In life it is inevitable to face challenges, struggles, and tragedy. Each one strikes through the heart, mind, and soul of a person like a hurricane leaving sorrow, fear, and destruction in its wake. The person’s time stops in order to rebuild what is lost and move forward in life, but in some cases the time never continues and the person is frozen. This is the choice of the individual to move forward or stay. Sue Monk Kidd plays with this concept in her book, The Secret Life of Bees. The story takes place in the south during the age of integration. The tale goes through the eyes of Lily, a young white girl who lost her mother, Deborah, at a young age. Her father, T. Ray, turns cold after her mother runs away never overcoming the tear in his …show more content…
heart from his wife’s departure. Due to this he acts cruelly to Lily which forces her further away until she runs from him in order to save herself from his fate. Once she runs away, she meets May and June Boatwright, two African American sisters who are frozen in their own grief. May is paralyzed by her twin sister’s suicide, while June is captured by fear because she is left at the alter. Each character throughout the story cope with their tragedies differently allowing them to heal or move forward or be consumed in the void tragedy created for him or her. The light within a person can be blown out under the right conditions.
Deborah Fontanel is subject to those conditions; she falls in love with T. Ray when they meet but her love weakens with time. He purposes enraptured in his love for her but she declines. Fate has another plan for her though and she becomes pregnant with T. Rays child. Now she must marry him and live on an isolated farm with the man she does not want to be with. Soon she gives birth to Lily who then is attached to her mom at the hip. In the rare even Lily is not at her mom’s side Deborah would be “out behind the tractor shed, sitting on the ground, staring off at nothing” (53) contemplating the tragedies in her life. She does not want to be confined to this life but is unable to leave it. So she falls into despair contemplating the world beyond her shackles. Later on, she becomes so desperate she runs away to save and free herself. She goes to August, her old caretaker and older sister of May and June. On her arrival, August noted that Deborah“ha[s] gotten so thin and ha[s] these dark circles under her eyes” (251). Both sleep deprivation and loss of weight are symptoms of her depression which stems from the lifestyle she is forced to live. For the first week away from home, “all she did was cry” (252) partly her guilt of leaving, but also her realization that she threw away her life. She is so incapable of handling this fate of hers she has fallen apart. Back on the farm withdraws into books underlining …show more content…
the phrase “Of crimson joy, / And his dark secret love / Does thy life destroy” (275). She resonates with these lines seeing them as her past with T. Ray the bright darkened lust that drove them together has now ruined her life. But she is with August away from what once dimmed her life and after “three months... [she starts] feeling a little better, she start[s] talking about how much she misse[s]” (254) Lily. By separating herself from T. Ray and the farm, she is able to save herself, reigniting the smoldering spark within her. She beings to feel normal again and wants to keep her life this way except with her child. She begins taking steps to improve her life planning to bring Lily “to Tiburon to live. She even talk[s] to Clayton about filing divorce papers” (254). Deborah pulls herself from her pit of despair. Scraping every step of the way but she starts taking steps to move her life forward. To much regret fate does not agree with her plans and when she goes to get Lily T. Ray finds her, a gun accident occurs and she dies. Though her plans never came to fruition, she manages to find peace in her life and save her flame from suffocating from her regrets. When a loved one leaves another, there is a hole in the other’s heart yearning for them to come home.
