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The Secret Life Of Bees By Sue Kidd

925 Words4 Pages

The Secret Life of Bees, written by Sue Kidd, follows Lily Owens as she faces life’s continuous ups and downs. Lily’s troubled life at home plays a significant role in how she develops throughout the story. After Lily unintentionally kills her mother when she is young, her father T-Ray becomes both physically and emotionally abusive towards her. Since her mother’s death, she was mainly cared for by her maid, Rosaleen. Despite Lily's decision to run away from her father with Rosaleen and to leave behind the only family she had ever known, she learns what family really means when she meets the three sisters. Through a comparison of the relationships Lily shares with her father, Zach, and the three sisters, we see Lily grow as a young woman in …show more content…

When Lily finally stands up for herself against T-Ray, he says to her, “The truth is, your sorry mother ran off and left you. The day she died, she’d come back to get her things, that’s all. You can hate me all you want, but she’s the one who left you” (Kidd 39). The cruel truth and the way he tells her breaks Lily’s heart. As a consequence, she runs away with Rosaleen to be in a place where her mother had been. If it were not for T-Ray harshly revealing how her mother had left them, Lily never would have ended up at August’s house or developed into the stable and confident person she became. T-Ray’s brutality made Lily realize that she had to leave to save herself. In this moment she realizes her strength and independence could lead her to new opportunities. This proves to be a turning point in her life, and ultimately her growth as a young woman, as she ventures in hopes of finding something better. Similarly, near the end of the book, as August is telling Lily about her mother, Lily finds out that her mother had only married T-Ray because she was pregnant. Lily repeats in her mind, “Unwanted, I was an unwanted baby,” (249). Even though this is upsetting for Lily to realize, it forces her to come to the conclusion that leaving her dad was the right thing to do as she would always be “unwanted” by

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Rosaleen fills in for Lily’s parents with her openness and determined

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The Secret Life of Bees By: Sue Monk Kidd 1. Character List Lilly Owens is the main characters, narrator and the protagonist of this novel. She is fourteen years old and lives on a peach farm in Sylvan, South Carolina with her father who she calls T-Ray because they are not close and “daddy never fit him”. She also lives with their housekeeper Rosaleen. Throughout most of the novel, Lilly believes that she killed her mother when she was four years old during an argument between her and her father.

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The story is about a 14- year- old girl, Lily Owens who is from Sylvan, South Carolina. She is trying to find more information about her mother. When she does, her life was changes around. Lily has faced many obstacles. She is introduced to the secret life of bees which mirrors the secrets in her own life.

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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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In the novel, The Secret Lives of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd, Lily, the main character and May, one of the Boatwright sisters are conflicted with many events. One of the life lessons that were in this novel was, family, is a big part of who you are or who you turn out to be. Lily and May are the characters whose family is a big factor in who they are. In the beginning, Lily is a very intelligent, mischievous, girl. This is caused by, her dad who she calls T.Ray making her kneel on grits (crushed corn) even if she really didn’t do anything.

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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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“I learned a long time ago that some people would rather die than forgive. It’s a strange truth, but forgiveness is a painful and difficult process. It’s not something that happens overnight. It’s an evolution of the heart.” (Kidd)

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Her father, whom she loves, never shows any affection for her, and she has reason to believe that her mother, whom she so desperately wants to have loved her, abandoned her before Lily accidentally killed her. This complicated relationship to love leaves her without a clear idea of whether love can be a positive force in life at all, and she reaches the extreme, negatively charged opinion that the fiery passion of love destroys the world. Later in the novel, when Lily learns that love is not only about rejection and longing, her opinion of love softens a great deal, although she never recants on these poignant, passionate

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Overall, Lily’s idea of motherhood evolves a lot, and her happiness and fulfillment depends on finding various mother figures throughout the novel to fill the hole that her dead mother left. The first significant point in

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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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However, the main focus will be on Lily, who is now a young adult in search for answers and clarities in life. Besides growing up in an isolated environment during her early and crucial time in life, Lily has also been subjected to physical and emotional abuse by her brutal father who used to make a living by running a peach farm. Years after running off with her only mother figure, Rosaleen, and settling in a warm and welcoming household of women, Lily is still striving to find a more positive and relatable view of herself and life. In many ways, she tries to connect her past with her father and mother with the one she has created with Rosaleen and her new supportive family. Lily’s current ‘family” according to herself, consists in part of her estranged father T. Ray Owens, presumingly her deceased mother, Deborah, Rosaleen, the Boatwright sisters August, May and June, and her love interest Zachary.

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14) In this quote from the book at the very beginning one is able to see that Lily had this admiration and longing for her late mother and just wanted a sense of her to remember her by. Throughout the story one is able to see that as Lily comes to learn who her mother was and what she did she starts to create some sort of hatred towards her mother. The way she thinks about her mother changes as she comes to hear all the events that played out in her mother's life from a character named August who was important to Lily’s mother and Lily herself. “ “I guess one day it finally dawned on her: oh, yeah,

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Two of her sisters have this problem and it has genuinely affected August for better or worse. Lily’s father, T-Ray, deals with his mental illness by using violence and taking his anger out on Lily because of what happened with his wife Deborah. This causes Lily to feel unloved by her father. In the beginning of the story, Lily runs away from home to escape her tragic life with T. Ray.

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The character of Lily Owens evolves and changes as any young woman would throughout the course of her life. Lily begins the book as an insecure, detached, and unaware teenage girl. We see how Lily changed into a wise young woman as she solves the mystery of her mother’s life. Towards the end of the book Lily transforms into a young woman who is much more confident, happier, and vicarious. Lily has learned about love and biases.

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Lily's childhood was traumatic, as her father abused her mother, which has much to do with her staying in an abusive relationship. Lily and Ryle get married, and soon to follow, Ryle begins to regularly abuse Lily out of jealousy, anger, sadness, and his problems. When Lily loses hope and trust, she turns to her past boyfriend, Atlas Corrigan. Atlas was a boy

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