In the novel The Beet Queen, Louise Erdrich about two children traveling through an unknown town to their family’s house, in hope for a better life. Erdrich writes these children as parallels to their surroundings. Each character reflects different parts of the setting, and they are impacted differently throughout the plot. These events help shape their personalities and exaggerate certain characteristics, such as Karl’s wistfulness and Mary’s concentration and simpleness. When the children first enter the town, they are greeted with the cinders that scrape their knees and palms as they jump out of the boxcar. The reader imagines the town immediately warning them to go back, as they are hurt by their first contact to the town. The story also rarely mentions the presence of other people until the woman who unleashes her dog onto Karl. This depicts a mood of loneliness, as if the townsfolk are segregating themselves from the contrasting aura of the boy. Consequently, the children feel isolated and confused. …show more content…
Mary is described as short and ordinary, and Erdrich writes, “Her name was square and practical as the rest of her”. The uninteresting description of her makes her seem like a part of the town, which is written as grey, old, and uneventful. While Karl stops to look at the graceful bright beauty of the tree, the text says “Mary trudged solidly forward, hardly glancing at it,” showing her obvious disinterest in the contrast of the tree from the dull, grey town. When the dog attacked Karl, Mary ran towards her aunt’s house instead of back to the train. She stayed in the town and fit in
In her novel, she derives many of her characters from the types of bees that exist in a hive. Lily and Zach have characteristics that are akin to that of field bees, August has that nurturing personality of a nurse bee, and the Lady of Chains is revered by her subjects just like a Queen bee is by her hive. Nowadays, no one ever faces a problem that someone, or something, has already faced. No one really has a secret life to themselves.
It was times throughout the book the reader would be unsure if the children would even make it. For example, “Lori was lurching around the living room, her eyebrows and bangs all singed off…she had blisters the length of her thighs”(178).Both Lori and Jeannette caught fire trying to do what a parent is supposed to do for their child. Jeannette caught fire at the age of three trying to make hotdogs because her mother did not cook for her leaving Jeannette to spend weeks hospitalized. She was burnt so bad she had to get a skin graft, the doctors even said she was lucky to be alive. The children never had a stable home. They were very nomadic and a child should be brought up to have one stable home. No child should remember their childhood constantly moving. This even led to Maureen not knowing where she come from because all she can remember is her moving. The children had to explain to her why she looked so different is because where she was born. They told Maureen “she was blond because she’d been born in a state where so much gold have been mined, and she had blue eyes the color of the
The meaning behind Sonsyrea Tate’s statement can be found deeply rooted within Sue Monk Kidd’s novel, The Secret Life of Bees. The desire for “home,” or identity, within Lily is the driving force that leads her to find the pink house and the Calendar Sisters. This new physical and spiritual “home” that Lily finds illuminates the larger meaning of the novel, which is acceptance and identity, and displays where she truly
Mary is still in deep love with John, conversely John only uses Mary for selfish pleasure. In here, Atwood breaks away from the telling of stories from third person to sentences of second. “He comes to her apartment twice a week and she cooks him dinner, you’ll notice that he doesn’t even consider her worth the price of a dinner out…” (96). This interruption is to revert back to the main idea of Atwood talking directly to the audience and informing them of how the character John treats and views Mary, which is complete turnaround from the previous Story A which went into no detail into either character’s thoughts or actions whatsoever. Another form of specific detail gets used through similes.
Para 2: First of all, Bees and beehives is a significant motif in the novel by Kidd because it represented the community of women. The Boatwright sisters, along with Our Daughters of Mary, stood up for Lily when T. Ray came to take her home. Quoted from page 721, “The four of them lined up beside us, clutching their pocketbooks up against their bodies like they might have to beat the living heck out of somebody.” The Daughters of Mary all stood in the parlor of the Boatwright house, ready to take on whatever came their way. The community of women in this novel stuck together
She spends hours in her house while taking care of May, her youngest sister, who suffers from a mental disorder. May often needs a lot of protection and monitoring since her traumatic episodes happen without notice. At all costs, looking after May makes August delightful because she is simply showing her sincere love. Whenever May has an episode, August bathes May and she advises May, “That’s right, May. Let all that misery slide right off you. Just let it go.” (Kidd, 89). Above all, this helps May to calm herself down as August’s recommendations are pleasing. Moreover, August owns a huge apiary that she genuinely adores. She works there as a full- time beekeeper and appreciates what she does for a living. While working Lily observes her, “...August hummed it when she pasted labels on the honey jars.” (Kidd, 83). The three blood sisters own a bee song that they sing when they are working around the bees. August hums it when she is vigorous to show her prosperity of being free. Also, August was able to afford the expenses of Lily and Rosaleen, Lily’s caregiver. Lily does not have money to pay for food or other necessaries so August uses her self-earned cash to aid her. In the long run, August’s success is due to having plenty of
This expedition of sort is demonstrated when Lily, having lost her mother as a young child, seeks a sense of comfort within the Boatwright sisters and the bees. Experiencing this sense of comfort and joy for the first time, given from the bees, Lily is met with a feeling of euphoria and excitement. However, upon realizing that the love she was feeling wasn’t truly from a mother, Lily described a dramatic change in feelings as, “Then, without all warning, all the immunity wore off, and I felt the hollow spooned-out space between my navel and breastbone begin to ache. The motherless place” (Kidd 150-151). Due to the dramatic contrast between the two emotions, it is evident that the theme, how the lack of a motherly figure leads to a missing part in a person’s life, is constructed using the structure. The sudden change from exhilaration to guilt and sorrow adds to the organization of the passage. By including such a dramatic shift between emotions, the author draws the reader’s attention to the contrasting feelings. Because the euphoria that Lily was experiencing was converted back to dysphoria, it is evident that the lack of having a mother in a child’s life cannot be fulfilled with another feeling. Thus, Lily is lead back to the start of her
In the excerpt from The Beet Queen ,by Louise Erdrich, two children arrive in the town of Argus through the only means of transportation, a train. Once the pair arrive the environment immediately impacts them and is described through careful word choice and visual descriptions when mentioning what the town and children are like. As well as comparisons between between the the two children. Which all contribute to create an atmospheric feeling about the town that only Mary can endure.
