In the book, The Secret Life of Bees, by Sue Monk Kidd, August and Rosaleen unawarely found themselves as a mother figure for Lily Owens. After losing her mother, Lily was lost. She found herself resulting to the comfort of bees as a source of love. After her mom’s death, Rosaleen, her house keeper began to treat Lily as her own. As the book continued Lily met August, a motherly bee keeper that Lily found intriguing.
One of the themes presented by Sue Monk Kidd in, “The Secret Life of Bees” is pushing boundaries. In the book, Lily runs away from her abusive father and stays at a beekeepers house where she would be safe. This beekeepers house is a black family and while she stayed there and everyone was constantly pushing boundaries. The story relates to the article written by Nadra Kareem Nittle which was called, “How the Freedom Riders Movement Began”. This article was about a group of people called freedom riders traveling together to end the Jim Crow laws or other known as, racist laws.
Sue Monk Kidd presents Lily’s insecure personality in her novel The Secret Life of Bees to convince the audience to see Lily in an innocent light. Kidd desires to portray Lily as innocent to justify her running away from T. Ray and her home. An excerpt from the onset of the book reveals Lily’s insecurity: “There was nothing worse than clumps of whispering girls who got quiet when I passed. I started picking scabs off my body and, when I didn’t have any, gnawing the flesh around my fingernails till I was a bleeding wreck”(9). As one analyzes this portion of the book, Lily convinces herself that she does not care what the others think about her.
Above all, Rosaleen is stuck living in the south during the 1960s; a time period full of extreme racial tension. She is facing ridicule and name-calling simply because of her skin color, but nonetheless stands up and fights back against this injustice.
Bees hide an entire colony within their hives, they hide little cities and communities. The book, The Secret Life of Bees, shows a lot of symbolism that relates to bees. In this book, written by Sue Monk Kidd, a 14-year-old named Lily Owens has memories of pulling the trigger on her own mother as a child. Her abusive father who goes by T-Ray makes her life miserable. Lily runs away with her caretaker Rosaleen to the Boatwright sisters, whom live on a honey farm.
How the decisions one makes can affect others in The Secret Life of Bees In American author Sue Monk Kidd’s novel The Secret Life of Bees, fourteen-year-old Lily Owens abandons her abusive father, Terrence Ray, with her caretaker Rosaleen. They set off on an adventure to find closure after her mother’s tragic death, and end up in Tiburon, South Carolina. She is taken care of by the Boatwright sisters, August, May, and June, who takes her under their wings and teaches her about their religion, while she learns about her mother’s life.
In The Secret Life of Bees, author Sue Monk Kidd alludes to the St. Augustine Civil Rights Movement to highlight the racism of the time period and explain why white people in Tiburon had trouble with the concept of Lily staying at a colored house. Although Lily is comfortable at August’s pink house, she is unable to be sheltered from the racist views from the outside world. One day while watching television, she learns of “an integration parade in St. Augustine that got attacked by a mob of white people…” (88). Here, Lily is being informed of a Florida parade in which activists marched together in support of integrating the public schools. Their peaceful demonstrations were violently crushed by Ku Klux Klan members, who believed that white
“But she’s white, August,” (Kidd, 87) and this quote sets the tone because the book was based in 1964, South Carolina when racism was a big thing towards blacks. Besides everything else that is going on in the world, a young girl named Lily is searching to see if her mother is still looking out for her in the world. In The Secret Life of Bees, Sue Monk Kid used tone, symbolism and foreshadowing through out the novel. The tone that the author uses through out the novel is sadness such as when she did not know that she killed her mother. Then she uses many examples of symbolism through out the story; consistently she searches for a mother in woman around her.
In the novel, “The secret life of Bees” by Sue Monk Kidd, the main character, Lily, is a teenager who is conflicted by the haunted memory of killing her own mother, and living in an abusive household. The series of events throughout the novel, transitioned her from helpless, depressed, shy girl, into a powerful, confident and empowering woman. She turned from a victim in an abusive household, into a superhero. Her ability to elude T.Ray, mature with August, and stand up to her enemy, developed her into her truest form, a hero.
Throughout the Secret Life of Bees, Lily Owens becomes more mature as she lives in the pink house and learns that all people are equal. She also becomes more mature as she learns more about her mother's past, and learns to forgive herself for her death. In the beginning of the book, Lily is selfish and immature. She says that “People who think dying is the worst thing don’t know a thing about life.” Through this, the reader sees how much Lily's life has been affected by her mother's death.
The main example in which Kidd used throughout The Secret Life of Bees novel was with the symbolism of Lily by bees. When this book was written its purpose was to represent racism within the US around the civil rights movement. But racism is really just taking two different parties which appear different but are equally smart, can perform the same tasks, and are emotionally equal, Caucasians and African Americans. So the real importance of the way Kidd uses bees as a symbol within the novel is to understand what Kidd is representing at a larger scale, not just within the story itself, racism present within the
In the Bildungsroman, The Secret Life of Bees, by Sue Monk Kidd, Lily, the young motherless protagonist, exists in a life which lacks love and care, but with an act of rebellion, alters the entire course of her life. After enduring cruel punishments from a sadist father, Lily accepts this as the way of life she must live. However, after a crucial moment, Lily begins to consider the idea of freedom from her oppressive life; she realizes this when she and Rosaleen, her substitute mother, come under arrest for disrupting the public and Terrence, her father, would only take Lily out of jail. This is a pivotal moment as Lily a heated conversation with her father and exclaims, “You don’t scare me”(Kidd 38). Her brash action to rebel against her father
Also, society is turning more towards religion as guidance and strength to move along in life. Sue Kidd Monk prove these views and incorporates her own perspective of society. In her novel, The Secret Life of Bees, Sue Monk Kidd reveals the complexity and
The question of lowering the drinking age has been up in the air for a while now and is now a legitimate question to consider. An eighteen-year-old in US has the right to vote, and serve in the military. If an eighteen-year-old can make up their mind as to who the potential leader of the country should be and take a bullet for their country, they should have every right to purchase and drink alcohol (Cognac). Even though there may be some cons to lowering the drinking age, like there is to anything we do, there is a lot of evidence that show the pros outweigh those. Before federal law mandated that 21 only laws be passed or funding would be pulled from states, there were several areas that had made it legal to drink as a teenager (HRF).
“A wonderful novel about mothers and daughters and the transcendent power of love” (Connie May Fowler). This quote reflects the novel, The Secret Life of Bees, by Sue Monk Kidd because the protagonist in the story, Lily Owens, her mother have died when she was four years old and she didn’t feel loved by her abusive father, T. Ray Owens, until she met the Boatwrights family with the housekeeper, Rosaleen, and stayed with them. The Boatwrights family are the three black sisters who are August, May, and June. This novel took place in Sylvan and Tiburon, South Carolina, where Lily grew up and where she found the answer to her questions.
