...Symbolism is the subtext in everyday life that connects us to other people, places, and things that contain deeper meanings. In the novel, The Secret Life of Bees, Sue Monk Kidd explains how the main the main character, Lily, has been going through her life and the many obstacles that come along with it. Through the book, many objects help symbolize things from her past or things she is starting to connect with, not just bees. Sue Monk Kidd mostly uses the bees in the The Secret Life of Bees to represent guidance, some of the characters’ roles in Lily’s life, and society in general. The symbols of the bees help Kidd convey the theme that one must rely on her “hive” in order to make it through life. Guidance was continuously shown throughout...
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...102 12/10/13 Secret Life of Bees In 1964, Lily Owens is fourteen years old. She has no mother, a father whom she despises, and no friends to turn to when she needs a shoulder to cry on. Not only does Lily have to deal with feelings of loneliness and betrayal caused by her parents, but in a time troubled by negativity towards the Civil Rights Act, she is also faced with situations that force her to grow up very fast. The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd is a page turning novel about Lily’s journey to find answers to her past. There are themes and symbolisms throughout the book. Racism, forgiveness/coping, and bees are big ones for many characters throughout the novel. The summer of 1964 in South Carolina comes at the peak for race relationships in American history, a summer when much of white Americans showed no respect towards the blacks. The nature of racism is discussed throughout Lily’s story. It is important to understand she grew up in the South, where races were separated by both law and attitudes. Lily does not attempt to reconcile her love for Rosaleen with her understanding that blacks are inferior to whites. “Rosaleen pulled back the towel; I saw an inch-long gash across a puffy place high over her eyebrow.” (Kidd). Is one of the first times she started to see racism, but not to the fullest understanding. When Rosaleen’s life is threatened by a system that Lily doesn’t understand, she knows only that she must save Rosaleen’s life, even if it means...
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...“Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself” (George Bernard Snow). Sue Monk Kidd’s novel, The Secret Life of Bees, centered around the development of the life of Lily Owens, a young, South Carolinian girl. Upon running away from her abusive father, Lily unwittingly set in motion a series of encounters and experiences that would later help to define her own character. This novel is the story of Lily’s coming-of-age, a sequence of events of drastic mental maturation, and in each of the most critical encounters and experiences, Kidd emphasized their meanings through the application of devices, such as indirect characterization, symbolism, and allusion. Together, they demonstrated what Lily believed in, what she wanted...
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...The Secret Life Of Bees The Secret Life of Bees is the story of Lily Owens, a girl who has shaped her life around one devastating memory—the afternoon when her mother (Deborah) was killed, when Lily was four. Besides her harsh and unyielding father ,T.Ray, Lily’s only real companion is Rosaleen, a tender, but fierce-hearted black woman who cooks, cleans and acts as her "stand-in mother." Set in 1964 in South Carolina, a place and time of seething racial divides, violence explodes one summer afternoon, and Rosaleen is arrested and beaten. Lily is desperate, not only to save Rosaleen, but to flee from a life she can no longer endure. Calling upon her colorful wits and youthful daring, Lily breaks Rosaleen out of jail and the two escape, into what quickly becomes Lily’s quest for the truth about her mother’s life. They are taken in by three black, bee-keeping sisters, May, June, and August, and Lily is consumed by their secret world of bees and honey, and of the Black Madonna who presides over this household of strong, wise women. Lily’s journey is one of painful secrets and shattering betrayals but that ultimately helps Lily find the thing her heart longs for most. Throughout the book, the reader comes to know a cluster of characters. One character that sticks out the most is June Boatwright. According to the book "her hair was cut so short it resembled a little gray, curlicue swim cap pulled tight over her scalp." June is a teacher at a 'colored' school, which is where she...
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...The Secret Life Of Bees, by Sue Monk Kidd. Book Report, Dorthea Søiland The secret life of bees centres on Lily’s search for clues and connections to her mother, who was killed when Lily was a little girl. We get to follow her journey as she runs away from her abusive father along with her nanny Rosaleen. Lily is longing to be loved, because the lack of it in her past life is destroying her. “People who think dying is the worst thing, don’t know a thing about life” Lily, p2. The novel is an excellent written drama. It explores race, love and the idea of family and home in troubled times. The author of the book, Sue Monk Kidd, is a well-known writer who has written other known books such as “The Mermaid Chair”(2005) and “A Mother-Daughter Story”(2010). She has been on the New York Times bestselling list twice, which one of them were with this very novel. The secret life of bees was published in 2002 by Penguin Books New York. The story takes place in South Carolina in the 1960’s, which we can say is a time were racism was on it’s worst. Time and place has a lot to do with the story, and we get to look into a time were being black wasn’t easy. The main character of the book is fourteen years old Lily. She is a brave and smart girl, whose only wish for a birthday present is to know a little about her mother. Her fear of living a life without being loved is getting her to write poems, which she’s good at. All-tough Lily doesn’t have a mother she has a father, T....
