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What does the title mean in The Help book, meaning of title

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Set in Jackson, Mississippi in the early 1960s, 'The Help' by Kathryn Stockett shows the peak of racial segregation. The book is narrated by three very different women; Minny, a black maid unable to keep a job due to her hot head, Aibileen, another black maid who is raising her 'seventeenth white child', and Miss Skeeter, at the opposite end of the spectrum, a white woman who wants to be a writer. She has been brought up by black maids since she was young, and longs to find out why her much-loved maid, Constantine, has disappeared.

The help are the black community who spend their lives bringing up the children of upper-class white families. With their own children being looked after by someone else, the help spend their days feeding, dressing and playing with the children they are employed to look after, only to see them grow up and turn out like the rest of the white community, discriminating against the people who have raised them.

Aibileen dedicates all her working time to Miss Elizabeth Leefolt's child, Mae Mobley, whilst trying to heal the scars left by her own son's death. Minny finally manages to find a new job working for Miss Celia Foote, who, luckily for Minny, is too new to the town to know anything about her. Aibileen and Minny have their own problems at home, as well as those surrounding their work for the white families.

Miss Skeeter is finally given her big break when she gets the chance to get her work published. However, she needs to find something interesting that people will want to read. When she has the idea of writing a book about the dreadful life that the help lead, the three women team up, and the help reveal the cruel and unbelievable experiences they have faced whilst working for the people who discriminate against them. This shunned friendship unbelievable is a huge risk for the help, as if found out they could be fired immediately.

Kathryn Stockett manages to merge fact and fiction perfectly, exploring different emotions ranging from sadness to happiness - sometimes all in the same paragraph. Stockett has not only written an unforgettable, at times humorous and all-round brilliant story; this is also an informative masterpiece, educating people about life of the help in the segregated society of Jackson, Mississippi in the early 1960s, using some of her personal experiences of growing up in the deep south.
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Set in Jackson, Mississippi in the early 1960s, 'The Help' by Kathryn Stockett shows the peak of racial segregation. The book is narrated by three very different women; Minny, a black maid unable to keep a job due to her hot head, Aibileen, another black maid who is raising her 'seventeenth white child', and Miss Skeeter, at the opposite end of the spectrum, a white woman who wants to be a writer.

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Kathryn Stockett is a writer and editor of American origin. Born in 1969 in Jackson, Mississippi, she is best known for her critically acclaimed novel The Help.

Stockett studied creative writing and English for her undergraduate course from University of Alabama. Then she moved to New York in order to pursue work in publishing business. For about nine years she offered her services in marketing and publishing of magazine there and later relocated in Atlanta, Georgia. She shifted her interest to literary writing as she moved back to South.

After five years of hard work on her personal writing project she finally had The Help published in 2009. It was not easy for Stockett to find a willing literary agent to represent her work. After rejection from 60 literary agents consecutively, eventually agent Susan Ramer took upon the task. The novel became a milestone in Stockett's writing career earning a tremendous praise for writing on a unique subject matter. The inspiration for the novel is Stockett's own childhood.

The Help highlights the relationship dynamics between whites and their African-American domestic help in South. At first Stockett was reluctant to write about the dynamics of this relationship as she knew it would be heavily criticized. In her interviews she recounted her experience as a child in South where Jackson had equal population of white and back, though she never saw any black receiving education. Her childhood memories are only of blacks as domestic help for white people which she assumed customary affair. It was not until she moved to North she was able to see the bigger picture. She realized that she was living in an isolated place where blacks were not considered equal race.

As she shared her childhood experiences of black domestic help in her family with other Southerners, she mulled the idea of writing down a story on it. The model for her novel was her close relationship with a black housekeeper, Demetrie. In an interview, Stockett sketched Demterie's life who was underprivileged and was treated somewhat like a slave despite the change in segregation laws in 70's. Every family in Stockett's town had a black woman as a domestic help and they were expected to wear a white uniform which granted them access to white people's markets. They were not allowed privacy or offered any sort of comforts.

During the initial process of writing Stockett employed the first-person narrative of a black housekeeper, thinking her work would never have any readership. It was not until she let her friends read the book in order to get their valuable feedback, she felt concerned about her narrative technique and depiction of characters. Despite her apprehension, the novel won rave reviews from readers and critics alike. Over ten million copies of the book have been sold in over 42 different languages. In 2011, the novel was adapted into film by Walt Disney Studios.

After publication of the novel, Kathryn Stockett professed that she felt mortified that it took her 20 years to see the unjust treatment of blacks. And the sole reason for her writing The Help was to understand why she couldn't see through the duplicity of things in South. The memories of Demterie still haunt her and make her wonder what her childhood companion would think of present America, electing a black president twice.

Buy Books by Kathryn Stockett

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Kathryn Stockett Biography - Kathryn Stockett is a writer and editor of American origin. Born in 1969 in Jackson, Mississippi, she is best known for her critically acclaimed novel The Help. Stockett studied creative writing and English for her undergraduate course from University of Alabama.

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Set in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1962, Kathryn Stockett's first novel is narrated by three women: Aibileen and Minny are both black maids working for ladies from the cream of white society, while Miss Skeeter is the 23-year-old daughter of one of those pillars of the community. Aibileen has raised 17 white children, but her own son has been recently killed in an accident at a lumber yard; Minny is forever losing jobs because she talks back to her employers; and Miss Skeeter, so called because she looked like a mosquito when she was born, is ungainly and unmarried and seemingly the only one of her class able to see there might be something unjust about their society.

While Aibileen and Minny are just trying to get by, working all the hours God sends them and then, in the case of Minny, putting up with a drunk, wife-beating husband, Skeeter is in the enviable position of being able to try to make something of her life. She wants to be a writer. Her first efforts are wonderfully wrong-headed, but inspired by thoughts of the woman who brought her up - Constantine, who has vanished in mysterious circumstances - she hits on the idea of collating the stories of the domestic maids, voices never before heard in print. In 1962 this is not only a radical project, since if any of the white ladies found out their help had been talking in public they would have fired them on the spot, but also illegal in Mississippi, since it contravenes the notorious Jim Crow segregation laws.

The fruition of this project gives the book its narrative arc, but elsewhere the novel is a complex, immaculately structured but tremendously convincing nest built from secrets and lies. At some stages it resembles a Feydeau farce, with maids and mistresses popping up one after the other hoping they won't be seen, or the lies they have told won't get out, but there are also moments of real emotional heft, too.

Each of the many relationships between the large cast of characters is perfectly captured, and there is layer after layer of irony to excavate when Stockett describes the lives of the society women of Jackson. But most impressive - and attractive - is the blend of rage and humour with which she writes and that is what makes this novel at once so horrifying yet so savagely funny.

by Kathryn Stockett

451pp, Fig Tree, £12.99 (pbk)

Buy now for £11.99 (plus £1.25 p&p) from Telegraph Books

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Set in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1962, Kathryn Stockett's first novel is narrated by three women: Aibileen and Minny are both black maids working for ladies from the cream of white society, while Miss Skeeter is the 23-year-old daughter of one of those pillars of the community.

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Discussion of themes and motifs in Kathryn Stockett's The Help. eNotes critical analyses help you gain a deeper understanding of The Help so you can excel on your essay or test.

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The Help book summary & chapter summaries of The Help novel