Discussion Topic
Miss Skeeter's character development and how she stands out from her peers in The Help
Summary:
Miss Skeeter stands out from her peers in The Help due to her progressive views on race and her determination to give a voice to the African American maids. Unlike her friends who accept societal norms, Skeeter evolves from a passive observer to an active challenger of racial injustices, driven by her empathy and moral courage.
How is Miss Skeeter different from the other young ladies in The Help?
Miss Skeeter is different because she is more progressive and independent.
Prejudice against black people is ingrained in most of the people where Skeeter grew up. However, she had a close relationship with Constantine, the black nanny who helped to raise her. This relationship and her college education led to her seeing racial bias differently than people like Hilly, for example. She didn't dehumanize black people in the way that many whites in her community did; this made her treat black people around her with more concern and respect. As she learns about the experiences of the maids, she comes to better understand how wrong the way black people are treated in her society is.
Skeeter was also more independent than other women of a similar background. She went to college, works, and isn't focused on the prospect of marriage. This attitude is something else that isolates her from other...
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wealthy white women and creates problems with people in her life.
Miss Skeeter, one of the main characters in Kathryn Stockett's The Help, is different from the other women in the novel in several ways. For one thing, she is interested in the opinions and lives of the black housekeepers who work in the homes of the white women in Jackson, Mississippi. While Hilly and the other white women are concerned only with their maids as employees, Miss Skeeter asks them questions about their lives.
The other women exhibit blind prejudice, relegating their maids to separate bathrooms. "It’s just plain dangerous. Everybody knows they carry different kinds of diseases than we do," Hilly says, even going so far as to launch the Home Health Sanitation Initiative. Hilly's initiative proposes that all white homeowners be required to provide a separate bathroom for the black people who work at their homes. Miss Skeeter, however, finds the idea ridiculous and insulting. “Maybe we ought to just build you a bathroom outside, Hilly,” Miss Skeeter says.
Miss Skeeter is also interested in a career in journalism, while the majority of her friends in the Junior League are interested primarily in snagging a husband and keeping up appearances. In addition, Miss Skeeter is not as physically attractive as most of her friends; she is tall and lanky (often towering over potential suitors), and her hair is hard to manage. Miss Skeeter's mother, however, believes that her healthy trust fund can overcome men's reluctance to date her; she hopes that Miss Skeeter will eventually find someone to marry her. Miss Skeeter, however, is focused on her career as a writer and goes along with her mother's attempts to improve her appearance just to appease her.
While Miss Skeeter's friends accept and endorse the mistreatment of their black employees, she sees the black women who work as maids as humans and as worthy of respect. Miss Skeeter's friends want to keep their society as it is, while she is willing to challenge the status quo by telling the stories of the black women who work as maids in Jackson.
How does Miss Skeeter evolve in the novel The Help?
One aspect of Skeeter that is difficult to make sense of and may be a flaw in the character presentation is the source of her outward-looking attitudes. We can understand that Skeeter's time at college away from Jackson opened her eyes to the prejudices in the town and created the seeds of her rejection of the society's structure and attitudes. This only partly explains her liberal values, though. Where in her upbringing do these come from; what made her so open to racial tolerance? It's not fully explained. Her love for Constantine may have given her insight and a natural propensity to see the black people with respect. Still, why is Skeeter so profoundly different from her white friends?
The corollary to this is the oddity of her friendship with Hilly. If Skeeter was inclined to broad-minded values, why would she have ever linked up with Hilly in her school days? Hilly's caricature two-dimensional awfulness is also a weakness in the novel. The respect in which she's held is at odds with her comic nastiness.
From the beginning of the bookuntil the end, Skeeter's attitudes completely change.
Having grown up in a southern family of means, the way of life she had always known was that every family had black maids. This was a way of life for her and also almost everyone she knew in Jackson, Mississippi.
As the book goes on, and Skeeter hears more and more of the maids' stories of what they've experienced working in white homes, her eyes become opened to the injustices that the maids were subjected to.
Her eyes also become opened to the mistreatment of the maids by people who have been her friends for her entire life.
Her own immediate family had driven away Constantine, the maid who had practically raised her.
By the time her interviews of the maids are finished, and her book containing the interviews is published, Skeeter has totally changed her thinking and attitudes towards black people from what she had known throughout her entire childhood.