Lily has a lot of mother figures in her life. In ?The Secret Life of Bees? two mother figures that she has are Rosaleen and August. A mother cares for her young and guides them trough life. She comforts and soothes them when they need it. Lily?s Mothers are Rosaleen and August. Both act as mothers for Lily in different ways.
Rosaleen is the disciplinary figure in Lily?s life. She is tough and sometimes mean but really she loves Lily. Lily knew that ?despite her sharp ways, her heart was more tender than a flower skin and she loved her beyond reason?. Rosaleen also shows her love for Lily when she avoids telling Lily that her mother left her. She knew this would break Lily?s heart.
Another motherly figure in Lily?s life is August. She encourages Lily to open her heart and reveal the truth to them. August is very patient and would make a great mother. Even though she knew that Lily was lying to her, she gave Lily a chance to settle down. In doing this she was wise. If she had confronted Lily, Lily probably would have left the house. Unlike June even though Lily was white she still treated her regularly.
August was more of a friend to Lily. They shared many interests. One of these interests was to mix cola with peanuts. Another interest that they shared was that they loved beekeeping. Rosaleen did not have as much in common as Lily did. She was more of a caretaker to Lily than a friend. When they lived with T. Ray she would cook dinner and dress Lily up. Even though Lily does not have much in common with her she still loves her.
August was correct when she said that Lily must be her own mother. Lily will not always have someone to care for her. If this happens she must learn to care for herself. Lily was also relying too much on the statue of Mary. When the statue of Mary was chained up Lily could not go to her for help.
Lily shows forgiveness and understanding towards her mother in the quote at the top of page 277, “a queenless colony is a pitiful and melancholy community; there may be a mournful wail or lament from within...Without intervention, the colony will die. But introduce a new queen and the most extravagant change takes place” (277). In the beginning of the novel, the queen bee represents Deborah, Lily’s mother. When she passes away Lily’s life spins out of control. However, forgiving not only her mom and dad, but herself has allowed a new queen to take order, August. When her father finds out where Lily’s been hiding all this time he goes to take her home, “I looked into his eyes. They were full of a strange fogginess. ‘Daddy,’ I said.” Lily has stated from the beginning that T. Ray has never earned the title of ‘Dad’; Lily calling him Daddy, is her way of forgiving her father for everything he put her through. Lily has been through more than most fourteen year-olds can imagine. Her learning to forgive her mother her father and herself has gotten her to finally open up, and make friends. She can finally stop living her life with regret of the past, and of her mother's death, and
I really was impacted by T. Ray’s quote during the height of the tension about Lily’s past mistakes, “ ‘It was you who did it, Lily. You didn’t mean it, but it was you’ ” (Kidd 299). This moment was one of my favorites because it showed the growth the lead character had made toward not only forgiving her mother, but forgiving herself. When Lily chases after her father to finally get the raw truth about the fateful day her mom died, it reveals that she is finally ready to come to terms with her past, no matter what really happened. At the beginning of the book, she can’t accept her mother’s death, her disappearance, and her lack of love from her parents. Coincidentally, she grasps at any excuse to punish herself because she is unsure of who she is.
The first example of Lily’s coming of age is in her spiritual development. She is introduced to the Daughters of Mary, who connect her to the Black Madonna. When Lily first sees the Black Madonna, she thought that:
First, Kidd highlights the power of strength through indirectly characterizing Lily as a courageous young woman to display the character’s growing maturity throughout the novel. Her courageousness is demonstrated after T Ray, Lily’s father, picks her up from jail. Upon arriving home, it is clear that Lily is displeased about how T Ray handled the situation. Vexed and irritated, she challenges him: “‘You don’t scare me,’ I repeated, louder this time. A brazen feeling had broken loose in me, a daring something that had been locked up in my chest’” (38). Even though Lily knows that disrespecting her father will mean terrible consequences, kneeling on Martha White grits, she proceeds
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.