While doing an analysis of the essays regarding “The Beet Queen,” I noticed correlations between their writing an my own. Sample D started of with a question, used as a hook, which is something I can recall doing freshman year quite often. It also has a really good thesis statement, even though there is a comma missing. It would make a fine starter for an essay with a little bit of work. Sample H has more problems than Sample D, in my opinion. It uses the word “me” making the essay personal instead of analytical. It also is very generalized, there are no specific details brought in for the story. Onto Sample A, the introductory paragraph sounds choppy, like their thesis was broken into different sentences then switched around into a weird,
When the book begins, Lily is depressed and guilt-ridden over the loss of her mother and her father T. Ray’s cold and abusive behavior. These are symptoms of queenlessness, a hive in chaos. “The queen...is the unifying force of the community; if she is removed...the workers very quickly sense her absence. After a few hours...they show unmistakable signs of queenlessness” (Kidd 1). Without Deborah in the house, Lily and T. Ray suffered and the distance between them grew. Without a queen bee to give them a direction, they had no sense of community. Lily and T. Ray did not work together to prosper, and neither could function at their full
During the course of the novel Mary becomes more vigorous and courageous. She is the one who takes the initiative to save her mother when Caleb loses hope. As the novel progresses she becomes more and more courageous. To sneak around and attack who used to be your best friends and defile the law takes a lot of courage. One of the greatest examples is that she will do anything to save her mother. This is shown when Mary and Caleb kill a lamb to scare Constable Dewart, “A hooded figure jumped out from behind the boulder, but instead of a human face, the head of a sheep stared at constable Dewart” (257).
Early on the reader is aware that Mary Katherine thoughts are unusual and eccentric for a girl her age. Mary Katherine was brought up as upper class in a small village, living with her family until their sudden death. With only her Uncle and
In the opening scenes of the story the reader gets the impression that the boy lives in the backwash of his city. His symbolic descriptions offer more detail as to what he thinks about his street. The boy says “North Richmond Street, being blind, was a quiet street [it’s houses inhabited with] decent lives within them, gazed at one another with brown imperturbable faces” (Joyce 984). This shows that the boy feels that the street and town have become conceited and unoriginal. While to young to comprehend this at the time the matured narrator states that he now realizes this. The boy is also isolated in the story because he mentions that when the neighborhood kids go and play he finds it to be a waste of time. He feels that there are other things he could be doing that playing with the other boys. This is where the narrator starts to become aware of the fact that not everything is what is seems. He notices the minute details but cannot quite put them together yet. As the story progresses one will see that th...
Near the middle of the story we see Mary exhibit her bad sinister character; her personality and feelings suddenly change when she murders her own husband by hitting him at the back of the head with a frozen lamb leg. After denying all of Mary’s helpful deeds, Patrick told her to sit down so that he can tell her something serious; the story doesn’t tell us what he says to her but Mary suddenly changes after he tells her something, her “instinct was not to believe any of it” (Dahl 2). She just responded with “I’ll get the supper” (Dahl 2) and felt nothing of her body except for nausea and a desire to vomit. She went down the cellar, opened the freezer, grabbed a frozen leg of lamb, went back upstairs, came behind Patrick, and swung the big leg of lamb as hard as she could to the back of his head killing him. This act of sudden violence shows how much she has gone ...
The story begins as the boy describes his neighborhood. Immediately feelings of isolation and hopelessness begin to set in. The street that the boy lives on is a dead end, right from the beginning he is trapped. In addition, he feels ignored by the houses on his street. Their brown imperturbable faces make him feel excluded from the decent lives within them. The street becomes a representation of the boy’s self, uninhabited and detached, with the houses personified, and arguably more alive than the residents (Gray). Every detail of his neighborhood seems designed to inflict him with the feeling of isolation. The boy's house, like the street he lives on, is filled with decay. It is suffocating and “musty from being long enclosed.” It is difficult for him to establish any sort of connection to it. Even the history of the house feels unkind. The house's previous tenant, a priest, had died while living there. He “left all his money to institutions and the furniture of the house to his sister (Norton Anthology 2236).” It was as if he was trying to insure the boy's boredom and solitude. The only thing of interest that the boy can find is a bicycle pump, which is rusty and rendered unfit to play with. Even the “wild” garden is gloomy and desolate, containing but a lone apple tree and a few straggling bushes. It is hardly the sort of yard that a young boy would want. Like most boys, he has no voice in choosing where he lives, yet his surroundings have a powerful effect on him.