Characters Analysis In The Help By Katherine Stockett
The Help by Katherine Stockett is a very gripping story that takes place in the segregated city of Jackson, Mississippi during the civil rights movement. A young woman by the name of Skeeter goes back home after graduating college with dreams of being a writer. She chooses to interview the black women that spend their days looking after white folks’ kids while cleaning their houses and cooking for them. The first person that agrees to get interviewed is a maid named Aibileen, who works for Skeeter’s best friend Elizabeth Leefolt. Aibileen also takes care of Miss Leefolt’s daughter Mae Mobley.
Stockett uses fashion as a way of characterization multiple times throughout the book to describe the personalities of each character and to contrast the different lifestyles of the maids and the white women. The white women are always depicted to be wearing expensive clothes and being very subconscious of how people around them view the way they dress, while the women of The Help are always described as wearing cheap, minimalistic garments. For example, when she was getting dressed, Elizabeth Leefolt asks Skeeter, “‘Does it look homemade?’” (Stockett 76). She did so due to the fact that she didn’t want others to realize that she makes her own clothes because she can’t afford to buy clothes from outside. Another example is when Celia decides to wear a very revealing dress at the Jackson Junior League and Ball Benefit. By doing so, Stockett is implying that Celia is in a wild or uncontrolled spirit that night. This is later proved to be true when she vomits on the floor and speaks loudly about her pregnancy.
On the other hand, Skeeter is different from the other white women. She advocates for the Help by interviewing them and getting their story through to the rest of the world. A common characteristic she shares with the black maids of Jackson is that she’s very hard working. Unlike the other white women, she has a career and is more focused on that than her social status. She also doesn’t like to be pushed around, and when she is, she retaliates. For example, after Hilly told Skeeter “‘You know, it’s no wonder Stuart Whitworth dropped you’” (Stockett 280), Hilly fires back by telling people to drop off their used toilets in Hilly’s lawn.
Like Skeeter, Minny also doesn’t like to be pushed around. After Hilly spread rumors that Minny is a thieving maid, Minny baked her feces into a pie and fed it to Hilly. This pie incident is referred to as the “terrible awful” throughout the book. The “terrible awful” is a very vital part because when Skeeter is writing her book on The Help, she needed something to confirm that Hilly won’t tell anyone that the story is about the city of Jackson, or else all the black maids in the city would be fired. The “terrible awful” is the perfect insurance because Hilly would never want anybody to know that she was the woman who ate two slices of a black woman’s feces. The “terrible awful” is also important because if Celia Foote didn’t know about the “terrible awful”, she wouldn’t have stayed in Jackson and would’ve left Johnny and moved back to Sugar Ditch instead.
After the incident at the Jackson Junior League and Ball Benefit, she felt like she should’ve stayed in her place and messed up her whole life on that night. Celia felt this way because she wore inappropriate clothing, got intoxicated, yelled about her pregnancy, ripped Hilly’s dress, threw up, and got Hilly furious at her for something she didn’t even do. Once this happened, Minny explained the Celia why Hilly was so upset about the pie, and Celia realized that a lot of what happened at the Benefit wasn’t necessarily her fault. Because of this, Celia also decided not to leave her husband.
Celia is a character that slowly grew throughout the story. After all the attempts of trying to fit into the crowd and befriending all of these fake people and ultimately failing because of her love for Hilly’s ex-boyfriend, she eventually realized that the only people really care about her well-being is Minny and Johnny. Celia is included in the text because she contrasts the women of high society, such as Elizabeth and Hilly. Celia comes from poverty, and out of nowhere, she’s placed into a group of upper-class women due to her marriage to Johnny Foote.
Even though she’s now part of this group, she’s still seen as an outsider. She represents growth, change, and new beginnings. This is also represented in Chapter 26 when she chops down the mimosa tree. Even though she hated the tree, she never chopped it down because she felt like others would like the appearance of it when they saw her home. When she chopped it down, it showed that she has chosen to focus on her own interests rather than focusing on pleasing others and fitting in. This is the reason that Celia was added into the story.
