Editor's Choice
What are the conflicts in The Help?
Quick answer:
The primary conflicts in The Help are driven by racial discrimination and social divides in 1960s Jackson, Mississippi. Skeeter confronts societal racism and her mother's prejudices. Aibileen battles internal grief and workplace racism. Minny faces domestic abuse and conflict with Hilly. The novel also explores how secrets damage relationships, as seen with Skeeter's family and Minny's employers. Ultimately, the story captures the broader struggle for civil rights and social change.
The Help is set in Jackson, Mississippi, beginning in 1962, so the setting drives much of the conflict in the novel. The novel is told with three narrators who rotate sharing perspectives in different chapters, and thus most conflict is focused on their internal and external battles.
Skeeter is a young white woman who sees the belittling ways "the help," or the black maids who are employed in white households, are treated. She realizes that this is reflective of deeper racial issues in Jackson and looks for a way to educate a deeply racist white society about the inherent injustices in such treatment. Her primary conflict is with a white society which wants to hang on to tradition and racism. This is embodied primarily in Elizabeth, who employs Aibileen and who is also pressing for more segregation in Jackson, such as requiring white households to build separate outdoor restrooms for...
Unlock
This Answer NowStart your 48-hour free trial and get ahead in class. Boost your grades with access to expert answers and top-tier study guides. Thousands of students are already mastering their assignments—don't miss out. Cancel anytime.
Already a member? Log in here.
their black employees.
Skeeter also finds herself in conflict with her own mother, whom she comes to realize fired her own help (whom Skeeter grew up with and loved) because of her racist beliefs. Skeeter wants to change her hometown but struggles in how to make an impact until she realizes that she can capture the stories of the black maids and thereby make their voices heard. This places her in conflict with her society at large and some of her former friends specifically.
Aibileen, another narrator in the novel, is also laden with conflict. She is a mother silently consumed with the grief of losing her son, Treelore. Only around two years have passed since his accident, and it is her grief over the circumstances of his death which really propels her to work with Skeeter in writing the book that she hopes will change their lives. As an employee of Elizabeth, she also finds herself in a silent conflict in her place of employment, hearing Elizabeth's racist comments with her friends and carrying on with the work of the day in spite of it. Elizabeth is also not a good mother to Mae Mobley, and Aibileen takes the little girl under her wing, showering her with self-affirmation to try to overcome the effects of abuse the little girl suffers at the hands and tongue of her mother. Through the book she helps create, Aibileen finds a voice for all the quiet suffering she has endured in the conflict she has faced.
Minny tells other chapters in the novel, and while she is portrayed as a humorous character, she also faces great conflict. Although Minny is seen as both an extraordinary cook and a strong black woman in her community, she suffers from an abusive husband at home. Minny's propensity for saying what she thinks places her in direct opposition to Hilly, who is the leading force of the restrictive and racist young white women in Jackson. Minny thus includes a chapter in the book which describes how she'd once made Hilly a pie using Minny's own poop—and that Hilly had eaten it. This both provides great vindication for the conflict Hilly has caused her and keeps Hilly quiet about the narrators in the book as she would never want her white society to know what she's endured at the hands of her former black help.
There are many layers of conflict in the novel, but in the end almost all of it is driven by a racist Southern town's beliefs in the years before the Civil Rights Era; change had not yet begun to really reshape the ways African Americans were seen, treated, and valued in some pockets of our country. This novel captures multiple angles of that conflict, from inside the black community to the whites who worked with blacks to push for societal changes to the white resistance to such efforts.