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Critical essay of the secret life of bees
Critical essay of the secret life of bees
Critical essay of the secret life of bees
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Sue Monk Kidd indirectly characterizes Rosaleen through speech , in The Secret Life of Bees, as brave in order to reveal that she cares about Lily enough to stand up to T Ray and be like a mother figure to Lily. An example of this is when Rosaleen defends Lily and her new baby chick, “ she said and looked him up one side and down the other ‘You ain’t touching that chick.’ ” (Kidd 11).In this scene, T Ray was threatening to kill Lily’s baby chick that she had recently acquired. Since Lily was only 8 years old she could not defend herself against her father, so Rosaleen is brave and steps in and acts as her mother in protecting her, and what she cares about, from her ill-tempered father. The author does this in order to explain to the reader
Many people think bees live a vague life compared to humans. However, Albert Einstein once said “If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe then man would only have four years of life left. No more bees, no more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no more man.” This quote illustrates how bees and humans live a similar life, each having their own set of tasks to accomplish. In the novel The Secret Life of Bees, Sue Monk Kidd uses bees as a metaphor for Lily’s life.
The book “The Secret Life of Bees” by Sue Monk Kidd is a book about a fourteen-year-old white girl named Lily Owens who lives on a peach farm in Sylvan, South Carolina with her father T. Ray who is abusive and neglectful. Lily lives with a secret that many people do not know about, she believes she shot and killed, Deborah, her mother when she was just four years old. This memory has been haunting her for many years, and she would like to learn more about her mother. Ever since Deborah passed away, Rosaleen, Lily’s nanny, has been taking care of her. When the Civil Rights Act was signed, Rosaleen decided she would go and register to vote.
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).
Another prevalent literary device in the novel is Kidd’s use of metaphors. As the novel is titled The Secret Life of Bees, unsurprisingly enough, the main metaphor of the novel are bees and their hive. The fact that there is a whole dynamic of jobs and responsibilities that go into running a successful hive is unknown to a lot of people compares to Lily’s life with the Boatwright sisters, since Lily and Rosaleen arrive at the Boatwright sister’s house unknown and unexpected. Lily describes this time as her “secret life,” shown by the quote: “‘Most people don’t have any idea about all the complicated life going on inside a hive. Bees have a secret life we don’t know anything about.’
On September 15, 1963 the group made a dreadful act. They placed a bomb under a staircase to the basement of 16th Street Birmingham Baptist Church. Four Girls, Denise McNair, who was eleven, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, and Addie Mae Collins, which were all 14, were killed in the bomb that exploded at 10:19 a.m(gale group). Twenty-two other people got injured, but were fortunate enough to survive. Former KKK members that included veterans supposedly committed the crime.
The Color of Your Skin Means Nothing When a little girl runs away, wouldn’t you want to know what happens to her? Well in Sue Monk Kidd’s book, The Secret Life of Bees a little girl named Lily leaves home. While she is gone she learns a bunch of life lessons, one of them being about the color of your skin. In the book The Secret Life of Bees, Sue shows us that the color of your skin does not mean anything.
Living in the pink house with the Boatwrights provides Lily Owens, a fourteen year old girl from Sylvan, South Carolina, with an experience like no other. As the protagonist, she gets to become a master beekeeper from the teachings of August. In the novel, The Secret Life of Bees, Sue Monk Kidd inserts symbolism through bees by drawing connections between the jobs of the bees in the hive and the characters of the novel. There are also other symbols that help to make the story. The bees illustrate the journey of the characters to show that a broken person will sew up their cracks of despair, just as a bee in a hive can not work unless surrounded by the fellow bees.
The Bombing 16th Street, Baptist Church The tragic event occurred on September 15, 1963. The act was carried out by members of the Ku Klux Klan, people who disliked blacks and did horrible things because of this, in Birmingham, Alabama. Alabama was a Southern state and allowed segregation. The explosion went off at approximately 10:20 A.M., when Sunday school was ending and the service was beginning.
Thousands of children are getting abused by their parents. In Sue Monks Kid’s novel, The Secret Life of Bees, Lily Owens uses old lost memories of her belated mother and dusty items left by her mother to find the truth behind her mother's death. On Lily's quest, she meets 3 black bee keeper sisters who hold the secrets of her mother. Symbolism is the cornerstone of the novel, The Secret Life of Bees, the bees symbolized Lily in several ways. One instance in which bees symbolized Lily is when the bees were trapped in a jar is like how Lily was trapped with her dad.
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 Secret Lives of People The Secret Life of Bees, by Sue Monk Kidd, is an interesting story that connects human lives to bees. The story takes place in 1964 during the Civil Rights Movement and fourteen year-old Lily Owens leaves her abusive father and her home in Sylvan, South Carolina to go to Tiburon with hopes to find information on her mother. Throughout the story, Lily struggles with many internal conflicts and also meets several mother figures along the way.
Birmingham church bombing by:Kareena Holkar One of the most horrific bombing has happened in Birmingham Alabama. It had happened at 10:22 a.m. on the morning of September 15,1963. 200 church members were in the building and many attending Sunday school classes before the start of the 11 a.m. service-when the bomb donated on the church’s East side, spraying mortar and bricks from the front of the church and caving its interior walls. Most parishioners were able to evacuate the building as it filled with smoke but, the bodies of the 4 young girls named Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robert, and Denise McNair were found beneath the rubble in a basement restroom. 11-year-old Sarah Collins, who was also in the restroom at the time of the explosion, lost her right eye, and more than 20 other people were injured in the blast.
The authors use of words such as “dark clouds of racial prejudice” and “I cannot sit idly by” shows the injustice that was occurring in Birmingham. The “dark clouds” represent the social climate of Birmingham, allowing readers to see the negative effect it his having on the black citizens. He believed the injustice needed to be addressed and action needed to be taken against it, therefore what he did was justified. Additionally when Martin Luther King writes, “nagging signs reading ‘white’ men and colored when your first name becomes ‘nigger’ and your wife and mother are never given the respected title of Mrs…” This further demonstrates the unjust treatment of African Americans which is why someone needed to take action and not idly sit by as these things occcurred.
This excerpt from the book, “The Beet Queen,” describes in short about the events that happen the night two children, Karl and Mary, come to the town of Argus. The author illustrates the impact of the monotonous town of Argus on the two children by implementing images, small but important details and the tone of the overall passage. Throughout the passage, the impact of the environment is different for each of the children. Erdrich describes Mary as “square and practical,” like her name.