At age four, Lily Owens accidentally kills her mother in an act to help her. As she was handing her mother a gun, her mother dropped it. The gun then backfired on her and kills Lily’s mom. Lily is clearly traumatized by this event. As soon as Lily enters the Boatwright home, she is overcome with motherly love. Raub writes, “Upon settling into her new life in Tiburon, Lily finds motherly love where she did not expect it” (Raub 1). Some love is received from Rosaleen and August and the rest from the Black Madonna. Lily is also well received by the black sisterhood. “Lily enters a loving, compassionate world of the feminine divine, a black sisterhood grounded in worship of the Black Madonna” (Hamilton and Jones 2). August, one of the Boatwright sisters, becomes a mother figure to Lily. August is not only a mother to her, but as well, her spiritual mentor in the book. The Boatwright sisters love her in different ways. August lets Lily to open up and cry to her like a mother would. The Black Madonna was a major idea and religious feature in The Secret Life of Bees. “The Black Madonna, a symbol of freedom and consolation, wraps her veil of protection over the oppressed African American women and the abused Lily in the pink house” (Hebb 2). Lily is raised a Baptist and has hardly ever heard of the Mother of God, who only appears at Christmas in the Protestant doctrine. By the end of the summer, she has experienced the truth about what
According to pages 31 and 32, Lily said, “I watched their wings shining like bits of chrome in the dark and felt longing build in my chest. The way those bees flew, not even looking for a flower, just flying for the feel of the wind, split my heart down its seam.” She was the bee, flying to feel the wind, but full of emptiness because she couldn’t find her flower; her mother. Since the age of 4, Lily grew up without a mother. After the bees came the summer of 1964, she thought, “Looking back on it now, I wanted to say the bees were sent to me. I want to say they showed up like the angel Gabriel appearing to the Virgin Mary, setting events in motion I could never have guessed.”(32) The bees set the course of the novel, and finally, at the end of the novel, helped her find closure for her
For example, T. Ray punishes Lily by making her kneel on grits and verbally abuses her. Lily resents T. Ray for his brutality and gains the desire to flee her birth home. This shows that Lily desires more than just a physical house to live in, but also loving parental figures who can help guide her in life and show her love. This quest for acceptance led her to meet the Calendar Sisters.
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 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...
In The Secret Life of Bees, written by Sue Monk Kidd, Lily lacks a mother figure in her life, which leads her on a compelling journey as she desperately searches for answers about her true mother. Her abusive father, T. Ray, causes Lily to run away along with Rosaleen, the housekeeper. They are led to the Boatwright household by one of the few things Lily still possesses from her mother, a Black Madonna Honey label. Lily is given the opportunity to create a mother-daughter type bond between her and the Boatwright sisters. August, one of the sisters, acts as the “queen bee” throughout the story. August teaches Lily that a mother does not have to be someone who you share blood with, but rather, a mother is
In the novel “The Secret Life of Bees”, which is surprisingly not an informative book talking about bees, the main character Lily Owens is set out to be the victim because of her parents. The novel first tells the reader that Lily accidently kills her mother when she was a toddler, and goes on to explaining how her father, whom she calls T-Ray, is an abusive man. He punishes Lily very often in many ways, like making her kneel in grits and speaking to her in an offensive manner. We later find out that Lily’s mother, Deborah, suffers from depression, partly because of the dominance coming from T-Ray, and learn the harsh truth of her leaving Lily. The author, Sue Monk Kidd, gives the vision of T-Ray being a bad father and Deborah being an ethical
...oes not make mothers” ~ Anonymous (Quotations about mothers, 2011). Daisy seems to be more of a child than a mother, and Ma brings out the characteristics people would want in their ideal mothers. The mother they would want is the one that cares about them, is always there for them, and takes real responsibility for their job as a parent.
A mother is like glue. She is the glue that holds the families together, because she provides love, care, and support to her family. It is the simple things a mother does that are important. Who used to hear you before you can talk? Who used to hold you before you could walk? And who wiped your tears when you cried? However, a mother could also be foolish and small-minded. In Pride And Prejudice, Mrs. Bennet is a great example of a foolish mother and how a mother could represent her daughters in foolish way.
In Sue Monk Kidd’s The Secret Life of Bees, the recurring theme is love. Throughout the whole novel Lily is looking for a mother figure. When she ends up at the Boatwright house she begins to learn more things about her deceased mother, when she is telling August about her mother and her father, T. Ray, she states that she is unlovable. Later on in the book when T. Ray is driving away after deciding to leave Lily at the Boatwright house she turns towards August and the Daughters of Mary on the porch and says, “I remember the sight of them standing there waiting. All these women, all this love, waiting.” (299). During this Lily realizes that she, is in fact loveable and that so many people are there to act as a mother for