The novel The Secret Life of Bees, by Sue Monk Kidd, is set in Sylvan, South Carolina, in 1964. The story is told from the point of view of Lily Owens, a fourteen year old young woman. She lives with her father who she calls T.Ray and always treats her badly. Rosaleen acted as “a stand in mother (2) “ for Lily since her mother, Deborah Owen’s, death when she was young. One day Lily finds some items that belonged to her mom; a picture of her mother when she was young, her mother's gloves and necklace and a picture of a black women that had the face of Mary on it, which Lily to be the most interesting item. On the back of the picture the word “Tiburon” is written. T.Ray told Lily that her mother left their family and the day she was killed, she …show more content…
Before she came to the Boatwright house, Lily broke Rosaleen out of jail after she had been imprisoned. Additionally, Lily ran away from T.Ray and killed her mother when she was young. The sisters are very suspicious about Lily’s past from day she arrives. Finally, when Lily reveals who she is the Boatwright sisters, the girls are not surprised to hear of her history and actions. Lily’s past is revealed to the Boatwright sister during her stay with them and they uncover her hidden secrets.
Lily had a very narrow opinion of African American people and how they behave because of her relationship with Rosaleen but her generalization of Black people change when she interacts with the Boatwright sisters. The only Black person who Lilly encountered in her childhood was Rosaleen who was not well mannered so she viewed all African Americans negatively. When Lily meets and spends time with the Boatwright sisters, she realises that Blacks can be intelligent, polite, graceful, funny and nice to be around. She learned intelligence form August Boatwright who knew a tremendous amount about the bees and life itself and shared this knowledge with Lily when they worked with bees together. Lily uncovers the trait of gracefulness from June Boatwright when June plays the cello in an elegant fashion. [ Find quote about the first time she saw them ] . May teaches Lily about the trait gentleness by acting in a sweet and empathetic
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August pretended that Lily was a stranger when she began living with her. Toward the end of the novel, however, Lily finds that August knew her identity throughout her entire stay with the Boatwrights and that August had not only known Lily’s mother but had practically raised Deborah. August divulges that Deborah wrote letters to her when Deborah was living with T.ray about how she was depressed and asked if she could live at Augustus house. Lily uncovers that August had been hiding information about her mother and pretending not to know Lily when she truly did.
(As the book goes on we learn that she knew Lily's identity the whole time, she tells Lily that she knew her mom since Deborah was little and practically raised her. August divulge that Deborah wrote letters to her when she was living with T.ray about how she was depressed and asked if she could stay over at Augustus house.
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.
In the beginning of the novel, as the reader is first introduced to Lily’s character, she comes across as an extremely negative young girl. While thinking about
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.
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.
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.
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.
When Nettie first introduces her newborn child to Lily, she tells her “Marry Anto’nette-that’s what we call her: after the French queen in the play” (Wharton 334). The significance of the baby’s name is because it is an allusion to Marie Antoinette. Her lavish lifestyle is similar to the aristocrats of New York, but she was soon murdered during the French Revolution. Her murder represents an imminent downfall, as Lily experienced. However, Wharton changes the spelling in order to signify that Marry will not belong among the wealthy, such as Lily did not. Therefore, Wharton creates a connection between Lily and Marry, because both will obtain wealth, but diverge from society causing their decline and untimely death. When Lily dies, Wharton continues to highlight Lily’s connection to Marry. After she has overdosed, Lily begins to hallucinate that she is holding Marry, in which “…the baby more likely symbolizes [Lily’s] desire to born again” (Dixon). From this wish, Wharton is able to symbolize that Marry will embody Lily, and then is doomed. But Marry is a child, who cannot control her life, and according to Social Darwinism, is forced to endure her unsuccessful future. By making Marry a futile and naive baby, Wharton employs a sense of pathos, so she can censure Social Darwinism for harming a child and
...gh daughter because of her wealth. Lily is aware that marrying for money and social staus will not bring her happiness, but chooses a socially uplisfting life instead of her own happiness. Later in the novel we find out that Gryce marries another woman . This shows the importance of money and social status, and also, how powerful the elite circle, that lily will do anything to be apart of, is. From the previous events, one can deduce that you can never rely on man to bring you to power. The New York circle is so exclusive and elite that you can never be sure of your position, you must constantly plan, plot, and climb your way to the top, and once there you must fight to keep your position. This is the life the Lily Bart wants to badly, in Old New York money, social status, and how other perieve you was the most important things to these woman.
Throughout her childhood, Lily had always longed for her parents’ affection, but being a daughter she is aware that she is considered a burden. Lily has always seen herself as someone in need of training and attention to make her worthy of the life for which she is intended. Within Snow Flower she discovers the possibility for her desires to be met; to be loved and to be acceptable within the standards of their male-dominated society. Lily says of Snow Flower, “… I wondered how I could make her love me the way I longed to be loved” (See, 57). Young Lily with the innocent desire to be loved is a window showing us her insecurity and vulnerability to the society. Lily looks up to Snow Flower as if she were perfect, as someone who she aspires to be like. It has been conveyed several times within the novel especially during Lily’s daughter days how she sees Snow Flower as someone superior to herself. Throughout the course of the book we come to understand that Lily fears rejection more than she feels compassion for the needs of Snow Flower. Lily’s friendship with Snow Flower has had a major effect on her priorities within life. Snow Flower’s unfortunate marriage to the butcher and slaving under her mother-in-law was what drove Lily’s train of thought. Lily’s relationship with Snow Flower has
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
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.
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:
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 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.
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.