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    A Study Guide for Kathyrn Stockett's "The Help"
    A Study Guide for Kathyrn Stockett's "The Help"
    A Study Guide for Kathyrn Stockett's "The Help"
    Ebook53 pages42 minutes

    A Study Guide for Kathyrn Stockett's "The Help"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Kathyrn Stockett's "The Help," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateJun 27, 2016
    ISBN9781535837279
    A Study Guide for Kathyrn Stockett's "The Help"

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      A Study Guide for Kathyrn Stockett's "The Help" - Gale

      12

      The Help

      Kathryn Stockett

      2009

      Introduction

      Set in Mississippi in 1962, Kathryn Stockett's debut novel, The Help, explores the discrimination and violent repression endured by African Americans during the early years of the 1960s. The novel focuses on three women, and is told from each of their points of view, as Stockett shifts the novel's first-person narration from character to character. Aibileen and Minny are both African American maids, working for powerful, and sometimes racist, white women. Skeeter is a young, rich, white woman who defies the Southern conventions of the time by utilizing her college experience to gain a degree, rather than to seek out the husband her parents expect her to find. Exposed to the racist views of her friends, Skeeter is forced to confront the deep inequities of her society. She attempts to use her own position as an aspiring writer to help Aibileen, Minny, and other African American women tell their stories and expose the truths about the way the help is treated by wealthy, white, southern families. Stockett's historical novel explores various aspects of the civil rights movement, and includes the death of civil rights activist Medgar Evers as a plot point. Additionally, the struggles faced by working women are examined through the character of Skeeter, who is driven to pursue a career rather than start a family. Stockett also tackles issues related to Southern notions of social class in her depiction of Celia Foote, a poor, white young woman who has married a wealthy, upper class southern gentleman, Johnny Foote. Celia is shunned by Skeeter's social circle for her perceived attempts to infiltrate the ranks of the upper class through her relationship with Johnny.

      The Help quickly became a national best seller and earned critical acclaim upon its 2009 publication by Amy Einhorn Books/Putnam. It was also adapted as a film in 2011.

      Author Biography

      Born in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1969, Stockett is one of five children. She attended the University of Alabama and earned a degree in English literature and creative writing. She later worked in New York in the magazine marketing and publishing industry for nine years.

      The Help was published in 2009 and is Stockett's first novel. At the end of the book, Stockett includes a section titled Too Little, Too Late, in which she recounts her relationship with her family's maid, Demetrie. After her parents divorced when Stockett was six years old, she states, her relationship with Demetrie became even more significant than it already was. In Too Little, Too Late, she describes the way Demetrie comforted her during her mother's frequent absences and when her older siblings seemed to have outgrown her. In many ways, Stockett's relationship with Demetrie inspired her novel. In a 2009 biographical article for the London Daily Mail, Stockett writes that Deme-trie began working for her grandmother in 1955 and remained with her family for thirty-two years. She describes the South of the 1970s, in which Demetrie was allowed access to white establishments only when wearing her white maid's uniform. Even though this was the 70s and the segregation laws had changed, the ‘rules’ had not, Stockett notes. Although she describes her relationship with Demetrie as being extremely close, Stockett also states, with irony, that as much as we loved Demetrie, she had a separate bathroom located on the outside of the house.

      As of 2011, Stockett lived in Atlanta, Georgia, with her husband and daughter.

      Plot Summary

      Chapters 1–5

      The Help opens with a chapter written in the first person (the narrating character refers to

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