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Chapters 5 & 6

Summary: Miss Skeeter, Chapter 5

Upon arriving home at her family’s cotton plantation, Longleaf, Skeeter Phelan’s mother, Charlotte, laments that Skeeter has no romantic prospects. Skeeter, who is tall and pale with frizzy hair, knows her mother is confounded by her and cannot tell her mother that what she truly wants is to be a writer. A few months prior, Skeeter applied for an editor position at Harper & Row, a publishing company in Manhattan. The Phelan’s maid, Pascagoula, tells Skeeter that she has a phone call. Skeeter answers the phone to hear Hilly, who tells Skeeter that her husband William’s cousin, the son of a state senator and the man Hilly has been trying to set up with Skeeter, will be in town next weekend. Hilly also mentions that she wants Skeeter to publish the Home Help Sanitation Initiative, about installing different bathrooms for maids, in the League’s next newsletter.

While looking at the maid’s bathroom in her own house, Skeeter thinks back to her childhood maid, Constantine. Constantine told Skeeter she was beautiful on the outside and the inside and encouraged her to follow her dreams. When Skeeter returned home after college graduation, her mother told her Constantine quit to go live with her family in Chicago. Skeeter was heartbroken that Constantine would leave without telling her.

Summary: Miss Skeeter, Chapter 6

Skeeter receives a letter from Harper & Row, written by senior editor Elaine Stein, who informs Skeeter that she does not have enough experience for an editor position. However, Elaine expresses sympathy for a young woman looking to make it in publishing and advises her to write about things she notices that disturb her. Elaine also offers to review Skeeter’s best ideas. Elated, Skeeter begins writing a list of everything that bothers her and mails it to Elaine Stein. She later realizes she sent ideas she thought would impress Elaine instead of ideas she wanted to write about.

A few days later, Skeeter secures a job at the local newspaper writing answers to questions about cleaning in the place of Miss Myrna, who has abandoned this role. Knowing she will need help, Skeeter gets Elizabeth’s permission to talk to Aibileen, who reminds her of Constantine. After Skeeter gets some answers from Aibileen, she brings up Constantine’s departure. Aibileen mentions that Constantine was fired, and Skeeter is surprised, as she thought Constantine quit. 

One day, while talking with Aibileen, Skeeter explains that she wants to be a writer, and Aibileen shares that her son liked writing and had started writing a book about working for white men before he died. Aibileen apologizes for not being able to tell Skeeter what happened to Constantine, though she says it had something to do with Constantine’s daughter. Skeeter didn’t know Constantine had a daughter, and Aibileen says the baby was born looking white due to Constantine being half white, so Constantine had to send her up North. Skeeter returns home to find a letter from Harper & Row, in which Elaine Stein criticizes Skeeter’s ideas for being unoriginal. Skeeter begins to form a new idea, though thinks it would be crossing the line.

Analysis: Chapters 5 & 6

Skeeter is presented as a contrast to her friends Hilly and Elizabeth in several ways. Even before seeing the story from Skeeter’s perspective, Aibileen notes that Skeeter is different from the other women, as she takes time to greet the maids, treating them as more of equals than her friends. Though they are all the same age, Hilly and Elizabeth are both married and have children, while Skeeter does not have much interest in settling down and longs to begin a career instead. Skeeter also knows that she isn’t conventionally attractive, as she has been told so her entire life by her mother, but Skeeter doesn’t seem particularly bothered by this, as other women at the time might be. However, Skeeter is still bound by the constrictions of society. She knows she is expected to get married, have children, and live the same life as Hilly and Elizabeth. Though this is not what she wants, she goes along with the idea without much resistance, agreeing to setups by Hilly and taking no steps to move out of her parents’ home.

Despite Skeeter’s intelligence and lofty goals, she proves herself to be rather naive about the world. She didn’t consider that an editor position at a prestigious publishing company would require experience and even went so far as to look at apartments should she get the one job she applied for. Skeeter then takes a job on a subject she knows nothing about, figuring she can get the information from someone else. And while Skeeter doesn’t come across as racist, unlike Hilly and Elizabeth, that too is a product of her limited worldview. Skeeter saw her maid, Constantine, as a mother figure until Constantine disappeared from her life only recently. As Skeeter had an affectionate relationship with her maid, she treats other maids with kindness. Still, she doesn’t seem to fully acknowledge the maids as individuals, choosing to ask Aibileen for advice because Aibileen reminds her of Constantine. However, once Skeeter begins talking to Aibileen for the Miss Myrna column, Skeeter begins to see things in a more nuanced way.

The similarities between Skeeter and Mae Mobley show the complicated relationships between the maids in The Help and the families they work for. Both Skeeter and Mae Mobley are disapproved of by their mothers, Skeeter for being tall and having unruly hair and Mae Mobley for being chubby and behaving like a typical toddler. Both Skeeter and Mae Mobley 0find comfort in their families’ maids, Constantine and Aibileen. Both Constantine and Aibileen, who know firsthand the dangers of judging someone based on how they look, assure Skeeter and Mae Mobley that their character matters more than their appearance. Since Constantine and Aibileen have each lost a child in their own way, they value the white children they care for perhaps more than they otherwise would. While Constantine and Aibileen both love the children they care for, how they feel about the mothers is quite different. Constantine’s disappearance implies that some tensions between her and Charlotte boiled over, but what exactly happened remains a mystery. Meanwhile, though Elizabeth relies on Aibileen to care for Mae Mobley, she treats Aibileen almost like a child herself.

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