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Essay about the secret life of bees
Secret life of bees literary analysis
Critical essay on the secret life of bees
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The Secret Life of Bees begins with fourteen-year-old Lily Owens thinking back on the eventful summer she had. Lily lives on a peach farm in Sylvan, South Carolina with her abusive father T. Ray Owens. Lily has memories of the death of her mother Deborah Fontanel Owens, who died ten years ago. She remembers her mother packing and arguing with her father. Then her memory is blurred, she remembers picking up a gun, and then an explosion. According to T. Ray, who she doesn’t refer to a dad, the gun went off in Lily’s hands killing her mother. This causes Lily to face severe loss and guilt in her life. Thus, whatever she has of her mother she treasures dearly. She keeps a small box full of her mother’s old things including a photograph of her, …show more content…
Ever since, Lily’s mother’s death she is been taken care of by a black woman named Rosaleen Davis, who acts as her only emotional support. On July 1st, 1964, Lily realizes that bees are living within the walls of her house and have started swarming her bedroom. She takes this as a sign that she should leave her old life behind and start anew. Rising Action: When the Civil Rights Act is passed on July 2nd, 1964, Lily accompanies Rosaleen to go to town and register to vote. Along the way there, a trio of racist white men starts insulting Rosaleen and call her names. She then spills snuff juice all of their shoes causing them to attack her and hit her in the end. She is then sent to jail for assault. Lily goes back home shocked by the situation, where she starts fighting with her father, who tells her that her mother never loved her and was leaving the both of them on the day that she died. He also tells her that Rosaleen life was in danger because the men who attacked her once will want to fight again. Lily who was now extremely upset finally decides that it was time to run away from home. She quickly writes T. Ray a letter in which she says that she doesn’t believe
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 strange fogginess. ‘Daddy,’ I said. ”
...heir parents resulted in damaged relationships and escapes into the unknown. Chris was intelligent and well rounded, but he had several flaws, specifically his inability to make peace with his parents. He could not dismiss the mistakes his parents had made and hurt not only himself but also his entire family in the process. Lily was young, but mature beyond her age. She made impulsive decisions, such as running away with her nanny, but it did not ruin the flawed relationship with her father. Instead, it led to the truth she so desperately needed and a better relationship with her father. Lily’s leaving was the best thing she could have done for herself. Both Chris and Lily left with similar intentions but saw different results. Chris reached the realization that isolationism is not the best policy, and Lily was brought into a world filled with love and truth.
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.
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
Do you ever wonder how much you have changed in the past year? Not just physically, but in every aspect. Lily Owens in The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd matures throughout the novel. Lily Owens matures because of her spiritual development. Also, she matures because of her social consciousness and her relationship with Zach. Sue Monk Kidd portrays the theme “coming of age” as difficult in The Secret Life of Bees.
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
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 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.
While disaster overwhelms others, guilt consumes Lily. “I was speculating how one day, years from now, I would send the store a dollar in an envelope to cover it, spelling out how much guilt had dominated every moment of my life, when I found myself looking at a picture of the black Mary,” (Kidd 63). Lily at no instant in the novel indicates mailing the envelope or the assumed regret she would posses when she regards the Black Mary. This affair does not suggest years from now she would not send the dollar. This exposes that while she may execute seldom vile things, she would try to rectify them.
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.
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.
Ray and Lily's relationship has never been great or even good. Whenever Lily does something that he doesn’t like, like her sneaking out to the peach farm, T. Ray makes Lily kneel on grits. In the book it describes how it gives Lily cuts on her knees because they feel like glass, which shows that T. Ray was abusive. Lily and T. Ray don’t really talk to each other so they don't have a close father and daughter relationship. The day before Lilly's birthday she had told him that she wanted a bracelet that all the girls had in her grade and T. Ray didn’t get her one or even tell her happy birthday.