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How does society influence one's behavior
Racial Discrimination in Literature
How does the society shape the behavior of an individual
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In the 1960’s a racial divide was the main source of conflict in the United States. White people were treated as superiors just because of their skin color, black people always got the short end of the stick and were treated poorly. The civil rights act was signed in 1964 in attempts to end the discrimination but it was not effective. In The Secret Life of Bees, Sue Monk Kidd proves that love can challenge a person’s belief system and alter the reality of their world. Kidd portrays a young narrator who leaves home only to find unconditional love and acceptance from a family of another race despite a turbulent, prejudiced world. Kidd begins her novel in the small conservative town of Sylvan, South Carolina. She highlights Lily’s childhood …show more content…
and upbringing through her father Terence Ray, whom Lily refers to as T. Ray. Lily eventually leaves home and moves in with three black sisters: May, June, and August. She is thrown into a world she is not expecting, and Lily faces injustices and prejudices that she did not know existed. These experiences change Lily’s perception of the world around her. The environment of Sylvan influenced Lily’s way of thinking, growing up in a small town does not leave a lot of room for diversity.
She came from a town known to discriminate against people with different colored skin, causing her to discriminate against them, too. While telling her story, Lily acknowledges fault in her ways of thinking. She admits to thinking the stereotypes she had heard about black people were true. After August tells her a story she finds intriguing, Lily admits “I thought they could be smart, but not as smart as me, me being white” (Kidd 78). After several other conversations with August, Lily realizes that she had been completely wrong and black people were just as smart as white people. Lily goes to a segregated school. She never saw a person of color there and assumed every black person was dumb because of it. Lily hears the children at school talking badly of those who are of a different race and laughs at their remarks. Lily’s father T. Ray had black people working on his peach farm. He led by example, and his dominant attitude toward people of a different race rubbed off on Lily. She blatantly states “T. Ray did not think colored women were smart” (Kidd 78). His prejudices toward black men and women were the foundation of Lily’s prior worldview. Lily’s upbringing results in tension when she and her caregiver, Rosaleen, leave Sylvan. Lily creates a plan and takes control. She bosses Rosaleen around until they are out of the city. Rosaleen gets upset and finally confronts Lily on her behavior by declaring, “You act like you’re my keeper. Like I’m some nigger you gonna save” (Kidd 53). Rosaleen stands up to Lily, which makes Lily more aware of the way she acts toward black people. Lily had only learned how to treat people from T. Ray, who was mean-spirited. Lily’s lack of compassion made her new reality even more challenging. If Lily had grown up elsewhere with a different role model, she may have acted completely different. With the help
of Rosaleen, May, June, and August, Lily realizes the flaws in her thinking, but the journey there was long and painful. Lily learns how it feels to be discriminated against, she takes a walk in black people's shoes and hates the results. From the moment Lily steps foot on the property, she gathers that June has a problem with her living there. She listens in on a conversation between August and June and is shocked to find out that June is against Lily staying with them because she is white. “I hadn’t known this was possible- to reject people for being white” ( Kidd 87). Lily is infuriated. She is disgusted by the thought of someone not liking her because of her skin color. June’s hatred made Lily realize how awful it is to be looked down on because of race. This is not the only instant where June is discriminatory towards Lily; Lily keeps facing prejudices making her aware of the huge problem within the country. May, June, and August host a religious ceremony at their house praising the Black Mary and invite the Daughters of Mary to come over to worship. After watching each woman touch the heart on the Mary statue, Lily decides she’d like to as well. “I walked toward Black Mary with my hand lifted. But just as I was about to reach her, June stopped playing” (Kidd 111). Lily faints after the embarrassment, waking up confused and hurt. June did not want Lily to touch the statue, so she abruptly stopped it from happening. She would not allow Lily to touch the statue just because she was white and different than the rest of the daughters. Through June’s actions, Lily learns the unfairness of judgement due to skin color. She takes it upon herself to never make someone feel the way June made her feel. These events change Lily’s views of black and white people. While living with four black woman, Lily has a change of heart and finds a new belief system that shapes her into a kind, accepting young woman. Lily meets August’s helper, Zach, and it is love at first sight. They eat lunch together every day and quickly become close friends. Lily and Zach learn they cannot be together, Zach is black and would get in serious trouble if he were to be caught with Lily. The fact that Lily falls for a boy of a different race is remarkable. In the beginning of the novel she would not have dreamt of dating a black boy, and toward the end, she wishes she could tell everyone that she has feelings for him. Lily recounts, “At school they made fun of colored people’s lips and noses… I wished I could pen a letter to my school and tell them how wrong we’d all been. You should see Zachary Taylor I’d say” (Kidd 116). Lily learns that there is more to people than the color of their skin. She falls for Zach’s dedication to the things he is involved in such as football, school, and the bees. Lily learns that love has no boundaries; everyone should love and be loved despite skin color. Lily expresses her new belief system to T. Ray when he finds her and comes to take her back to Sylvan. He demands Lily come home with him and taunts her for staying in a house full of black women. Lily fights back and refuses to leave with him. “‘I know them’ I said ‘August Boatwright is a good person’” (Kidd 297). Lily did not let something as insignificant as race factor in on her decision on where to live. Lily learned that three black women had more love for her than T. Ray could ever give. She chose the black women over her white father and had no qualms about it. Lily knew the safest and best choice for her was living with August, June, and Rosaleen even if society did not approve. Sue Monk Kidd enforces that core beliefs are able to be altered upon life experiences. She encourages acceptance and equality through the life of Lily. Kidd shows Lily’s beliefs and the effect they had on her daily life. She acted like she was better than black people when she was not. It took her leaving home and getting away from T. Ray to become open-minded. Lily faced discrimination because of her skin color, which helped her understand how it feels to be a minority in a community. When she realized just how misconstrued her original beliefs were, her entire worldview changed. When Lily finally accepted that skin is just a color, she was overwhelmed with love from a family she never expected: Rosaleen, May, June, and August.
