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.
In American writer Sue Monk Kidd's fiction novel The Secret Life of Bees, the reader is introduced to Lily Owens, a naive and unfortunate character longing for her mother's absence. Growing up with an abusive father, T Ray, Lily is kept miserable until a stroke of confidence allows her to run away with the only person on her side, Rosaleen. Through multiple influences and revelations of truth, she can develop individually with the help of her new family, the Boatwrights, transforming her into a profound and confident character. One of the major influences Lily undergoes throughout the book is the religious rituals August and the Boatwrigts assign her. An example of this is the observance of a religious statue, The Black Mary, worshiped by the
Honey discusses one major issue of organizing in the South—self organization among African Americans. Prior to the support of the CIO, Memphis African Americans had a hard time organizing. This was largely due to the fact that they were black and they were poor. Honey noted that a black family’s income was around one-third of a white family's income. They were not only facing issues like school segregation and other overt racisms; they were also facing job and income disparities.
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 Sue Monk Kidd’s novel, The Secret Life of Bees, Kidd incorporates the literary technique of allusion to assist the reader in delving into Lily’s thought process. Furthermore, to incorporate allusion, Kidd compares the message Lily interpreted from the arrival of the bees in her room to the plagues God sent to the pharaoh Ramesses. Lily ponders: Back in my room on the peach farm, when the bees had first come out at night, I had imagined they were sent as a special plague for T. Ray. God saying, Let my daughter go, and maybe that’s exactly what they’d been, a plague that released me (151).
This leads to her being elected for homecoming queen, where her father even gave her gown for the occasion. This marked a very special time in her life. But Anne still saw inequality amongst whites and blacks in day to day living conditions. When Anne discovered the NAACP, she began to contemplate how racial inequalities could be changed. Anne’s mother does not understand her interest in the civil rights movement, nor agrees with it.
Another example is when she talks about her relationship with her ex-boyfriend. She still has strong feelings for him but knows that it is not healthy for her to be with him. This shows how she is aware of her emotions and how they can affect her decisions. [Insert quote here…] [Insert explanation to quote here…]
Throughout The Secret Life of Bees bees play a recurring role in the novel, repeatably being mentioned during the novel in epigrams before the start of each chapter and within the story itself. Unfortunately, on certain occasions the reason why bees are included in a certain part of the story can be unclear and confusing to readers, causing them to occasionally misinterpret the importance of bees throughout the novel. Regardless, the bees throughout play a very important role in understanding many of the themes and symbolism that Kidd included within the novel. In The Secret Life of Bees Kidd symbolizes Lily’s experiences and situations through the bees frequently present in the novel to show that seemingly different things can function in the same way.
The main characters Atticus Finch, Tom Robinson, and Bob Ewell face moments that deal with racism all told from the perspective of a six year old girl, Scout. The intended purpose of expressing racial relations in Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird,”
In The Life of Bees, Zach dreams of becoming a lawyer despite his skin colour. He believes he can be the best lawyer out there, and so does Lily, Zach’s close friend. Zach’s disadvantages inspire him to work hard for his future. In the same way, Kumasi, a former gang member, explains how police regularly reminded the black children in the gangs how they would have a limited future because of their race. This was the effect of the black children being rejected by white extra-curricular groups such as the Scouts of America.
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
Although Aunt Alexandra does not possess the strength to detach from the social customs, Scout and Calpurnia are able to cast off the conventional roles despite society’s wishes. Calpurnia’s act of successfully living in black and white communities and Scout’s act of defying typical gender roles illustrates to the reader how immensely society pressures women. Although the expectations of women in modern times are not the same as in southern Alabama, women are still oppressed today. It is not always clear to see, but women today are so used to acting a certain way, they are unable to recognize the inequality between genders and races. Through Aunt Alexandra the reader is able to grasp, that not every woman is capable of having the incredible amount of strength it takes to break away from the socially accepted roles.
For example, when Mr. Keating pushed Todd to think freely and for himself. The scene took place during the school year in Mr. Keating’s English class. Todd at the time was shy and stayed away from participation, so Mr. Keating wanted him to read his poem out loud, but Todd didn’t do it. Mr. Keating then made Todd “`yawp” and describe Uncle Walt, a picture on the wall just saying and not thinking. Todd then went on to tell a great poem through Mr. Keating helping Todd find his inner voice, the class cheered, and Mr. Keating told Todd, “Don’t you forget this”.
Humans live in a world where moral values are very clearly set determining what is good and what is bad. We know what scares us and how racism should be treated. Nevertheless, this was not the case back in Alabama during the 1950s. In the famous novel To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee narrates the lives of the people of Maycomb, Alabama, focusing on the story of Scout and Jem Finch, and the case of a said to be rape. In this emotion filled narrative, readers learn how life was back then not only in general, but for the separate social statuses that there was.
Afro-American women writers present how racism permeates the innermost recesses of the mind and heart of the blacks and affects even the most intimate human relationships. While depicting the corrosive impact of racism from social as well as psychological perspectives, they highlight the human cost black people have to pay in terms of their personal relationships, particularly the one between mother and daughter. Women novelists’ treatment of motherhood brings out black mothers’ pressures and challenges for survival and also reveals their different strategies and mechanisms to deal with these challenges. Along with this, the challenges black mothers have to face in dealing with their adolescent daughters, who suffer due to racism and are heavily influenced by the dominant value system, are also underlined by these writers. They portray how a black mother teaches her daughter to negotiate the hostile, wider world, and prepares her to face the problems and challenges boldly and confidently.
