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Secret Life Of Bees By Sue Monk Kidd

1303 Words6 Pages

Lily Owens who is the main character in the book Secret life of bees, written by Sue Monk Kidd. Lily is a 14 year old girl who is figuring out her life while trying to uncover her deceased mothers. This book is about her coming of age story and her life and the struggles of living in a racist era in 1964 South Carolina, she is on a journey after escaping her abusive father, to find where her mother would run off to. Lily and June Boatwright are very complex characters, who hold a lot of hate and misjudgement for themselves for their past. Both characters are confronted by these feelings they wish to ignore and they have to learn to overcome them and deal with them to let themselves be happy. Lily has been seeing these “bees’ ever since she …show more content…

Especially as a woman she knew of the misogyny she was faced with when she lived with her father, doing chores, can't wear revealing clothes, etc. Through the events of the book she grows mature and is able to acknowledge the deeper effects of racism that has on her new family and friends. She just knows herself cannot defeat racism but she is able to work around the racist laws and events. “It was a ridiculous question, though, because once you know the truth, you can’t ever go back and pick up your suitcase of lies. Heavier or not, the truth is yours now.”(Kidd 256). Lily is a very deep character who holds a lot of guilt, sadness, and hatred over herself for what happened to her and her mother. But as she grows more mature and finally learns the truth she knows she has to accept it for what it is. She's able to work it out herself and realize there is a place for her in the world. She never was able to accept who she was until …show more content…

June is a young and intelligent black woman who works with her older and younger sister August and May Boatwright with the honey business. However no matter how cold and rude she acted towards these two newcomers, everything she does is out of protection and care of herself and her sisters. All she had ever experienced in life was heartbreak and Death, so she puts up these walls around herself to protect herself and her heart from ever getting hurt again, even if she has to push away family and her loving boyfriend who has genuine love for her. June lost a younger sister before due to racism and suicide, then her ex fiance left her at the altar. June is scared to let herself be that vulnerable with someone again after being hurt like that by the love of her life, now she has Neil but is scared that the same thing will happen again. But through loss and new relationships June is able to overcome a lot of her fears and

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Character Analysis Of Lily Owens In 'The Secret Life Of Bees'

191 Words | 1 Pages

Lily Owens is the main character in the book “The Secret Life of Bees”. Lily is the protagonist and also the narrator of the book. Lily was a 14-year-old teenage girl living in the fictional town of Sylvan, South Carolina in the time of 1964. She lives on a peach farm with her father who she calls T.Ray. her father(T.Ray) who beats, punishes, and abuses her.

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The Secret Life Of Bees By Sue Monk Kid

601 Words | 3 Pages

She turns 14 at the beginning of the book and she is a troubled young girl. She lives with a lot of pain of guilt and regret, and she struggles through the book with finding herself and learning how to let her self forgive. Rosaleen: Is Lily's black nanny and she is the closest thing she has to a mother. He has taken care of her since she was a little girl and make sure Lily gets what she needs.

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The Secret Life Of Bees By Sue Monk Kidd

513 Words | 3 Pages

The Secret Life Of Bees, is the first novel of Sue Monk Kidd and it received many awards such as the 2002 Orange Prize in England. This novel was adapted for the stage as well as for the screen. It won the People's choice Award and the NAACP image award for the best picture,2008.(suemonkkidd.com) This realistic fiction novel takes place in rural South Carolina in 1964. A motherless Lily lives with her abusive father and wants to know about her mother’s life.

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The Secret Life Of Bees By Sue Monk Kidd

1154 Words | 5 Pages

Lily’s mother is the cause of much of her grief, through her journey she imagines her mother in a way that does not accurately depict who her mother truly was. When she finds out what her mother actually was she, “I stood

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Lily Owens In The Secret Life Of Bees

482 Words | 2 Pages

In the story the secret life of bees the main character is Lily Owens. She is 14 years old and lives with her father T-Ray and caretaker Rosaleen. When Lily was just 4 years old she had accidentally shot her mother by trying to hand her the gun while her dad was abusing her mother. Now, 10 years later, she still feels the guilt and sorrow of her mother's death weighing her down. I admire Lily’s courage and kindness.

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Racism In T. Ray's The Secret Life Of Bees

275 Words | 2 Pages

The secret life of bees is the story of a white teenage girl, Lily Melissa. Lily is fourteen years old living with her father T.Ray. T.Ray owned a peach farm and was also bad and abusive to lily. Bees often visited Lily as she laid in her bed at night though she never got bitten by them. Lily lost her mother at the age of four, growing up she held a terrible secret which she believed she had shot her mother, Deborah.

