Story Analysis: The Help

Times are changing, and sometimes the past is hard to imagine, and easy to forget, but reading The Help has changed that. The Help tells a story of multiple ladies in the 1960’s, who struggle with being colored, due to the racism they receive by living in the south. As the story progresses, the theme changes from personal struggles, to making changes in everyone’s lives and defining and changing what everyone presumes to be normal. Normal is typical, or expected, and in Jackson, Mississippi, the normal was whites in one part of town, and blacks on the other. Normal was having a black help around the house, take care of your children, and clean up all the messes you make, literally and figuratively. But in The Help, normal changes, normal begins to take on a whole different meaning. It all started with “Skeeter”. Skeeter had a dream to write, and to become a famous author, but she didn’t know where to start. She eventually started writing news articles about house cleaning, which she had no previous knowledge of, so she turned to one of her friend’s help, Aibileen. Once working with Aibileen on an article, an employer gave Skeeter a challenge, to write about the lives of helps in the south and to share their hidden stories. This idea was anything but normal.
Help’s constantly had to make changes, as some of their employers fired them immediately if they made a single mistake, and as we all know, mistakes are unavoidable. In The Help, Aibileen was raising a girl, Mae Mobley, and once she started working on the book, she knew if her employer found out,she would be fired, so she began to teach Mae Mobley to not be racist by telling her stories that represented racism, and Mae Mobley began to dislike the racists portrayed in Aibileen’s stories. The book Skeeter wrote was to hopefully change other people’s minds and feelings towards their help and other colored