| dc.description.abstract | This study focuses on The Help by Kathryn Stockett, one of the contemporary literary works that tackle the issues of race, class, and femininity in America. The Help is set during the early 1960s in Jackson, Mississippi. It focuses on the lives of Black maids who worked in white households during the civil rights movement. It also highlights the Jim Crow era, whose laws enforced racial segregation. These regulations required separate schools, restrooms, shop entrances, and even sections of town for Black and white people. Despite these divisions and unfair rules, Black women would cook, clean, and care for children in white households. Julia S. Jordan-Zachery claims that The Help attempts to situate itself in the ideologies of post-racialism and post-feminism; the discursive practices deployed actually work to reinscribe racialized and gender tropes (83). The novel's centerpiece is its description of the relationships between these black women and the white families for which they work. The book explores the themes of racism and the tight bonds that form among oppressed people under awful conditions.
The black characters in the novel are subjected to a bleak social and economic status. Moreover, the circumstances of black women in the 1960s were particularly distinctive and challenging. They were compelled to confront oppression arising from their dual identity of being both black and female in a white male supremacist culture. In addition to highlighting this aspect, the thesis also examines the lives of white female characters and how they experience oppression at the hands of their male counterparts. The lives of white women are centered around catering to their husbands and preserving the white supremacist culture. This study scrutinizes these factors and analyzes various challenges these female characters encounter in society. | |