The Help by Kathryn Stockett: A Full Summary and Guide
What The Help is about
Kathryn Stockett's first novel, published by Penguin Books in 2009, is set in Jackson, Mississippi, in the early 1960s. It follows African American women who work as maids in white households, and the white employers whose homes and children they keep. The book is told mostly in the first person by three women who take turns narrating.
The engine of the plot is a secret book project. Eugenia "Skeeter" Phelan has just come home from the University of Mississippi wanting to be a writer. She is also troubled by the disappearance of Constantine, the maid who raised her. Constantine had written to Skeeter at college promising a great surprise on her return. Skeeter's mother says Constantine quit and went to live with relatives in Chicago. Skeeter does not believe it, and everyone she asks pretends the matter never happened.
Pushing at that silence changes how Skeeter sees the houses she has grown up in. She notices that her friends' maids are treated nothing like white employees. With encouragement from Elaine Stein, an editor at Harper & Row, who tells her to find a subject she can be passionate about, Skeeter decides to collect the true stories of Black maids in Mississippi and publish them. In the South in the early 1960s, that is a dangerous thing to attempt and a far more dangerous thing to agree to. The risk hangs over every chapter.
The main characters
Aibileen Clark is a maid who cleans and raises other women's children. Her own son, Treelore, died at twenty-four in an accident at work. She is currently with the Leefolt household, caring for their toddler, Mae Mobley. Aibileen is watchful and careful, and she is the first maid Skeeter wins over. The friendship grows sideways, through a household tips column Skeeter has taken on at the local paper. Skeeter knows nothing about cleaning, because cleaning is what the help does. Aibileen supplies the answers. Skeeter eventually recognises the irony and offers to pay her for the expertise.
Minny Jackson is Aibileen's friend and her opposite in temperament. She says exactly what she thinks of her employers, which is why she has been fired from nineteen jobs. Her most recent employer was Mrs Walters, mother of Hilly Holbrook. Minny distrusts white people on good evidence, and her agreement to take part costs her more than anyone. Octavia Spencer was Stockett's original inspiration for Minny, and later played her in the film adaptation.
Skeeter is the daughter of a wealthy family who own Longleaf, a former cotton plantation outside Jackson where many of the field hands and household staff are African American. Her mother wants her married and treats her degree as a pretty piece of paper. Hilly Holbrook runs the social circle, and as Skeeter's opposition to the racial order grows, that circle shuts her out. Another maid, Yule May, becomes the turning point for the project when she is arrested for taking one of Hilly's rings after Hilly refuses to lend her the money for her twin sons' college tuition.
The themes
The most obvious theme is justice, and how slow and partial it is. The novel is interested in laws that still governed what Black people in Mississippi could and could not do, and in the smaller, daily enforcement of those rules inside kitchens and nurseries.
Underneath that sits something more awkward: intimacy. The New York Times review noted the "affection and intimacy buried beneath even the most seemingly impersonal household connections". The maids' stories in Skeeter's book are not uniformly bleak. Some describe generous, loving and kind moments. Others are cruel and brutal. Both are true at once, which is the hardest thing the novel asks a reader to hold.
Class and identity run alongside. Skeeter's social standing protects her up to a point, then stops protecting her. The maids have no such cushion. Friendship becomes the only real safety: between Aibileen and Minny first, then across the line to Skeeter, built slowly and never casually.
How it ends
After Yule May's arrest, other maids decide they are willing to risk their jobs and their safety and join the project. The book, titled Help, is published. The closing chapters deal with the aftermath of its success and what that success costs the women who contributed.
Why it still matters
The Help took Stockett five years to write. She began it after the September 11 attacks. Sixty literary agents rejected it over three years before Susan Ramer agreed to represent her. It then became what USA Today called a summer sleeper hit, sold seven million copies in print and audio by August 2011, spent more than a hundred weeks on The New York Times Best Seller list and was published in thirty-five countries. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution called it "a stunning début from a gifted talent".
It suits readers who want historical fiction driven by voice and by moral risk rather than by event. It is also a novel that has been argued about since publication, which is part of why it stays in circulation. The New York Times called it "button-pushing" on the way to calling it wildly popular, and both halves of that judgement have held up.
