The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd and The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath are novels that depict a journey towards the call for self-identity. Both novels are feminist novels, which deal with a woman’s need to find her place in the world, and by doing so, secure her own identity. In Kidd’s Secret Life of Bees, Lily’s identity is more readily given to her. The Boatwrights, who are women of color, accept and care for Lily, as well as identify themselves as a foster family to her. Kidd’s Secret Life of Bees ends with the idea that Lily will be able to get by in the world because she has the unwavering and passionate support of the Boatwrights, who are able to guide Lily throughout her journey of discovery. However, in Plath’s Bell Jar, Esther’s …show more content…
Kidd was raised in an intimate and loving community, which prompted and fueled her desire of writing. Kidd also cited Thoureau’s Walden and Chopin’s The Awakening as influences that would ultimately lead to novels established in spirituality. Kidd’s environment during the 1960’s encompassed a cultural movement, which later influenced her writing: The African-American Civil Rights Movement, which goal was to end racial discrimination against Americans of color and enforce constitutional voting rights for them. Kidd’s early environment shaped the writing of her novel, Secret Life of Bees, which is mostly based on her years of growing up in the 1960’s in the South. Kidd’s cultural background and context help the reader understand why Lily finds an enduring and steady support in the Boatwrights, who offer her love and care throughout the novel. Clearly, Kidd, given her background, aims to project a theme of unity and …show more content…
Plath was born in Boston, Massachusetts and raised as a Unitarian Christian by her German father and Austrian mother. Because of her father’s European culture, there was a constant cultural gap that got in the way of their communication and paternal connection, which led to a distant relationship between them. When Plath was only eight years old, her father died because of his untreated diabetes. After which, Plath experienced a loss of faith and remained equivocal about religion throughout her life. In 1950’s, Plath attended Smith College in Northampton Massachusetts, which was an all-girls college. Plath excelled in her studies; however, she found college life stressful and tedious because of the social and academic rigors. In 1953, Plath won a Guest Editorship at Mademoiselle in New York City. Her experiences in New York began a downward spiral in her life because of her competitively harsh environment. It is said that many events during her New York experience influenced her writing of The Bell Jar, which is arguably a semi-autobiographical novel that parallels Plath’s own depression to Esther’s fall into mental illness. After returning from New York, Plath made numerous suicide attempts and was later checked into a psychiatric hospital where she met doctors who would help her recover. Plath’s cold and clinical environment greatly influenced her writing of The Bell Jar, which explores the
People share their secret lives without even talking about them. It only takes a glance or feeling to see that others have faced similar situations and problems, some people even live parallel lives. Despite the fact that many people believe it impossible for a measly insect, like a bee, to know the pain hardships a human faces, Sue Monk Kidd proves them wrong with her book The Secret Life of Bees. In her novel she derives many of her characters from the types of bees that exist in a hive. Lily and Zach have characteristic 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 all to themselves.
August Boatwright is a reliable friend, a caring woman, and a positive influence to Lily. “August lives up to her name as the ‘Mistress of Bees’ and the ‘portrayal into [Lily’s] mother’s life’ in the first moments she welcomes Lily and Rosaleen into her home and offers them refuge in the honey house.” (Herbert, 20). August becomes a mother to Lily by giving her a place to stay and someone to lean on. August recognizes that Lily is missing something from her life, but she waits for Lily to confess the truth to her. “There is a hole in Lily’s heart from not having parental love, especially mother love, but August teaches her that if one’s earthly mother is not dependable, there is always a heavenly mother.” (Themes, 237). August creates her own religion for her self and her friends based around a statue of black Mary that has been in the Boatwright’s’ family for years. The group of African American women call themselves The Daughters of Mary. This group of women also plays a role in Lily’s search for comfort in a mother figure. “August becomes not only a mother, but a sort of spiritual teacher for Lily. She tells Lily about the secret life of bees, which includes the secrets of human life as well.” (Themes, 237). August teaches Lily lessons about patience, love, and forgiveness. She teaches her how to forgive, not only others, but herself as well. August says, “Every little thing wants to be loved.” (Kidd, 92). Lily learns
In the novel, “The Secret Life of Bees” by Sue Monk Kidd, the story reflects the time when the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was approved. Tension is rising in the southern states of the United States where most of the people there are against this bill. One of these states is South Carolina where the story takes place. It tells the story of Lily a fourteen year old girl living in Sylvan, South Carolina with her abusive father called T.Ray and a black maid named Rosaleen. After having to confront some troubling events, Lily and Rosaleen get to stay in the house of the Boatwright sisters, who are known to make the best honey in South Carolina. T.Ray had already fought in the war. He is a resentful and an angry man. The main cause of his behaviour is because when her wife died, she was about to leave him. This causes him to take out all of his anger on his innocent daughter, being really cruel sometimes towards her. At the end of the novel, Lily’s father let her stay with the Boatwright sisters. This decision is consistent with T.Ray’s character because it shows us how he is a careless, unloving and prideful person.
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.
Most runaway youth are homeless because of neglect, abuse and violence, not because of choice. Lily Owens is the protagonist in the novel, Secret Life of Bees, by Sue Monk Kidd, is no different. Lily is a fourteen year-old girl still grieving over her mother's death. T. Ray a man who has never been able to live up to the title of a father, due to years of abuse, has not made it any easier. Lily is a dynamic character who in the beginning is negative and unconfident. However, throughout the novel Lily starts to change into the forgiving person she is at the end.
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.
In The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd Lily has assumptions, biases, and prejudices about race that are changing over the course of the novel.
“It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters in the end.” -Ernest Hemingway. The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd is a coming-of-age novel written in the form of first person, using the internal monologue of a tween girl named Lily who lives in the very hostile, racist environment of South Carolina in the 1960’s. Lily lives in a household with her African American maid and only friend, Rosaleen, and her abusive father, T. Ray, who informs Lily that she was the one who killed her deceased mother as a child. In a search to find clues that deny this claim, Lily and Rosaleen set out to Tiburon, SC, a place her mother has indicated on the back of an unusual picture of a Black Madonna. The basis of the novel
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.
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
With an increase in familiarity, as she progresses her outlook on life changes with her. By the closure of The Secret Life of Bees, Lily Owens experiences passion, rage, joy, and sorrow in larger quantities than most teens her age. Amidst every trial transpires an improved
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
Sylvia Plath’s novel, “The Bell Jar”, tells a story of a young woman’s descent into mental illness. Esther Greenwood, a 19 year old girl, struggles to find meaning within her life as she sees a distorted version of the world. In Plath’s novel, different elements and themes of symbolism are used to explain the mental downfall of the book’s main character and narrator such as cutting her off from others, forcing her to delve further into her own mind, and casting an air of negativity around her. Plath uses images of rotting fig trees and veils of mist to convey the desperation she feels when confronted with issues of her future. Esther Greenwood feels that she is trapped under a bell jar, which distorts her view of the world around her.
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
Ruth, Elizabeth. “The Secret Life of Bees Traces the Growth of Lily’s Social Consciousness.” Coming of Age in Sue Monk Kidd’s The Secret Life of Bees. Ed. Dedria Bryfonski. Detroit: Greenhaven, 2013. 63-65. Print. Social Issues in Literature. Rpt. of “Secret Life of Bees.” The Globe and Mail 2 Mar. 2002: n. pag.