The Secret Life Of Bees Gender Roles

In the book, The Secret Life of Bees, The main character Lily Owens, is affected by two major character rings throughout the book and on the journey to find out more about her mother since she died when Lily was young after she accidentally shot her causing Lily to have to grow up without her mother and deal with the abuse she faces from her father which leaves Lily feeling as though she is unlovable by anyone.

The character rings that affect Lily the most in The Secret Life of Bees are her gender and her ethnicity. For example, at the beginning of the book, Lily finds a box of stuff that used to belong to her mother that her father T. Ray hid away in the attic. After Lily finds this box of stuff, she buries it in the ground near her house.

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). As he says this Lily can see the pain and hurt in his eyes and that he has been treating her life because he was still hurt over the fact that she killed her mother Deborah and the fact that before she died she was trying to leave T. Ray because he was making her sad and

For example, while Lily is staying with the Boatwright sisters, she runs some errands with Zach which include delivering honey to stores and places of business. At one of the places she and Zach deliver honey to which is a lawyer, the receptionist notices that Lily is there with Zach and asks where she’s staying but when Lily says she’s staying at the Boatwrights house she gets a confused face and awkwardly continues back with doing her work. Lily, though, gets a little offended over the way the receptionist acted because she knows why she looked so confused about her staying with the Boatwright sisters and it’s because Lily is white and the sisters are black. This type of behavior by Lily’s white peers continues throughout the book including when after May dies a police officer comes over to the Boatwright’s house to ask them questions and starts to question Lily on why she’s here staying with them. Lily lies to the police officer saying she was an orphan and that she was only staying with the Boatwrights until she went to stay with her aunt Bernie. The police officer asks her if she has anyone else to stay within Tiburon, more specifically if she has any white people she can stay with and if staying with the Boatwrights was her only option. Lily says that it is and is almost confused as to why the police officer was asking her so many questions