would "catch a disease" from using a colored persons bathroom. In both cases treating people different was taught by somebody who thought that that was right, but what if they had taught their children to treat all people the same and that the color of someone's skin didn't matter. Perhaps, they'd teach their kids the same and their kids will teach their kids; eventually, the world would have been full of people that treated all people the same.