Most runaway youth are homeless because of neglect, abuse and violence, not because of choice. Lily Owens is the protagonist in the novel, Secret Life of Bees, by Sue Monk Kidd, is no different. Lily is a fourteen year-old girl still grieving over her mother's death. T. Ray a man who has never been able to live up to the title of a father, due to years of abuse, has not made it any easier. Lily is a dynamic character who in the beginning is negative and unconfident. However, throughout the novel Lily starts to change into the forgiving person she is at the end.
In life, actions and events that occur can sometimes have a greater meaning than originally thought. This is especially apparent in The Secret Life Of Bees, as Sue Monk Kidd symbolically uses objects like bees, hives, honey, and other beekeeping means to present new ideas about gender roles and social/community structures. This is done in Lily’s training to become a beekeeper, through August explaining how the hive operates with a queen, and through the experience Lily endures when the bees congregate around her.
People share their secret lives without even talking about them. It only takes a glance or feeling to see that others have faced similar situations and problems, some people even live parallel lives. Despite the fact that many people believe it impossible for a measly insect, like a bee, to know the pain hardships a human faces, Sue Monk Kidd proves them wrong with her book The Secret Life of Bees. In her novel she derives many of her characters from the types of bees that exist in a hive. Lily and Zach have characteristic that are akin to that of field bees, August has that nurturing personality of a nurse bee, and the Lady of Chains is revered by her subjects just like a Queen bee is by her hive. Nowadays, no one ever faces a problem that someone, or something, has already faced. No one really has a secret life all to themselves.
As strong, independent, self-driven individuals, it is not surprising that Chris McCandless and Lily Owens constantly clashed with their parents. In Jon Krakauer’s novel, Into the Wild, Chris was a twenty-four-year-old man that decided to escape the materialistic world of his time for a life based on the simplistic beauty of nature. He graduated at the top of his class at Emory University and grew up in affluent Annandale, Virginia, during the early 1980’s. In The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd, Lily was a fourteen-year-old girl who grew up in the 1960’s, a time when racial equality was a struggle. She had an intense desire to learn about her deceased mother. Her nanny, Rosaleen, with whom she grew very close over the years, raised Lily with little help from her abusive father. When her father failed to help Rosaleen after three white men hospitalized her, Lily was hysterical. Later, Lily decided to break Rosaleen out of the hospital and leave town for good. While there are differences between Chris McCandless and Lily Owens, they share striking similarities. Chris McCandless’ and Lily Owens’s inconsistencies of forgiveness with their parents resulted in damaged relationships and an escape into the unknown.
A poignant and touching classic, The Secret Life of Bees details the coming of age stories of a young girl named Lily. Her life up until the start of the novel was hard, she was friendless with an abusive father and a heavy conscience, as she believes that she is responsible for her mother’s death. Lily’s only solace is her stand-in-mother, a black woman named Rosaleen, so when Rosaleen is hauled to jail for standing up for herself, Lily decided to run away to a mysterious town that has some linkage to her mother. Her escapades lead her to three, wonderful, eclectic, devout followers of Mary, and to a new life. As the story unfolds, an elaborate symbol lies hidden just beneath the surface, one that seems so obvious, but only lies as a hidden
In The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd Lily has assumptions, biases, and prejudices about race that are changing over the course of the novel.
A beehive without a queen is a community headed for extinction. Bees cannot function without a queen. They become disoriented and depressed, and they stop making honey. This can lead to the destruction of the hive and death of the bees unless a new queen is brought in to guide them. Then, the bees will cooperate and once again be a prosperous community. Lily Melissa Owens, the protagonist of Sue Monk Kidd’s The Secret Life of Bees, faces a similar predicament. While she does not live in a physical hive, the world acts as a hive. She must learn to work with its inhabitants, sharing a common direction, in order to reach her full potential. The motif of the beehive is symbolic of how crucial it is to be a part of a community in order to achieve
Grief leaves an imprint on those who experience it. Some can survive its deep sorrow, others cannot. In The Secret Life of Bees, by Sue Monk Kidd, she explores the effect of grief on the main characters. The novel opens with fourteen-year-old Lily Owns struggling with the knowledge that her mother was dead because she, as an infant, picked up a loaded gun and accidentally shot her. She runs away from her abusive father in search for answers of who her mother was. Lily hitchhikes to Tiburon, South Carolina; the location written on the back of an image of the Black Madonna – one of the only belongings she has of her mother’s. There, she finds a pink house inhabited by the Boatwright sisters who are African American women making Black Madonna honey. The Boatwright sisters have had their share of grief with the death of two of their sisters and the racial intolerance they face despite the passage of the Civil Rights Act. The Boatwright sisters and Lily Owens have different methods of coping with grief; internalizing, ignoring, and forgetting are some of the ways they cope, with varying degrees of success. They discover that they must live past their grief, or else it will tear them apart.