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...The Secret Life of Bees, a beautiful coming of age novel written by Sue Monk Kidd, teaches its readers powerful lessons that touch the heart. Lily’s decision to run away enlightens her perspectives on life and helps her discover herself and her values. The journey that she makes results in a better understanding of the true meaning of family, the faults of her society, and what being happy really consists of. The first Lesson Lily learns is about family. Lily’s family life when she was living at home lacked the love and affection she needed. After running away, she makes several important discoveries about what family really is, and where it is found. The first, and most prominent, example of this in the novel is Lily’s mother. After accidentally killing her mother when she was young, Lily has to live with the unfortunate realities of only having one parent. It is clear that Lily feels the absence of her mother. “The queen, for her part, is the unifying force of the community; if she is removed from the hive, the workers very quickly sense her absence. After a few hours, or even less, they show unmistakable signs of queenlessness” (7). This passage is directly talking about bees, but indirectly referring to Lily and her mother. After she leaves her home in Sylvan, South Carolina and ends up in a house surrounded by black women, Lily realizes that a “mother” is not necessarily what it is defined to be. At the end of the novel, Lily finds that, in fact, she has adopted multiple...
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...In both Sue Monk Kidd's The Secret Life of Bee’s, and Homer's The Odyssey, readers watch as both protagonists are forced to chose between two horrible situations. Both characters are faced with two nearly impossible situations, and have to choose one. In the Odyssey, Odysseus is faced with the well known monsters: Scylla and Charybdis. One is a 6 headed female monster and the other is a dangerous whirlpool. Protagonist Lily in The Secret Life of Bees is faced with the challenge of either staying home and living with her impossible father T-Ray, or running away and trying to survive on her own. While some differences between The Odyssey and The Secret Life Of Bee’s are evident, the similarities between the challenges both protagonist’s face...
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...The novel, The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd, shows the tragic events in a young girls life and demonstrates how she overcomes her problems and finds herself. Lily Owens starts out as a troubled and confused girl. By the end of the book she overcomes her obstacles and becomes a confident young woman. Lily uses the pain from her father's abuse and mother's absence to mature into a young woman. When the story starts out, Lily Owens is a little girl who has always been put down by her father and as a result has a lack of confidence and lack of hope for the future. When lily thinks she hears bees buzzing in her room she called for her fathers help and T-Ray said " I guess they must have flown out of that cuckoo clock you call a brain. You wake me up again, lily, and I'll go get the Martha Whites, you hear me?" (Page 31/734). This shows here that she was abused physically and mentally . Instead of receiving comfort from her father Lily was made fun of and threatened. Obviously from the quote, we learn that the emotional and physical abuse were already a pattern in Lily's life. Already Lily's strength of character surfaces. Although she was afraid of her fathers form of punishment her courage and boldness are demonstrated when she says "still I couldn't let the master go entirely- T-ray thinking I was so desperate I would invent an invasion of bees to get attention. Which is how I got the bright idea of catching a jar of these bees, presenting them to T-Ray and saying...
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...what it is like to love, be loved and supported. In Sue Monk Kidd's, "The Secret Life of Bees," the story of Lily's experience as a teenager transitioning into a young woman is explored. She begins the story as a naive, neglected child and by the end, Lily is a more matured, young women. Within her journey, Lily experiences the influences of spiritually and motherhood . Lily was raised in the 1960's South by her abusive father, T.Ray. Daily, Lily struggles with the void she feels for her mother and T.Ray's physical and emotional abuse. After discovering a town affiliated with her dead mother, Lily joins forces with her caregiver, Rosaleen, and they both escape their burdens that remain in Sylvan, South Carolina. Lily's burdens include the absence of a mother and her abusive father and Rosaleen's include an unjust arrest for being African American. The...
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...Sue Monk Kidd’s “The Secret Life of Bees” tells the story of Lily Owens, a 14 year old white girl in South Carolina, living on a peach farm with her verbally and mentally abusive father, whom she does not call daddy, but rather T. Ray. Her life is revolved around her blurred memory of the afternoon when her mother was killed. Lily is dealing with the absence of her mother and she has her “stand-in” mother Rosaleen, a black woman who is their housekeeper. Lily’s most prized possessions are the items of her mother’s that remain after she is gone, a picture of her mother Deborah and a wooden picture of black Mary. On the back of the picture of black Mary “Tiburon, South Carolina” is written on the back of it. After Rosaleen attempts to vote and ends up in injured and in jail, Lily and her escape from the hospital and began hitch-hiking to Tiburon, South Carolina, in Lily’s attempt to trace down evidence of her mother. As soon as they arrive in South Carolina, they go to a general store for lunch and Lily recognizes the same black mary that she has a picture of on a bottle of honey being sold at the store. They receive directions to the place where the honey came from, the Boatwright residence and this is where they stay for the rest of the novel. They meet the Boatwright sisters, August, May and June....