But Deborah will never come back when she dies Lily is there. She holds the gun and then her memories goes black. Nothing else besides the sound of a gunshot. T. Ray tells her Lily is her mother’s killer. For most of her life she carries this as a heavy burden on her life filling her with sorrow and the desire to be loved which she describes as “nothing but a hole where [her] mother should have [be], and this hole had ma[kes her] different, le[aves her] aching for something” (293). Her ache leads her to develop a deep connection with Rosaleen, her caretaker. This connection leads Lily to go to many extents to keep her loved one safe including breaking Rosaleen out of jail and running away with her. Once they break out of jail and hitchhike to Tiburon, they find August’s house. There see the Black Mary statue; looking at it she describes the feeling as “magnetic and so big it ached like the moon had entered my chest and filled it up” (70). She views this statue as a mother figure one that can help fill her chest where her mother had left years ago. Over the course of months, she tells August the truth about what happened to her mom. She also explains the lie T. Ray told her, this is “the first time I’d ever said the words to another person, and the sound of them broke open my heart” (242). Lily for most of her life bottles up the alleged truth of her mother making her feel
unlovable and unable to move forward. Her sadness stems from being desperate for the love she’s lacked all her life due to her mother’s absence. Retelling this story horrifies her into thinking she is unlovable -- unable to receive the only thing she yearns for. She works so hard to be lovable. She never wants to be enraged or cruel. While she is with Zach, a coworker and crush, she tells him a story of how the boys at her school tide live fish around her neck and refused to take them off until the fish die. She acknowledges the boys as being mean but she also acknowledges that they are “angry at the world, and it ma[kes] them mean.” (230). She later explains that she does not want to be that way. She does not want to be like T. Ray mad at the world and cruel because she wants to be loved and not have her heart turn stone cold like his. So later on in the story when she finds out Deborah runs away without her. She describes the incident as terrible not finding out the truth but “the really terrible thing, [is] the anger in me. It had starte[s]...when the story of my mother had collapsed, like the ground under [Lily’s] feet giving way.” (258) She starts to hate her mother for her actions but also herself for being angry. Due to T. Ray’s brutality she affiliates cruelty and anger with being unlovable. So when Lily starts to feel anger she feels she will never be loved causing her to slip into her to fall into a pit of self loathing. Luckily August shows her a picture Deborah brings with her on when she was here. This picture has Lily and Deborah together in a loving manner; which helps Lily understand that she is lovable. In the very end she finds peace and realizes that here is her home with “all these women, all this love”(299). Lily receives the love she has yearned for all her life allowing her to mend from her mother’s death and move forward. Lily’s need for affection is common for all people and many people will go to great lengths to receive it and if they are unable to greater lengths to ignore their neglected need. Love is a dangerous game especially for T. Ray. He is smitten with Deborah worshipping her like a goddess and doing all he can for her. At first Deborah returns his affections but later she is unable to love him and leaves him. Since the day she runs away his heart turns stone cold allowing him to prevent getting hurt again or feeling her neglect. Deborah comes back 3 months after she runs away to get Lily and a few of her things. She does not plan to see T. Ray on her return but he finds her. They begin to argue and he screams at her that she is not leaving then “take[s] her by the shoulders and shake her, her head bouncing back and forth” (7). T. Ray’s aggression towards her is out of fear of losing her again. He loves Deborah will not let her go under any cost and so he takes to physical violence. During the fray, a gun accident occurs and Deborah dies since then T. Ray never recovers. He continues to act cruel to the point that Lily his daugher “calle[s] T. Ray because “Daddy” never fit him” (2). Since Deborah he has cut off any human connection even with his daughter. Despite the fact that he is trying to protect himself
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.
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
When someone hears the word quest, their mind automatically goes to a mythical land of dragons and knights in shining armor. However, Thomas Foster’s book How to Read Literature Like a Professor states that this shouldn’t always be the case. In Chapter One: Every Trip Is a Quest, Foster claims that a quest in literature can take place in any time period and can be as mundane as grocery shopping. In order to classify an event as quest, it needs to follow certain criteria. There needs to be “a quester, a place to go, a stated reason to go there, challenges and trials en route, and a real reason to go there” (Foster, 3). Furthermore, considering the definition of a quest by Thomas Foster, it is clear that the novel, The Secret Life of Bees, fits
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.
With an increase in familiarity, as she progresses her outlook on life changes with her. By the closure of The Secret Life of Bees, Lily Owens experiences passion, rage, joy, and sorrow in larger quantities than most teens her age. Amidst every trial transpires an improved
Within this world, people become self-governed after going through difficult times. In this novel, a fourteen-year-old white girl, Lily Owen’s, determination leads her to find contentment and another self-ruled woman, August Boatwright. After running away from home, Lily meets August and her two black sisters who maintain a large apiary to produce honey. Although some people work efficiently together, independent persons seek true happiness with their experiences as shown in the novel, The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd. Throughout the novel, Lily and August prove the importance of independence by managing their lives and taking care of their loved ones.
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.
Martin Luther King once said, “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” Sue Monk Kidd’s novel The Secret Life of Bees fully embodies his idea of equality, by introducing the story of a fourteen-year-old white girl named Lily Owens, who lives during the time of the Civil Rights Movement in South Carolina. Lily’s mother was killed in an accident when Lily was a little girl. Ever since, she lives with her father T-Ray, and her black surrogate mother, Rosaleen, in Sylvan, South Carolina.