Horace Arnolphe Character Traits

Arnolphe, a wealthy fifty-two year old man, returns home after a ten-day absence. He recently renamed himself “Monsieur de la Souche” (after a tree stump on his estate). His friend Chrysalde has a few opposing opinions to share with him, his thoughts on his new name being only one of them. He also warns him about the faultiness of his longtime plan of confining his ward, Agnès, to a convent to “be raised in ignorance of life” that someday she may be his innocent and dutiful wife. Arnolphe pays him no heed. Now that Agnès is of marrying age, he moves her into his house and plans to soon wed her.
Horace, the son of Arnolphe’s dear friend, Oronte, arrives at Arnolphe’s house and confesses he has fallen in love with a beautiful girl. She has told him of how her master, Monsieur de la Souche, keeps her hidden away from the world. Not knowing about Arnolphe’s new name, Horace confides to him his plan to steal away Agnès. Thus begins the game of scheming by each man to hold onto Agnès despite unexpected challenges.
Arnolphe anxiously confronts Agnès about her contact with
Horace. A misunderstanding arises where Angès believes Arnolphe has given her permission to marry Horace, while Arnolphe believes she has agreed to marry him. When he realizes what has happened, he forbids her from seeing Horace again and quickly sends for a notary to prepare the marriage contract.
Horace returns and again tries to see Agnès, who rebuffs him (at her master’s command) and even throws a stone at him. She has, however, tied a note to it in which she confesses her love for him. Horace unwittingly confides his distress to Arnolphe about his attempts to “rescue” her. Arnolphe realizes that his innocent Agnès is more quick-witted and imaginative that he has given her credit for, and, despite her seeming betrayals, he loves her all the more. He, however, decides to call off the wedding for now and sends the notary away.
Horace once again confides in Arnolphe about a plan to be with Agnès. After Horace leaves, Arnolphe orders his servants at whatever the cost to deter the young man when he returns that very night to steal away his love.
Nothing seems to stop Arnolphe or Horace from trying to hold onto sweet Agnès. Who will win her hand? Will marriage plans come to fruition? This classic farce reveals that perhaps youth and innocence are no assurance of plans for marital bliss, no matter how much effort is involved.
The time, the early 1960's, the place, Jackson, Mississippi. Eugenia Phalen - Skeeter to her friends and family - has just graduated from Ole Miss and has returned home in part to take care of her seriously ill mother. Unlike her female friends and colleagues who used their Ole Miss time solely to find a husband, Skeeter, who has never dated or had a boyfriend despite wanting romance in her life, strives primarily for a career, either as a serious journalist or editorialist. In Skeeter's social circle, the family servants, called "the help", are exclusively black. The female servants do the cooking and cleaning, but their primary responsibility is child rearing. The servants get passed down within families from generation to generation, so the child that they raised ultimately becomes the boss. Fifty year old Aibileen Clark is one such servant, who works for Skeeter's easily influenced friend, Elizabeth Leefolt. Skeeter asks Aibileen to help her with her newly acquired job, answering a housekeeping advice column. However, incidents that happen around Skeeter, including her mother seemingly being less than forthright about what happened to their own now absent female servant, the elderly Constantine Jefferson, who raised Skeeter and who Skeeter loved like a mother, make Skeeter come to the decision to write about the experiences of the black female servants in relation to their white bosses. Elaine Stein, a senior editor with Harper & Row in New York, approves the concept, but she knows that Skeeter getting the servants to talk, which Skeeter ultimately discovers is against the law in Mississippi, will be difficult if not impossible. Aibileen, the first and only servant who Skeeter asks, initially refuses Skeeter's request. But incidents around Aibileen ultimately get her and her acerbic-tongued best friend, Minny Jackson, who has long worked for the Walters family and now works for the Walters' racist daughter Hilly Holbrook, to talk to Skeeter on the sly about their experiences. One of those incidents involves Hilly's "Home Help Sanitation Initiative", which would ban any black servant from using their white employer's washroom. Minny's experiences also include those with Celia Foote, a young uncultured woman new to the area who has never had servants, who is now married to Hilly's old boyfriend Johnny Foote, and who is shunned by Hilly and her social circle for supposedly cheating with Johnny while he and she were still dating. Even if Harper & Row or any other firm publishes the book, Skeeter and by association any servant who helped her may have a continued rough road ahead in overcoming the resulting wrath, especially by Hilly and her type.
Agnès: The ward of Arnolphe and an innocent young girl, Agnès falls in love with Horace, instead of her guardian, Arnolphe.
Eugenia "Skeeter" Phelan
Character Analysis
Skeeter Phelan is a bundle of contradictions.
She's a 23-year-old white woman with a cotton trust fund and a college degree. She lives at home on her family's cotton plantation, Longleaf. And she devotes herself, at considerable risk, to a book featuring the real stories of the black women who work for the white families in her hometown of Jackson, Mississippi. Contradictions abound, indeed.
She belongs to the HYPERLINK "http://www.jljackson.org/" \o "Junior League" \t "_blank" Junior League and is in tight with other high-society ladies. She's been best friends with Hilly Holbrook and Elizabeth Leefolt (villainous characters) since grade school. But as the story progresses, Skeeter becomes more and more distanced from this safe social status and goes, as they say, rogue. She breaks all the rules and crosses dangerous lines – and we love her for
it.
What cinches her new position of social outcast is the prank she plays on Hilly, who is trying to get a bill passed requiring Mississippi families to build outdoor bathrooms for their black employees. Well, Skeeter arranges for dozens of toilets to be dumped on Hilly's lawn, and got a big laugh out of us, at the very least. Hilly doesn't take this calmly, though, and turns Skeeter into a social pariah. So much so that Skeeter compares herself to outcast HYPERLINK "http://www.shmoop.com/to-kill-a-mockingbird/boo-radley.html" \o "Boo Radley in To Kill a Mockingbird" \t "_blank" Boo Radley in To Kill a Mockingbird, which she's been reading (even though it's a banned book in Mississippi). She fears, somewhat jokingly, that like Boo, she'll choose to stay inside to hide from the ugliness of society.
As Skeeter's own friends shun her, the black community embraces her, though not openly (because it's too dangerous). After the release of Help, the preacher at Aibileen's church asks Aibileen to tell Skeeter "we love her like, like she's our own family" (29.107). After you read The Help, you'll probably love her too. She's brave, kind, and looking for the truth. She narrates thirteen chapters of The Help.