Little Bee, by Chris Cleve, is a novel that explores unthinkable evil, but simultaneously celebrates its characters in their ability to transcend all that weighs them down, including their pasts, their secrets, and their flaws. For the character of Little Bee, identity is inescapably tied to ethnicity, nationality, gender, race, and class. A representative passage of the book that explores Little Bee’s point of view (both its unceasing optimism and stark realism) occurs in the final chapter: Little Bee is awoken from a good dream, and then comes the ominous first sentence, “There is a moment when you wake up from dreaming in the hot sun, a moment outside time when you do not know what you are” (Cleave 258). Little Bee is questioning her identity at just the moment when she should be most sure of it. Because Little Bee has been seeking a home, a family, and belonging, and has seemingly found it, the reader realizes that it is still uncertain. Still there is hope: Little Bee is hampered by the weight of her past; yet she is a character that has proven she can overcome the boundaries of her identity and change her station in life.
The book as alternates between the points of view of Sarah and Little Bee, though this section is told in Little Bee’s voice. It is critical that the final chapter be her perspective, given that the so much of the book deals with the lack of western knowledge of people like Little Bee, the silence regarding their stories, and the healing power of storytelling. The most significant element of voice in this passage is the tonal shift between its two paragraphs. In the first paragraph, Little Bee is coming out of her dream and the narration is reminiscent of that half-awake state. The second paragra...
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...ned. She will stay herself, “as the shape-changing magic of dreams whispers back into the roar of the ocean” (Cleave 259). It is a foreshadowing of her final decision. She does not choose to flee or fight, but instead to surrender herself for the sake of Charlie, because he is young and will continue the dream for her.
The reader takes from Little Bee the idea that identity is fluid and one’s own self-perception can be a tool of transcendence. Little Bee’s circumstances require that she reinvents herself from village girl, to refugee, to member of an upper-class British family. Because of her brain, her language, and her imagination, she cannot be marginalized, even though she must succumb to evil. To the reader, Little Bee will remain as free as the wind and as peaceful as the undisturbed sand, because she has offered her voice and her story as testimony.
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.
In her novel, she derives many of her characters from the types of bees that exist in a hive. Lily and Zach have characteristics 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 to themselves.
The themes of hatred and judgment are shown all throughout Little Bee. Whether it’s Lawrence’s threats, the carelessness of the detention officers, or the sideways glances from the relatives at Andrew’s funeral, Little Bee is always in the middle of some kind of judgment. However, there is one character that shows pure love and understanding for Little Bee, no matter her exterior or culture. Charlie O’Rourke may be considered naïve, but it’s his naivety that allows him to see past the discrimination Little Bee receives. He is the prime example of how children are often blind to this type of abhorrence. Charlie gives the readers insight into this phenomenon by allowing Little Bee to comfort him and by finally removing his Batman costume.
A Bug’s Life is an animated Disney film that tells the story of how a colony of ants fight back against and overcome the domination and oppression of the bullying grasshoppers. When looking at the movie through the lens of Ewen’s theory about identity, several connections concerning identity are found between A Bug’s Life and The Chosen People. Furthermore, by looking at identity issues in A Bug’s Life under this new light, Ewen’s theory becomes incomplete. In the Chosen People, Ewen fails to explore the positive aspects of conformity, gender in relationship to identity or the correlations between tradition and identity.
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.
The meaning behind Sonsyrea Tate’s statement can be found deeply rooted within Sue Monk Kidd’s novel, The Secret Life of Bees. The desire for “home,” or identity, within Lily is the driving force that leads her to find the pink house and the Calendar Sisters. This new physical and spiritual “home” that Lily finds illuminates the larger meaning of the novel, which is acceptance and identity, and displays where she truly
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 bees symbolize Lily’s unspoken guides throughout the novel. Kidd’s constant reference to the bees indicate that Lily eventually understands the importance of female power in the bee community, which she connects to her own life. When Lily initially sees the bees in her room, Rosaleen warns her that they can sting her if she tries to catch them, but Lily ignores her and continues to trap them, thus asserting her determination. Later, the bees reveal the message to Lily that she should leave her father. Kidd notes that one bee landed on Lily’s state map that she kept tacked on the wall, foreshadowing Lily and Rosaleen’s journey to Tiburon (10). The bees also symbolize the secret life that Lily lives as she hides her secret of running away from home. The hive represents society while the bees represent all of the humans inside. August tells Lily about the hives and announces, “Most people don’t have any idea about all the complicated life going on inside a hive. Bees have a secret life we don’t know anything about” (Kidd 148). The beehive cannot sur...
her grandmother) and grief, Viramontes successfully paints an endearing tale of change. “The Moths” emphasizes the narrator’s oppression by her
One’s identity is the most important lesson to be learned. It is vital part of life knowing who you are in order to live a fulfilled life. Without knowing your identity, and the way you perceive life, it is difficult for others to understand you, along with a struggle to live a happy life. In Sylvia Plath’s “The Bell Jar,” Esther Greenwood struggles to find her own identity, and in the process, she develops a mental illness which helps her discover the person she is on the inside.
In Myla Goldberg’s fiction novel, The Bee Season, young Eliza Naumann is a fifth-grader at McKinley Elementary School. In the novel, Goldberg incorporates several key concepts Martin Buber presents in his text, I and Thou. The story is set around Eliza as she competes in the school, district, and national spelling bees. Throughout the story, struggles as her family begins to separate and deteriorate. Buber in his text argues that there are two separate realms of I-You and I-It (Buber 82, 83). The I-It world is where Eliza experiences reality of the circumstances her family is experiencing. On the other hand, in the I-You world Eliza becomes in total commune and relation with God, or shefa as Eliza describes (Goldberg 190). Buber suggests every human has desire to be in I-You realm (Buber 79). However, this realm can become an I-It by individuals seeking the I-You— making it objectified and using it for a specific purpose (68). In Goldberg’s novel, Eliza begins seeking I-You, shefa, to remove herself from chaos and to help solve her problems of her broken family (Goldberg 172). Once she has obtained shefa, Eliza wants to be removed from the I-It world and “desires to have God continually in space and time” (Buber 161). Buber would suggest Eliza’s I-You relationship is lacking depth and that she is actually going further away from the I-You realm and into the I-It realm, as she objectifies her I-You. Goldberg helps the reader to have a better understanding of Buber’s key concepts, by allowing the reader to experience alongside Eliza as she encounters the I-You and I-It realms.
The influence of other people has many effects on a person's decisions and their actions. Chris Cleave examines the idea of outside impacts on a person in Little Bee. First, Lawrence in Chris Cleave's, Little Bee helps Sarah by giving her the idea of moving on and doing something positive to make up for her guilt and making Sarah choose between Lawrence and Little Bee puts Sarah in a tough position. Second, Andrews’s presence in Sarah’s mind helps her focus on the task of helping Little Bee and Andrews’s lack of connection influence’s Sarah. The role of a minor character is to influence the major character mentality in a positive and negative way thus impacting the major characters actions.
Lily, the protagonist, who shows attitude throughout The Secret Life of Bees, has a relatable mindset to the author of the poem, “If”.
Little Bee was written by Chris Cleave and tells the story of a girl known as Little Bee. Little Bee, or Udo, is a girl who flees Nigeria after a traumatizing experience in which a group of men are pursuing her and her sister. She moves to the Britain and stays with a woman named Sarah who saved her life on a Nigerian beach. From that moment on, the two’s lives are intertwined and play into how the story unfolds.