Intro: Working around the hives; dedicated and faster with each movement. Honey drizzling in golden crevices; a family unit working together, buzzing in harmony. Bees and beehives is a significant motif in the novel Secret Life of Bees: By Sue Monk Kidd because it represents the community of women in the novel. It also represents Lily Owen’s longing and need for a mother figure in her life. And finally, it was significant because the bees lived a secret life, just as Lily and Rosaleen did in the novel.
This “home” that she finds brightly displays the ideas of identity and feminine society. Though Lily could not find these attributes with T. Ray at the peach house, she eventually learns the truth behind her identity at the pink house, where she discovers the locus of identity that resides within herself and among the feminine community there. Just like in any coming-of-age story, Lily uncovers the true meaning of womanhood and her true self, allowing her to blossom among the feminine influence that surrounds her at the pink house. Lily finds acceptance among the Daughters of Mary, highlighting the larger meaning of acceptance and identity in the novel. The meaning behind Sonsyrea Tate’s statement can be found deeply rooted within Sue Monk Kidd’s novel, The Secret Life of Bees.
Heart break, joy, love, happiness, The Book The Secret Life of Bees has it all! The book is about a young girls that accidentally shot her mother. After spending nine years with her abusive, and emotionally absent father, she decides to run away. So, she breaks her beloved nanny out of prison, and Lily escapes to Tiburon South Carolina, a town she links to her mother through the writing on one of her old possessions. While in Tiburon, Lily finds the calendar sisters three very different, very helpful sisters. The family agrees to take Lilly in, despite the fact that almost every white person in town frowns upon the very idea of this white girl staying in an African American household. While staying with the sisters, August, May, and June, Lily learns lots of things, ranging from bee keeping, to why and how her mother first left her. She falls in love, explores her past, and finds it within herself to forgive her mother for leaving her, and herself, for shooting her mom. This book is rich in both emotion, and culture.
The setting in the Secret life of bees helps set the overall structure of the book. As the setting changes, and certain events take place, so does the characters views on life. The most change seen is on Lily, the main character. Her values multiply and her perspective on cultural order shifts from one mind set to another. Although one part of the book’s setting limits the opportunities of the characters; the other part opens those and different opportunities. The setting in The Secret Life of Bees is vitally important because it impacts the main character and the people around her through events that transpire in the book.
The Secret Life of Bees delineates an inspirational story in which the community, friendship and faith guide the human spirit to overcome anything. The story follows Lily Owens, a 14 year old girl who desperately wants to discover the cause of her mothers death. Her father T. Ray gives her no answers, which leads their maid, Rosaleen, to act as her guardian. Together, Lily and Rosaleen run away to Tiburon, South Carolina and find a welcoming community. It is in Tiburon that Lily learns many life lessons, including many about herself. In her novel The Secret Life of Bees, Sue Monk Kidd explores a theme of spiritual growth through Lily's search for home as well as a maternal figure.
The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd is a story about racial struggle between black and white in 1964, which is in the middle of the civil right movement in South Carolina. The narrator and protagonist of the story named Lily raised by T. Ray, her father, who has bias towards black people at all time. Due to the fact that T. Ray often says something regards to racial discrimination, Lily starts to thinks that whites are superior than the others unconsciously. Also Lily was not aware that she is being an unconscious racism because of T. Ray until she starts to live with Boatwright sisters who are black. T. Ray often takes his anger out on Lily since Deborah left the house and it trigged abuses and ignores Lily. Moreover, though T. Ray treats Lily so badly, he seems like and acts like he doesn’t care. In other words, it was impossible to feel any humanity in T. Ray. One of the most important and influential characters named T. Ray is prejudiced, violent and cruel person.
Racism has been around since humans first walked this planet, it would seem that over the thousands of years humans have had to develop morals and socially acceptable behaviors that something as shallow as racism would be entirely abolished, but that is not the case. In the novel The Secret Life of Bees, written by author Sue Monk Kidd, the idea of racism is a constant struggle for fourteen year old Lily Owens as she embarks on a journey to find who she really is. 1964 was a difficult time for the Civil Rights movement. The conflicting tug of war between the political strides for the cause and the tension growing in prejudiced southerners. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 had just been signed into law by President John F. Kennedy, making sure the rights of African-American people were granted instead of ignored.