From The Help, a scene that really stuck out to me was the scene in which Skeeter and Charlotte, are positioned in front of the mirror in Charlotte’s room. This scene, one of the first encounters that we are introduced their relationship as mother and daughter. We see that Charlotte is pressuring Skeeter to try on clothes, jewelry, hairstyles that aren’t really her style, in hopes that she would wear such clothes on a date with a man. There are a few seconds where the camera is showing us the reflection of both Charlotte and Skeeter looking into the mirror where Charlotte is standing behind Skeeter. The use of the reflected image of the mirror suggests that what we see of Skeeter and her mother is symbolic of the way that Charlotte wants her daughter to reflect herself. Additionally, because Charlotte is standing behind Skeeter, she wants to exert some sort of dominance over her, as she peers down at her in the mirrored image but also as her body frames Skeeter’s body.

This is supported by Williams argument in Something Else Besides a Mother where she states,

“Clearly, the paralleled closeness and similarity of mother to daughter sets up a situation of significant mirroring that is most apparent in these films. One effect of this mirroring is that although the mother gains a kind of vicarious superiority by association with a superior daughter, she inevitably begins to feel inadequate to so superior a being and thus, in the end, to feel inferior. Embroiled in a relationship that is so close, mother and daughter nevertheless seem destines to lose one another through this very closeness” (479).

I  took this claim quite literally and applied it to The Help by singling out a scene that uses a mirror. Since Williams is speaking about the way that mothers seek to cultivate daughters to become their respectable mothers, the mirror is a cinematic way of suggesting a reflection without expressing it explicitly in dialogue. Throughout the film, we see Charlotte attempting to remain a superior figure in Skeeter’s life, although Skeeter exemplifies just as much superiority from going to college.  The scene that I mentioned is especially important in establishing the way the mother tries to keep her superiority before she inevitably accepts her inferiority later in the film.