Sue Monk Kidd presents Lily’s insecure personality in her novel The Secret Life of Bees to convince the audience to see Lily in an innocent light. Kidd desires to portray Lily as innocent to justify her running away from T. Ray and her home. An excerpt from the onset of the book reveals Lily’s insecurity: “There was nothing worse than clumps of whispering girls who got quiet when I passed. I started picking scabs off my body and, when I didn’t have any, gnawing the flesh around my fingernails till I was a bleeding wreck”(9). As one analyzes this portion of the book, Lily convinces herself that she does not care what the others think about her.
Have you ever thought about what your mother means to you? Have you ever wondered what life would be like without her? In the novel The Secret Life of Bees, Sue Monk Kidd writes about a young Lily Owens living in Sylvan, South Carolina the mid 1960’s with her abusive father T. Ray and her housekeeper Rosaleen. Lily is fourteen years old and has grown up with the guilt of accidentally shooting and killing her mother when Lily was only four years old. Lily has many questions about her mother but doesn’t know where to begin looking for the answers.
Chapter 1 The five aspects of a quest are: (a) a quester, (b) a place to go, (c) a stated reason to go there, (d) challenges and trials en route, and (e) a real reason to go there. A book that uses the aspects of a quest very nicely is the secret life of bees. (a) The quester in this story is a young girl named lily owens who fights with her father and does not have a mother because lily accidently shot her when she younger.
The Secret Life of Bees begins with fourteen-year-old Lily Owens who is reflecting back on the summer and all of the growth and change that she made as time progressed. The novel starts of by introducing her home which is a peach farm in the town of Sylvan, South Carolina where she lives with her abusive and ignorant father T. Ray Owens. Lily lost her mother when she was four years old, and every since she has not felt right in the world as though something has been taken away from her life. Thus, she always has flashbacks of her mother Deborah Fontanel Owens. The last memory she carries of her mother was the day she passed away.
The Secret Life of Bees, an American novel written by Sue Monk Kidd, presents Lily Owens’ journey to seek for the love of a mother, as she ran away from home to stay at the Boatwright sisters’ house to escape her father’s abuse. Throughout the book, readers can infer that Lily misses her mom immensely, however, aside from yearning for her mother’s presence, Lily also expresses her curiosity in her mother’s life before her death. One day, she finds out from August that her mother has left her and ran away from home before she died. This knowledge alters everything that Lily feels for her mother, and she completely forgets about the motherly tenderness that she dreams of everyday. Instead, all she can feel is resentment and hatred.
(Kidd, 294), shows Lily as she is about to be thrown back into her ‘jar’, just like the
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
Lastly, Lily finally builds up the courage to stand up to her father. She does this by saying, “I said I’m not leaving” (296). For Lily’s whole life, she was blamed for her mother’s death especially by her father. He is a terrible father to her because he mentally and physically abuses her, and makes her feel
Introduction In the novel, “The Secret Life of Bees,” written by Sue Monk Kidd an important character who showed maturity and took significant action in her life was Lily. We see this when (1) she leaves home and (2) moves in with the Boatwright sisters and, at the end of novel, (3) challenging her father and making the decision to become a permanent part of the Boatwright community. We see Lily begin to trust her own instincts and have the courage to forgive herself as she grows under the care of the Boatwright sisters. Lily leaving home was an important action she took that shows maturity on her part. This action showed that she was both stable minded enough and grown up to be able to make a concious decision about a life-altering aspect
In the beginning of the book we knew nothing about her mother. Mostly about how T- ray is the meanest man in the world. In the novel lily said that he wouldn’t let her read or have fun. What she had to do was help him work his peach farm all day. Lily also said that she hated him for telling her that her mother didn’t love her.
The Secret Life Of Bees- Literary Analysis A conflict in The Secret Life Of Bees is that Lily has to deal with her father with him mistreating her all the time. Her father is depressed, mad and built up with a lot of anger because of the death of his wife. The first situation in the book Secret Life Of Bees is that lily has to deal with her dad, T.ray mistreating her all the time.
The Character I Admired “Secret Life of Bees,” a book written by Sue Monk Kidd is about a fourteen year old girl named Lily Owens that has her whole life flash before her eyes because of the blurred haunting memory of the afternoon her mother was killed when she was only four years old. I personally haven’t dealt with this, but I can only imagine how it feels to have your mother’s life be taken away because of an accidental action you decided to take. In this story, there are characters of different skin colors, different personalities, different beliefs and they all somehow come together to form an usual, but loving family. But because of this there are some characters more adored than others, if it’s because they lied, there personality is not nice, or they are abusive, each character has their own reasons behind why they act like they do. Even though many people’s favorite character in the “Secret Life of Bees” is Lily, the character I admired the most in this book was August because she was kind and understanding.
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
Lily says, “And there they were. All these mothers. I have more mothers than any eight girls off the street” (298). Then Lily says, “ I remember the sight of them standing there waiting. All these women, all this love, waiting” (299).
“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.