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The secret life of bees
Secret life of bees personal essay
Secret life of bees personal essay
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More handpicked essays just for you.
The secret life of bees
Secret life of bees personal essay
Secret life of bees personal essay
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
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.
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
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.
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).
Anna Quindlen’s use of detail, along with imagery and language, paints a picture of her struggle with attaining perfection while in college. Her speech, often pensive and foreboding, warns of the dangers of pursuing perfection and the joy felt when one gives up that inane dream. Quindlen’s details planted from beginning to end of her speech are designed to get a clear message across to her audience: Don’t try to be perfect. This is elaborated upon when she says, “the thing that is. . .really amazing, is giving up on being perfect and beginning the work of becoming yourself”.
The fact that she can walk away from all those terrible experiences with love for her parents is incredible. Another thing I loved about this book is how it represents her parents, with all their faults, and their poor mentality, at its worst, without anger, or really any judgment, just with the love. If she had been bitter in her description it would not have been as amazing. This memoir was written with forgiveness making me respect her for not only surviving such a strange childhood to become a successful, but for being able to view her past with
Chapter 1 The five aspects of a quest are: (a) a quester, (b) a place to go, (c) a stated reason to go there, (d) challenges and trials en route, and (e) a real reason to go there. A book that uses the aspects of a quest very nicely is the secret life of bees. (a) The quester in this story is a young girl named lily owens who fights with her father and does not have a mother because lily accidently shot her when she younger.
“The gun on the floor. Bending to pick it up. The noise that exploded around us. This is what I know about myself. She was all I wanted.
Symbolism: ‘The Secret Life Of Bees’ “Lily Melissa Owens, your jar is open.” (Kidd, 41). Just like the bees escaped the jar, Lily has to, in able to find her freedom. Lily Owens, the main character, is living with an abusive father, who won’t let her out of her ‘jar’ (home). ‘The Secret Life Of Bees’ is set in 1964, during the Civil Rights Movement.
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.
Growing up. One of the most difficult things someone has to do, but everyone goes through it. A universal experience, Coming of age creates who we are and who we become. Lily from the book/movie The Secret Life of Bees is a big character who has faced coming of age.
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
In the article, Birds and Bees, No Let’s Talk about Dollars and Cents, by Ben Stein, he successfully makes his point to inform his son that he needs self discipline to create human and financial capital to have a more stable life. The young boy has been living large his whole life and his father wants to help him keep it going by having self-discipline to make smart decisions so he doesn’t live in fear and insecurity. Ben Stein uses many anecdotes to get the point across to his son and the readers of the New York Times that people are capable of coming from nothing and turning into something with the willpower to make smart choices. With the use of anecdotes and repetition all throughout the letter, it allows Stein to utilize logos, pathos,
Her consideration of the town’s thoughts indicates that August is self-conscious of other people’s judgment. As a result, she allows this consciousness to cloud her judgment for a split second before reaching a final decision. Lily, finally understanding, says “‘All this time I just figured you liked pink’ . . . She laughed again” (Kidd 147). Combined with the use of short syntax, it proves once again that August is caring, acknowledging that Lily is able to grip what she said,
“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.