Prompt #1 From the passage in chapter eleven, there are a lot of examples of symbolism that contribute to Lily and Zach’s relationship. The quote “Sometimes I would feel like I was hooked on the chain with them.” is a good example that resembles how Lily felt with the fish attached to her (Kidd 230). When those boys tied the living fish to Lily, she was completely freaked out and scared. When Zach explains how he knows what it is like to be hooked on a chain, it symbolizes his feelings towards Lily that she was not alone.
On the first page of the novel, “The Secret Life of Bees” the Heroine of the book, Lily Owens, declared that, “my life went spinning off into a whole new orbit,” (page 1) we as readers have no clue whatsoever what she is talking about. Lily seems like a child with a normal life but that can easily be proven wrong; at the age of four she happen to kill her mother without knowing it and has a father in which can be a bit brutal at times. Despite everything, Lily is a lady who loved to learn things about her mother every chance she got, it was clear she had love for Deborah, no doubt, even if she didn’t have any memories of her. An example that perfectly demonstrates this is the argument Lily and T. Ray had: Lily declared that Deborah wouldn’t
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.
In Kidd’s novel, The Secret Life of Bees, the author alludes to a bombing of a Baptist church in Birmingham to emphasize the terror that multiple characters, such as May, felt. In the novel, August clarifies the meaning of the wailing wall to Lily with one of the events that caused May’s sadness, “Birmingham, Sept 15, four little angels dead” (98). To further explain, the church in Birmingham had a large African-American congregation and served as a meeting place for civil rights leaders. Therefore, the Ku Klux Klan felt intimidated, so on September 15, they bombed the church and killed four little girls. So with the result of that, the Ku Klux Klan members hoped to scare African-Americans from trying to earn their civil rights.
The book “The Secret Life Of Bees” by Sue Monk Kidd expresses the power of women and the importance of a mother in life. Throughout the story, Lily was guided and protected by three black women , at the time period of when Civil Right Act was being passed. Racial interaction was yet to be common at the time and setting of the book but was no problem to Lily. Lily found her queen bee mother and felt at home there in her hive. The inspiration of the first book “The Secret Life Of Bees” was by Kidd’s small hometown of Sylvester, Georgia during the Civil Right Movement.
The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd is a book about a lost girl, who only seeks to learn more about her mother by traveling to the place she truly believes she will find answers, Tiburon, South Carolina. Her journey to find her long-awaited answers begins with her father and ends with August, the oldest of the Boatwright sisters. She hears various stories all of which form an idea in Lily’s mind of who her mother was. Of course, there were some details that Lily didn’t want to hear, but it was apart of her journey. Each and every single answer that she receives is unique and describes who Deborah was in different ways.
“Oftentimes. when people are miserable, they will want to make other people miserable, too. But it never helps.” (Snicket). When someone is struggling or feeling distress, that person will most likely make another person feel the same way.
When living in a small town, there is often a strong sense of community. It feels as if everyone knows everything about everyone. Stories change things that may not be true. When trying to find the truth, there are lies that can be blended in. In Sue Monk Kidd's novel, The Secret Life of Bees, the motif of family history is utilized to characterize the setting as tradition and collective memory, while also shaping the character of Lily Owens as she navigates her identity within the community.
The novel The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd opens in South Carolina during the 1960s, in the towns of Sylvan and Tiburon. The main protagonist Lily Melissa Owens, life has been shaped around her blurred memory of her mother, Deborah, after she was killed. When Lily’s black “stand-in mother,” Rosaleen, is arrested for insulting three racist men in their town of Sylvan. Then, Lily decides to spring them both free: herself escaping her neglectful and abusive father, T. Ray, and helping Rosaleen escape from the jail. The duo then escape to Tiburon - a town that they believes holds the secret to the past of her mother.
Pain is one thing everyone shares. Everyone in the world is affected by pain at one point in their life. Pain affects everyone differently, some people take it to heart and punish themselves, while others blame others for their pain and punish them. In The Secret Life of Bees, Sue Monk Kidd uses death and memories to convey the idea that people deal with pain and grief in different ways. Lily sees pain as a reflection on herself and uses it as an excuse to lock herself away from the rest of the world and suffer in silence.
Emotions, the cause of many different outcomes, and lingering thoughts. Those thoughts of ours can be as bad as an earworm, considering how it repeats over and over, until people begin to doubt themselves, but it’s worse when the thought is negative. It slowly becomes so irrational, and everything just becomes assumed. The author Sue Monk Kidd exemplifies this in her novel, “the Secret Life of Bees,” when the main character lies of her past and her feelings. Lies can affect ones feelings about him or herself, but they can’t define him or her.
Segregation has been a huge issue in our society since the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s. The battle between African Americans trying to become equal made our country split completely in half. Different rules and regulations were made for blacks to follow during school, work, and in other public places. The states further down South were very segregated and it also made it much harder for blacks to gain freedom. Many people viewed this time period through the phrase ‘love transcends race’.
“When you get down to it, that's the only purpose grand enough for a human life. Not just to love - but to persist in love.” I read these words in Sue Monk Kidd’s novel, The Secret Life of Bees, the summer before my senior year. It’s the story of selfless love, everlasting hope, and incredible faith - all three things I aspire to surround myself with some day. The novel not only challenged my views of the world, but also inspired me to consider new ways of handling difficult situations, similar to the ones with which I am faced as a peer counselor at my school.
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.
Why is it, that we live in a society that thinks success and lying is more important than honesty? Could it possibly be because this was how we grew up? Blinded by our own self- preservation, It’s not our fault. We learn from our mentors, parents and even by strangers we pass on the streets. It’s hard to process that this has been a constant battle in not just our time era, but decades before us.
