Trauma and Racism: 'The Help' as Understood in Print, in Film, and in Scholarly Sources Anonymous College

‘There is the South, then there is Mississippi.’

There is a method to madness in literature when talking about the racial prejudice bordering and grasping the context of American history. Black prejudice and ill-treatment date back to a long time in American history and further studies show how these atrocities have formed a vicious circle in the coming generations. Through this paper we bring forward the themes underlying mental illness, faced as a consequence of racial prejudice and the changing American scene in the 1960s- trauma and the sparks of feminism. While the major emphasis focuses on the trauma faced by the characters, we discuss in details the onset and the effects of it in depth. Trauma can be explained as a type of damage to the mind or the body that occurs due to a result of a gravely distressing incident. Trauma is usually the result of an onset of an overwhelming amount of stress which can exceed one’s capability to cope or integrate and assimilate their emotions and memories after being involved in that experience. Trauma can be short-lived or as a result of a repetitive force having its toll on an individual or community for weeks, years, decades or even centuries. The reason we have chosen trauma as a form...