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Secret Life Of Bees Boundaries

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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. The article relates to, “The Secret Life of Bees” because on the journey they are constantly doing anything and everything to end the laws by pushing boundaries.

In the book, “The Secret Life of Bees” Rosaleen as constantly pushing boundaries. For example it says, “For a second they stared down at the juice, dribbled like car oil across their shoe. They blinked, trying to make it register. When they looked up, I watched their faces go from surprise to anger, then outright fury.” (Kidd 32)It was very rude for the men to make fun of her size and race but it was the 1960s and most people were racist. Rosaleen pushed the boundaries when she poured her black spit across their shoe and to make it worse, she just had to do it on one of the most racist people in the town. Another example in …show more content…

For instance it says, “For two weeks, the activists planned to flout Jim Crow laws by sitting on the front of the buses and in “whites only” waiting rooms in bus terminals.” This mean that they just disregarded the rules of the Jim Crow Laws and sat where they wanted. As a result of doing this, they were pushing boundaries. Also in the article they said that they were attacked by, “white supremacist mobs” that could have killed them because they went too far to push the

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Page 101 briefly shifts to bird’s-eye view when the officers begin to further enforce restrictions on the freedom riders, playing to the same idea of disassociation with the scene and the lack of freedom present below. This directly refers to the status of civil rights in Mississippi when African-Americans lacked equal rights to their fairer skinned brethren, but also speaks to the authoritarian policing and poor treatment towards

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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

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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

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The story takes place at the height of the Civil Rights Movement in America, when desegregation is finally achieved. Flannery O’Connor’s use of setting augments the mood and deepens the context of the story. However, O’Connor’s method is subtle, often relying on connotation and implication to drive her point across. The story achieves its depressing mood mostly through the use of light and darkness in the setting.

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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.

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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

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In the 1960s, change progressively began to establish itself in the United States, especially in 1964, when the Civil Rights Act was signed into law by Lyndon B. Johnson. These years proved to be violent amongst the African American and White communities, sometimes taking the lives of innocent black Americans who were trying to fulfill their rights as American citizens. Lily Owens, a 14-year-old white timid school girl and the protagonist in Sue Monk Kidd's The Secret Life of Bees, witnessed this cruelty with her own eyes. Growing up in the south in Sylvan, South Carolina, Lily inadvertently developed her own stereotypes about African Americans. As the novel progressed, Lily came to realize her prejudice upon meeting August Boatwright,

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The act of racial discrimination impacts innocent people's lives in numerous, negative ways; hence why multiple people, worldwide can not tolerate racism and discrimination. The novel written by Sue Monk Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees, displays a wide range of scenarios where racism results in suffering. Rosaleen, a black woman, will never forget how three white men negatively impact her life; she will remain scarred unto death. Also, ever since the racial incident involving April and her twin, May, pain is constantly accompanying April; consequently, she commits suicide. Finally, when May loses April, she endures all the various sufferings of the world, including racial discrimination.

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After watching her father fight hard for a case he was bound to loose, hearing all the mean names her family and Tom was called and hearing the news of Tom’s death she began to understand the reality of racism. “Just what I said. Grandma says it's bad enough he lets you all run wild, but now he's turned out a nigger-lover we'll never be able to walk the streets of Maycomb agin. He's ruinin' the family, that's what he's doin'.” (Lee, 110)

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“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.

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