The Secret Life of Bees is a fiction novel set during 1964 in Sylvan and Tiburon South Carolina. As the story starts out, we as the reader are startled by the shocking and devastating story of a little girl who accidentally shot her mother. Lily wants desperately to be just like every other girl her age, and in order to learn the etiquette of a young lady, which she has missed out on, she dreams of attending the charm school during the spring, however, “[she] got barred because [she] didn’t have a mother, a grandmother, or even a measly aunt to present [her] with a white rose at the closing ceremony” (9). Told by the protagonist Lily, the story follows her along her quest for self-identification. Lily yearns to know more about her mother because her father refuses to speak a word about her. After finding a picture of a Black Mary, with Tiburon, S.C. written on the back, amongst her mother’s possessions, Lily wonders if her mother had been to Tiburon and promises herself that one day she’d go there because she wanted to go everyplace her mother had been (15). With that, she ventures off with her nanny to find out if her mother did indeed go there.
Not many books can really catch my attention; however, this book did just that. “The plotting is subtle and careful and exquisitely executed, enabling Kidd not just to make her points about (the irrationality of racism and the power of female community), but to tell a memorable story while she does” (Kephart 62). She demonstrates how emotional the irrationality of racism really can be when Rosaleen, Lily’s nanny, goes out to try and vote and in turn angers a group of racist white men who beat her and then have her arrested. At the same time she highlights how the power of female community...
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...into their home, help her to find the answers she has been looking for, and introduce her to the life of bees and honey. Starting off giving the impression of being filled with sorrow, the novel gives away details of such a tragic event that occurred, and it turns out to be nothing like the impression given off. The book is filled with all the answers that Lily yearns for, and she is welcomed by several women throughout the book who fill that emptiness inside her. This book serves a good read for anyone of any age: young or old.
Works Cited
Kephart, Beth. “The Secret Life of Bees.” (undetermined). Book (Summit, N.J.) 20 (2002): 61-62. Reader’s Guide Full Text Select (H.W. Wilson). Web.13 Nov. 2013
Chee, Vernon. “Book Review: The Secret Life of Bees.” Blogcritics. N.p., N.d. Web. 11 Nov. 2013
Kidd, Sue Monk. The Secret Life of Bees. New York: Viking, 2002. Print.
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.
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.
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
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
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
Lily’s idea of home is having loving parent/mother figures who can help guide her in life. Because of this desire, she leaves T. Ray and begins to search for her true identity. This quest for acceptance leads her to meet the Calendar Sisters. This “home” that she finds brightly displays the ideas of identity and feminine society. Though Lily could not find these attributes with T. Ray at the peach house, she eventually learns the truth behind her identity at the pink house, where she discovers the locus of identity that resides within herself and among the feminine community there. Just like in any coming-of-age story, Lily uncovers the true meaning of womanhood and her true self, allowing her to blossom among the feminine influence that surrounds her at the pink house. Lily finds acceptance among the Daughters of Mary, highlighting the larger meaning of acceptance and identity in the novel.
The Secret Life of Bees is a book by author Sue Monk Kidd. It is set in 1964 in South Carolina, and focuses on the coming of age of Lily, a young white girl with many demons she must overcome. Amid her experience is a backdrop of racism and the Civil Rights Movement. The novel establishes that there is a struggle against racism that influences people in different segments of society. It shows the irrationality of racism in the 1960s. Multiple characters throughout the book display racist character traits, Rosaleen is on the receiving end of
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.
Everyone has a secret life that they keep hidden from the rest of the world. Lies are told on a daily basis in order to keep these lives stashed in the dark. In The Secret Life of Bees, by Sue Monk Kidd, the bees are the ones that have the most secret life of all. They each have their own specific role to play deep within the hive. It's obvious that the author had meant for some of her characters to portray the roles that these buzzing insects have to dutifully fulfill every duty. Lily and Zach are the field bees, August is a nurse bee, and the Lady of Chains is the Queen bee.
Over the course of several months, August guides, teaches, and helps Lily to accept and forgive herself. August once knew Deborah, and she knows that Lily is her daughter, but she does not confront Lily about the issue. Instead, she waits until Lily puts the puzzle pieces together and discovers for herself the relationship between her mother and August. August knows she is not ready to learn the truth about her mother when she and Lily first meet, so she waits for Lily to come to her. When Lily finally realizes the truth, she comes to August and they have a long discussion about Deborah. During this discussion, Lily learns the truth about her mother; that her mother only married T. Ray because she was pregnant with Lily, then after several years she had enough of living and dealing with T. Ray, so she left. Lily is disgusted by the fact that her mother would've done something like this, she did not want to let go of the romantic image of her mother she had painted in her mind (“‘The Secret Life of Bees’ Themes and Symbols of The Secret Life of Bees). Lily struggles to stomach the fact the her mother truly did leave her and she spends some time feeling hurt and angry, but one day, August shows her a picture of Lily and her mother. As Lily looks at the picture she is comforted and thinks, “May must’ve made it to heaven and explained to my mother about the sign I wanted. The one that would let me know I was loved” (Kidd 276). Seeing
“Someone who thinks death is the scariest thing doesn't know a thing about life,” says Lily Owens in The Secret Life of Bees. This quote reveals that Lily, the main character in this novel, gains real wisdom. Later, Lily also gains a clear vision about the most important entities in life. Lily, with her new found wisdom, is ready to experience the real world, flaws and all. She does not only limit herself to anything- but also, she is ready for life’s dangers, endeavors, and in general, anything life throws at her. As she grows as an individual, her strength increases tremendously. This novel is narrated by fourteen year
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.
Winfree, R. . The conservation and restoration of wild bees. Annuals of the New York Academy of Sciences. Volume 1195, 3 May 2010, Pages 169 – 197.
Bees are small flying insects, buzzing around with its painful stings which always make people afraid and annoyed. What generally relate with bees are their roles in pollination and producing honey and beeswax. So it seems that bees might be nothing to human as it’s easy to find substitutes for honey as flavoring. However, this perception is mistaken. Without bees, aftermath.
Kidd’s employment of bees inThe Secret Life of Bees is crucial since they allude to Lily’s and the black women’s mirror of unification. For Lily, the bees in the jar are considered to reflect the spiritual messengers that are sent by the Virgin Mary. They are portrayed as the spiritual mediators standing as a symbol of compassion and freedom for Lily’s bleak loneliness. In this respect, Lily states that “Everyone of those could have descended on me like a folk of angels and stung me till I died” (3). The critic Harrold Buhner explains the bees sacredness by suggesting that “Bees are the messengers of the gods, bringing the sacred to human beings, with a kinship to the soul essence that all people possess” (20). In Kidd’s novel, the bees appear like the instructors in tracing Lily’s destiny as they provide her with a sense of deliverance. In her novel, Kidd