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Discrimination In Angelica Gibbs's 'The Help And The Test'

806 Words4 Pages

According to The Human Rights very human being is equal. Whether the ethnicity differs or the colour of the skin underneath all of those superficial criteria all humans are the same. Personality is the key factor to a person’s worth and so is a person’s morality. To be deemed as an underling because of something one wears or ones looks, is unwanted by everyone, yet there are still too many people that judge a person accordingly. Nevertheless, in modern society most people have realised that such behaviour is not acceptable, it was not so in the olden days. There, discrimination was a natural part of society and not something most people objected against. Such is the case in the short story “The Test” written by Angelica Gibbs and published by The New Yorker in 1940. Here the central point of the story is about a girl of 27 years who tries to take a driver’s license due to work. The first time she fails, and when she tries a second time, problems appear yet again due to her skin colour. One of the possible themes used in the short story is the distance between the white and the black people. The short story takes …show more content…

The film, ‘’The Help’’ 2011, focuses on the same central themes. In ‘’The Help’’ women are discriminated as well as in ‘’The Test’’. Some of the main characters, Aibileen and Minny, are black African-American women, who work as maids for Hilly Holbrook and Celia Foote. The relationship between Hilly and Celia and their maids is the quiet similar to the relationship between Mrs Ericson and Marian. Generally the black women are not treated equally in both stories. However the perspective on the theme is different. In ‘’The Help’’ it is seen from the African-American maids’ perspective. In ‘’The Test’’ it is seen from the author’s perspective – not directly, as mentioned – but when comparing those stories together, the short story is definitely more subjective than the film but with the same

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