The Help
The richness and variety of language is part of what makes the book so appealing and intriguing. The main protagonists are presented with the southern accent ’Law have mercy’. Each character has been presented with their own stereotypical dialect which as a reader contributes to the realistic feel of the novel. The Novel is written mainly in first person from each of the 3 protagonists perspective. The story is told by 3 different people as Aibileen, Minnie and Skeeter take turns with each chapter. I admire this style of writing greatly as it allows us readers to deeply understand each characters perspective of the story along with their thoughts and feelings. Chapter 25, ‘the benefit’ (the only chapter with a title) is the only chapter told in the third person. This third-person perspective is necessary for that chapter .
it is most concerned with Celia Foote; How others react to her extreme sexiness and her extreme nervousness. We would have loved to get a glimpse inside Celia’s head, but Celia wouldn’t have been able to capture all the nuances the third-person narrator captures, since Celia herself isn’t aware of much of what’s going on in the scene. Plus, Celia wouldn’t have been able to reveal that its Hilly’s mother who punks Hilly with Minny’s auctioned chocolate pie. ‘But then I realize, like a shell cracking open in my head, there’s no difference between those government laws and hilly building Aibileen a bathroom in the garage, except 10 minutes worth a signature’s in the state capitol’. Symbolism and imagery has dramatically been used throughout the novel one of which is the use of ‘toilets and bathrooms’. In some ways, toilets and bathrooms symbolize all that is wrong with the society depicted in the novel.
The prevailing belief among most white people in the novel is that black people carry diseases. In addition to that, they also believe a way to prevent those diseases is to use a separate toilet to those of the help. The toilet could also be used to highlight the extent of segregation at the time. Not only are Negros segregated in public but also in the work place as well. When Skeeter encounters the Jim Crow laws in the public library she begins to grasp all these discriminatory and racist practices she sees. Kathryn Stockett uses toilets and bathrooms to symbolize the dirtiness of the tactics used to maintain a racist status quo in thisMississippi community in the early 1960s, and to inject wicked comic relief into a sometimes heartbreaking book. November 8th is the date of Treelore’s senseless death. For Aibileen, it symbolizes the lowest day in her life, and the months of depression that followed. It also symbolizes the beginning of a change in her. After Aibileen loses her son, her vision of society sharpens, and she becomes more critical. This change in vision makes her receptive to Skeeter’s idea for a book about the lives of the black women who work in the homes of white families. Aibileen sees the book as a chance to speak the truth, and perhaps make things better for people in her community.
Word count: 527
