Secret Life Of Bees Case Study Essay

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Case study of the Secret Life of Bees
The Secret Life of Bees is a fictional novel by Sue Monk Kidd that is set in 1964, the year of the Civil Rights Act, in Sylvan, South Carolina. The book focuses on the fourteen-year-old Lilly who runs away from her abusive father, with her servant Rosaleen to Tiburon, S.C. In Tiburon, Lilly uses one of her deceased mother’s treasured possessions, a black Virgin Mary, to lead her and Rosaleen to Black Madonna Honey produced by the Boatwrights sisters May, June, and August. These three sisters take in both Lilly and Rosaleen; putting Lily to work in the honey house where she is finally happy for the first time since her mother was killed. Lily is running not just from her abusive father but from the memories she has from when she was four-years-old, specifically the time when she accidentally killed her mother. This book gives a poignant analysis of this fourteen-year-old girl as she demonstrates the concepts of attachment styles, dating, parenting style, self-esteem, and the cohort effects of the generation she lived in.
Throughout the book and the movie there are signs of the effects of Lily’s attachment style. One such instance is when she is telling August Boatwright how her mother died; Lily cries and tells August that she is unlovable and that she wrecks everything, this is a sign of an insecure/disorganized attachment style. An insecure/disorganized attachment style is usually characterized by the adolescent having an unusually high amount of fear as well as finding themselves believing they are unworthy of affection. Typically this attachment style is caused by a parent’s death or abuse by the parent, Lily is abused by her father and caused her mother’s death as well as witn...

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...lls and can show them a better way to go about it.
Each of these concepts is important to how well I do my job and whether or not I can accomplish what I set out to do. It is not impossible to influence a family or an adolescent for the better, as the movie shows, but it means that I have to actually know what I’m doing and know the signs of the concepts I’m looking for in the adolescent. I cannot just guess and blunder my way through, not if I truly care about the adolescent or child I’m trying to aid. The movie is a wonderful look at a young, immature girl growing up into a loving and loved young woman who lived through awful trials and benefited from the good people around her. I may only be in the lives of the adolescents I help for a short period of time, but I want them to remember me as their August Boatwright who loved and believed in all they could do.

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