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The Secret Life Of Bees By Sue Monk Kidd

482 Words | 2 Pages

The bees surrounded her but did not bother to sting her. “Looking back on it now,” Lily says, “I want to say the bees were sent to me. I want to say they showed up like the angel Gabriel appearing to the Virgin Mary” (Kidd 2). According to the passage, the bees were a foretelling of the changes her life was about to undergo. Furthermore, in the store in Tiburon, Lily ponders over this while looking at the jars of Black Madonna

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The Secret Life Of Bees By Sue Monk Kidd

692 Words | 3 Pages

Lily remembers being very close to her mother, and Lily was only four years old when her mother died. Lily was really depressed and mad at herself because she knew that she was the reason that her mother died. This quote states that “Lily is sustained by her wit and latent strength of character but at the same time by a profound need to make sense of powerful and confusing memories concerning her mother, Deborah, who died when she was four years old”(Monk Kidd). Years later when she was working in the peach stand, T-Ray came out and told her that she didn’t kill her mother but that her mother ran away and abandoned her. Lily says that “I lay in bed and thought about dying and going to be with my mother in paradise.

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A Secret Life Of Bees By Sue Monk Kidd

1339 Words | 6 Pages

I remember thinking that he probably loved me in his own small way. He had forfeited me, hadn’t he? Kidd, 299. This evidence proves that Lily was heavily influenced by her parents because after she is rid of both of them, it’s one of the first times that she can feel very strong love. For her whole childhood, she felt comforted by the idea that her mom loved her, but her perspective changed after learning the truth.

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The Secret Life Of Bees By Sue Monk Kidd

1186 Words | 5 Pages

Lily feels that these words were directed to her and felt like a bad person for the mistake of killing her mother. In a newspaper written by The Newcastle Herald, a statement stands out to the resemblance of this book and what the author is trying to show. As it states, “Lily finds solace in the guidance of the senior sister August, who holds the key to her past and slowly the rhythm of a new life with its funniness and sweetness is born…” THis helps to support my statement that Lily’s happiness and funniness grows when meeting and spending time with these girls. This was just the thing the young girl needed because at the time, Lily was feeling deep guilt for her actions.

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The Secret Life Of Bees Theme Essay

1401 Words | 6 Pages

In the story, Kidd’s use of characterization successfully reveals the theme that people's lives are more complex than they appear. Kidd demonstrates this theme using the characterization of Lily, T. Ray, May, and Deborah. One character that Sue Monk Kidd uses to portray the theme, is the main character Lily. In the beginning of the story, the author shows that Lily can be both mature and immature at times. An example of her maturity in the text is when she says, “People who think dying is the worst thing don’t know a thing about life” (Kidd 2).

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The Secret Life Of Bees Quote Analysis

1426 Words | 6 Pages

Continuing, another theme that led us through Lily’s adventure of growing up was her discovering how important storytelling was. She was going through gruesome horrid things, and when she read things like Shakespeare she realized how important it was because it helped her escape to a fantasy world for a little bit of time. Lastly, Lily learns the power of the female community. Lily grew up without a mother, so for a large chunk of her life she didn’t know the real power the female community held.

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Queenlessness In The Secret Life Of Bees

1507 Words | 7 Pages

"The queen… is the unifying force of the community; if she is removed from the hive… they show unmistakable signs of queenless" (Kidd 1). With Lily losing her mother at a young age she displays signs of "queenlessness". In the novel The Secret Life of Bees, Lily Owens grows up in Sylvan, South Carolina with her abusive father, T. Ray, and her loving house maid, Rosaleen, who is her only mother figure. There was an accident when Lily was young and Lily shot her mother, but she cannot remember exactly what happened that day since she was so young. Lily is so disgruntled at T. Ray, for not telling her about her mother and trying to cover up Lily's memories of her mother.

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What Are Some Examples Of Womanhood In Their Eyes Were Watching God

1151 Words | 5 Pages

She is strong, curious, independent and self-confident. Many trials throughout the book test her strength and independence but she overcomes. She recognizes as she gets older and gains more experience that there is a double standard for men and women. “The slave system defined black people as chattel. Since women no less than men were viewed as profitable labor units, they might as well have been genderless as far as slave holders were concerned” (Davis 5)

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The Role Of Feminism In Toni Morrison's Beloved

2515 Words | 11 Pages

In addition to that, the black community isolated Sethe because she did something that the community considered wrong. Black feminism will be the approach utilized here to see the oppression of woman of color because it includes sexism, classism and racism. Since the female characters are very dominant in the novel, a black feminist approach should be very effective and it enables one to see how the female characters deal with the past and live with it in the present, what motherhood mean to the female characters, and how much the past influences the female characters who lives in the present. The end of the novel reveals the forgiveness and the acceptance not only of the black community toward Sethe’s choice (killing her daughter) but also of the white people (the Bodwins) who accepted Denver to work for them. This reconciliation shows that the courage and the will to get rid off from the past to live side by side peacefully and to move toward the future together.

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