Related Themes: Racism. Page Number and Citation : 1 Cite this Quote. Explanation and Analysis:. Chapter 2 Quotes. Page Number and Citation : 35 Cite this Quote. Chapter 4 Quotes. Page Number and Citation : 58 Cite this Quote.
Chapter 7 Quotes. Page Number and Citation : Cite this Quote. Chapter 22 Quotes. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 1. If passed, the bill would require every white household in Mississippi to have a separate bathroom for black housekeepers. Chapter 2. The next morning, construction at the Leefolt house starts on the separate bathroom in the carport an outdoor shelter for cars consisting of a roof held up by The bathroom is ready by the next afternoon. Miss Leefolt tells Aibileen, who feels the bitter seed Chapter 4. Chapter 5. She also tells Skeeter to run an ad for the bathroom bill in the League newsletter.
Hilly is president of the newsletter. Looking at the separate Chapter 7. After witnessing Miss Leefolt berate her daughter Kathryn Stockett uses toilets and bathrooms to symbolize the dirtiness of the tactics used to maintain a racist status quo in this Mississippi community in the early s, and to inject wicked comic relief into a sometimes heartbreaking book. Sounds like the start of a very dirty joke, no? Actually, these are the two biggest clues that Help the book within The Help is set in Jackson, Mississippi.
The fact that Minny baked a poo pie that Hilly ate is left in Help intentionally, to keep Hilly from spreading the word that the book is about Jackson. If she admits the book is about Jackson, she admits she ate Minny's poo…and lived.
The big irony, of course, is that Hilly claims to believe that white people will come to harm if they use the same toilets and dishes as black people. If a white person can eat a black person's poo and not even get sick…we'll leave you to finish that sentence.
By contrast, Aibileen's inclusion of the fact that the Leefolts' dining room table has an L-shaped crack in it is totally unintentional, and a sign of Aibileen's attention to detail at least in her descriptions, though perhaps not her editing.
But, the inclusion might have an unintentionally beneficial result. We could look at Aibileen getting fired as a good thing — after all, she gets the Miss Myrna job and income from Help. Moments after she's fired, she frees herself to begin planning her new writing career. The inclusion of the L-shaped crack might also have benefits for Elizabeth.
Until Hilly points out the detail of the crack, Elizabeth somehow doesn't recognize herself in Aibileen's story.
Now she'll be forced to deal with Aibileen's vision of her. Perhaps this will help her with some of her problems and issues. This detail also gives her some power over Hilly — something she's never had, or never felt she had before.
When Hilly clues in Elizabeth that she's featured in the book, Hilly, by implication, admits that she too is featured, as the woman who ate Minny's special chocolate pie. Seeing Hilly as fallible might help Elizabeth stop idolizing and following the woman, and learn to think for herself. No, white womans like to keep they hands clean. They got a shiny little set a tools they use, sharp as witches fingernails, tidy and laid out neat, like the picks on a dentist tray.
They gone take they time with them. Several black characters in the novel suggest that the white women in general might be more harmful to them than the white men are — a white man might use violence, but a white woman will ruin your life. Hilly Holbrook, in all her villainy, is the symbol of this type of woman.
Aibileen's chilling passage quoted above dramatizes a certain type of violence. She uses "witches fingernails" and dentist tools to symbolize such violence, which often consists of using power and influence to have people fired, evicted, imprisoned, fined, or even subjected to physical violence. We discuss this issue more under the "Themes: Gender. By contrast, through her relationship with Skeeter, Aibileen learns sees that some white women use nicer tools for nicer purposes.
Skeeter uses books, writing, conversation, speech, and pranks to counteract the tools of vicious women like Hilly. Of course, the tools Skeeter, Aibileen, Minny, and the women who contribute to Help use also incite Hilly's wrath, and strict penalties are paid.
But all of the women seem to feel it's worth this risk. Three years ago today, Treelore died. But by Miss Leefolt's book it's still floor cleaning day. Mister Leefolt also threatens to fire Aibileen if she speaks to Skeeter again. Hilly wakes to find a front lawn full of colorful toilet bowls. Skeeter finally put the Home Health Sanitation Initiative into the League's newsletter, but she wrote that unwanted toilets could be dropped off at the Holbrook home rather than old coats for the coat drive.
Hilly is devastated and swears revenge. She kicks Skeeter out of the bridge club and makes everyone agree not to speak to her. She tells Stuart that Skeeter has ideas about changing the segregation laws in Mississippi just in case he ever thinks of dating her again.
Martin Luther King has just led the March on Washington and people are watching it on television. Aibileen is amazed by the numbers of people who attended, , and 60, of them were white. Then the Birmingham church bombings occur and everyone in the black community in Jackson mourns. Miss Celia shows up unannounced at Elizabeth's house and interrupts the bridge club.
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