ipl-logo

The Secret Life Of Bees By Sue Monk Kidd

692 Words3 Pages

What do bees have to do with a young girl enduring a most unfortunate family situation living in the south? Fourteen year old Lily is painfully aware that her cruel father doesn’t care about her. She longs for her loving mother who she vaguely remembers was always there to take care of her. Her ignorance of any other way of life causes her to despair of all hope. In the book The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd the main character, Lily is torn between experience of her painful family situation with an abusive father; ignorance of her mother and a better life available to her.

Lily is constantly aware of her cruel and abusive father. Her father, T-Ray always ignores Lily and tells her that when she goes to work the peach stand she …show more content…

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. I would meet her saying, Mother forgive. Please forgive” (Monk Kidd, 3). Not knowing the truth about her mother was part of her ignorance of knowing a better life available to …show more content…

After being abused by her father for so long, Lily decides to run away with Rosaleen to Tiburon, a town that was written on the back of one of her mother’s pictures.

Fantina 3

the author say that “Lily finds a picture of a black Virgin Mary with Tiburon S.C. on the back so, blindly, she and Rosaleen head there”(Zaleski). Lily finds a family in Tiburon, the Boatwright’s that will let her stay as long as she wants to. With the Boatwright’s she learns about bees and how to get honey from them and they help her understand who she really is. As Lily gets more comfortable with the family she decides to tell them the truth and finds out that they knew her mother. The bees and the beekeepers help Lily find out that there is definitely a better world available to her.

In The Secret Life of Bees, Lily overcomes her fears and present troubles to attain a better life. Lily longs for the truth about her mother and finds that truth is hiding in Tiburon South Carolina. She is painfully aware that her father might come and take her back to the horrible life she used to live. However she learns that the bees are free, that they live and rely on each other, and she tries to be free and happy like them. Lily soon discovers and comes to terms with her mother’s past, learns about beekeepers and is happy that she can now trust people and have friends that are like

Show More
Related
508 Words | 3 Pages

Lily ending up at her mother’s previous home was so unlikely, nearly impossible. In the real world, Lily would not have been accepted into their home so easily either. In conclusion, some parts of “The Secret Life of Bees” probably would not occur in the real

Read More
683 Words | 3 Pages

Rosaleen is Lily’s maid/nanny but she cares a lot more about her than most black nannies would have at the time. “You hurting?... Why don’t we sit down on the road awhile?” (28) Lily’s knees are raw from the grits T. Ray made her kneel on and, even though Rosaleen really wants to get her voter’s card, she puts Lily’s needs ahead of her own.

Read More
858 Words | 4 Pages

It is evident that bees serve as a symbol in Lily’s life due to the guidance and comfort they provide Lily, the roles they both serve, and feelings such as loss Lily and the bees both experience. Humans need the same necessities as bees in order not to

Read More
211 Words | 1 Pages

Set in the year 1964, “The Secret Life of Bees” written by Sue Monk Kidd is a novel written about the coming of age and maturation of Lily Owens, a young girl struggling to heal from the pain of her mother's death. Growing up without a mother was hard enough for Lily, especially when she was deemed as the underlying cause for her death. Lily was surrounded by her abusive father T-Ray, and her stand-in mother Rosaleen until with a little help from the bees, she decided it was time for her to escape. Throughout the novel, bees were used as a powerful symbol. The bee colony represented an unspoken guide for Lily, a portal of communication, and the relationship between the women in the novel.

Read More
644 Words | 3 Pages

The Color of Your Skin Means Nothing When a little girl runs away, wouldn’t you want to know what happens to her? Well in Sue Monk Kidd’s book, The Secret Life of Bees a little girl named Lily leaves home. While she is gone she learns a bunch of life lessons, one of them being about the color of your skin. In the book The Secret Life of Bees, Sue shows us that the color of your skin does not mean anything.

Read More
1051 Words | 5 Pages

Have you ever read a novel that starts off with a suspenseful beginning and a peaceful ending? Well, this is The Secret Life of Bees. The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd, is a heartwarming story of a young girl named Lily Owens, who sets out on a journey with Rosaleen, her stand-in mother, to uncover the truth about Deborah Owens and her past. It explores themes of love, race, and the power of sisterhood. In The Secret Life of Bees, August has had the greatest impact on Lilly's growth and development because her calm leadership is an important source of energy that's needed within the sisterhood community as she comes to terms with her family.

Read More
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.

Read More
798 Words | 4 Pages

Love is an involuntary factor that many people have come across in life. In the novel The Secret Life of Bees, by Sue Monk Kidd, the main character Lily, has an internal conflict with her mother which affects how open she is to love. Lily grew up with her father and the culpability of her mother's death.(more info) She was raised with a harsh understanding of love due to the lack of love given to her all throughout her life, for she was more open to love because she hasn't doted as a child. However, Lily found love through the Daughter of Mary, the Boatwright sisters, and Rosaleen, who later taught her how to love herself.

Read More
1446 Words | 6 Pages

Lily didn’t know this as she had no pictures of her mother and had no idea what she looked like until after she ran away from her father's house and went to the Boatwright sister's house. There were three Boatwright sisters named June, May, and August and they ran a family honey bee company. Lily went to find the Boatwrights because of a picture she found in the box of her mother's stuff she found in her attic on the picture she found there was a black woman with the name of the town where the Boatwright sisters lived in the back of it. The Boatwright sisters lived in a town named Tiburon, South Carolina, which wasn’t that far from where Lily was first living until she ran away to live with them. After Lily finds out from August that she looks a lot like her mother she starts to realize why T. Ray treated her so badly and like she wasn’t even his daughter which is reinforced when he says “You look like her”(296).

Read More
1401 Words | 6 Pages

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.

Read More
302 Words | 2 Pages

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

Read More
705 Words | 3 Pages

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.

Read More
718 Words | 3 Pages

Coursework 1 In the secret life of Bees Sue Monk Kidd makes the relationship between her and her parents really interesting because throughout the novel all kinds of things start to happen between them. In the beginning of the novel, Deborah wasn't really there for Lily when she was growing up. The reason behind that is because there was an accident with Deborah, Lilly and T. Ray.

Read More
730 Words | 3 Pages

Lily then consequently comes to find that the tables are turned and that her mother is the one who is in need of forgiveness. She shows her struggle by saying, “people in general would rather die than forgive” (Kidd 277). Capriciously, she contemplates the situation thinking for one moment “it is over and done,” but in the next she “would be picturing her in the pink house, or out by the wailing wall” (Kidd 278). Ultimately, after her entire debacle, with thrown honey jars as well as many headaches, Lily comes to learn that “you have to find a mother inside yourself” (Kidd 288). This idea sets Lily at ease giving her the knowledge that everything is going to be peaceful from this moment on and that she can take the time to learn to forgive others, just as she has to learn to forgive

Read More
983 Words | 4 Pages

“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.

Read More

More about The Secret Life Of Bees By Sue Monk Kidd

Related Topics

Open Document