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...characters pasts which prominently affect their present lives and behaviors. This is true in Sue Monk Kidd’s novel “The Secret Life of Bees” as the protagonist Lily Owens is haunted and motivated by the memory of how she killed her own mother at age four. Kidd uses this one event to lay way too many important plot points and give the piece meaning as a whole. In Lily’s memory she is four years old and caught in between a spur of the moment argument between her parents when her mother, Deborah, produces a gun. When the gun gets knocked from her mother's hand Lily scrambles to grab it, and the rest is history. As Lily says herself, “She was all I wanted. And I took her away” (Pg.8). One of the main...
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...Sunny Ms. Phillips May 28, 2011 A White Girl Finds Love in a Negro Servant Family “The gun shining like a toy in her hand, how he snatched it away and waved it around. The gun on the floor. Bending to pick it up. The noise that exploded around us. This is what I know about myself. She was all I wanted. And I took her away” (Sue, Page#7-8). The secret life of bees by Sue Monk Kidd. The story takes place in South Carolina in the year 1964. Lily’s mother died when she was four years old. She lives with her father. Rosaleen worked in Lily’s house. One day Rosaleen and Lily run away from their home. Lily gets shelter in August’s house and she lives there forever. One theme coming of age is illustrated through instances such as how Lily thinks she killed her mother; how Lily moves on; and how she feels about a new Family. To begin, Lily is a fourteen year old white girl. When she was four, she killed her mother, Deborah. Her father’s name is T.Ray. After his wife left him and later died, he became a bitter and resentful man. He abuses and punishes Lily by making her kneel on dried grits, making fun of her attempts to better herself through reading, and refusing to offer her any signs of love. T. Ray takes out his general resentment and bitterness on Lily, the product of his lost love. Whom she cannot call “Daddy”; she lives on a peach farm in rural South Carolina. . Lily loves and trusts Rosaleen, a black woman. She helped raise Lily. Lily most prized possessions are a few things...
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...Sue Monk Kidd’s The Secret Life of Bees revolves around fourteen-year-old Lily Owens, a determinedly stubborn, friendless, motherless girl living in South Carolina during the 1960’s. From the first chapter of the book, Lily’s character is significantly shaped by her mother’s absence, which is accounted to an accident occurring when Lily was only three, perhaps even at the fault of the young girl herself. In addition to affecting her personality, this traumatic experience drives her to seek maternal care and belonging as she runs away to Tiburon, South Carolina and the plot unfolds. Independence and determination make up large portions of Lily’s character. Growing up with only her emotionally detached and almost cruel father, whom she refers to as “T. Ray” in place of daddy, she was never allowed to take part in social endeavors and even resorted to sewing her own clothes and using...
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... Lily, has to deal with every day. The Secret Life of Bees is a novel about a young girl who leaves her father in search of a new life and ends up finding the Boatwright sisters and finds out more regarding mother. Lily’s journey hasn’t been easy especially when it came to her mother, Deborah. Her mother died when Lily was 4 years old. Lily shot her on accident and killed her. So naturally Lily feels so much guilt from that, idealization followed, then hatred, then forgiveness, and lastly acceptance. This all happened in a span of about 6 weeks. In Sue Monk Kidd’s, The Secret Life of Bees, Lily moves through stages of guilt for what she did, infatuation with her mother, anger, forgiveness, and then acceptance that everyone makes mistakes....
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...reader to better visualize the importance and majesty of the carp’s appearance to the boys. Bless Me Ultima Part Two Topic | Tone | Theme | Family Expectations | Contemplative | Throughout life we try to please others without losing our way in the fight of good and evil. | Loss of Innocence | Fearful | Good vs. Evil | Objective | In Bless Me Ultima, Rudolfo Anaya, communicates a theme of family expectations through the opposing views of Tony’s parents. Tony’s mother wants her son to become a priest. This dream is fostered at the birth of her son, when he is born under a full moon. Tony’s mother’s brothers want him to become a priest and work with them on the farm because he is a Luna. Meanwhile Tony’s father hopes for his youngest son to become a vaquero or cowboy, like he once was. Tony’s father argues that his son is a Marez and he will wander the countryside like vaqueros. Tony’s father’s brothers come and tell Tony’s mother he will become a vaquero. Tony’s uncles argue over how to dispose of the after birth, until Ultima says she will dispose of it and will be the only one to know what happens to it. Throughout Bless Me Ultima Tony must find his own destiny while choosing how to hand le expectations of his mother and father. The Secret Life of Bees Part One...
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