The Help by Kathryn Stockett is a novel and now a movie that takes place in the 1960s in Jackson, Mississippi. Skeeter, the white daughter of cotton plantation owners, returns home to find her old maid, Constantine, is no longer with them. She embarks on a journey that would empower black women, which are the maids in the book, to voice their stories. However, this splits the White and Black communities further apart because of unacceptance, racism, prejudice, and discrimination of the Black community.
There are many instances throughout this novel where these Black maids experience identity, power, and injustice problems. Aibileen is the current maid when Skeeter comes home. Skeeter finds a copy of Jim Crow Laws in the library and she starts to realize the oppressiveness of these Black maids, including Constantine and Aibileen. For example, Aibileen’s job is to obey her White superiors as this is the only way she can get by in a world full of racism. She has no power against the White community and has no voice. This novel represented the injustice against the Black community during this time period. Blacks were treated as less as they had no rights, were isolated because of their race, and were oppressed as a result just like the Black maids in the novel. Since this was uncomfortably normal in the 1960s, Aibileen struggles with her identity as she could not live a truthful and full life because of the power that Whites had over Blacks.
As the book continues, we start to see ideas that are parallel with what we learned in class. For instance, de Beauvoir’s theory of the Other is present in this novel. The Black maids and the Black community as a whole are oppressed, so this could be considered Otherness as they are looked down upon and treated differently. The White superiors are considered the One as they have complete power over the African American race. In addition to Otherness, Hegel’s master-slave theory also applies. The Blacks being the slaves in this novel to the White masters who are in charge of everything. The author wanted the world, today, to question whether this systemic injustice is still present by sharing these experiences in her fictional book. She wants to get society thinking about racial conflicts that still appear to affect the Black community when they should not, since we are far advanced from the 1960s. Stockett therefore, inspires conversations about identity, power, and injustice still happening in the African American race as she goes back in time during this dark part of history with stories of Constantine, Aibileen, Skeeter, and Skeeter’s family and friends.