In life it is inevitable to face challenges, struggles, and tragedy. Each one strikes through the heart, mind, and soul of a person like a hurricane leaving sorrow, fear, and destruction in its wake. The person’s time stops in order to rebuild what is lost and move forward in life, but in some cases the time never continues and the person is frozen. This is the choice of the individual to move forward or stay. Sue Monk Kidd plays with this concept in her book, The Secret Life of Bees. The story takes place in the south during the age of integration. The tale goes through the eyes of Lily, a young white girl who lost her mother, Deborah, at a young age. Her father, T. Ray, turns cold after her mother runs away never overcoming the tear in his …show more content…
Deborah Fontanel is subject to those conditions; she falls in love with T. Ray when they meet but her love weakens with time. He purposes enraptured in his love for her but she declines. Fate has another plan for her though and she becomes pregnant with T. Rays child. Now she must marry him and live on an isolated farm with the man she does not want to be with. Soon she gives birth to Lily who then is attached to her mom at the hip. In the rare even Lily is not at her mom’s side Deborah would be “out behind the tractor shed, sitting on the ground, staring off at nothing” (53) contemplating the tragedies in her life. She does not want to be confined to this life but is unable to leave it. So she falls into despair contemplating the world beyond her shackles. Later on, she becomes so desperate she runs away to save and free herself. She goes to August, her old caretaker and older sister of May and June. On her arrival, August noted that Deborah“ha[s] gotten so thin and ha[s] these dark circles under her eyes” (251). Both sleep deprivation and loss of weight are symptoms of her depression which stems from the lifestyle she is forced to live. For the first week away from home, “all she did was cry” (252) partly her guilt of leaving, but also her realization that she threw away her life. She is so incapable of handling this fate of hers she has fallen apart. Back on the farm withdraws into books underlining …show more content…
But Deborah will never come back when she dies Lily is there. She holds the gun and then her memories goes black. Nothing else besides the sound of a gunshot. T. Ray tells her Lily is her mother’s killer. For most of her life she carries this as a heavy burden on her life filling her with sorrow and the desire to be loved which she describes as “nothing but a hole where [her] mother should have [be], and this hole had ma[kes her] different, le[aves her] aching for something” (293). Her ache leads her to develop a deep connection with Rosaleen, her caretaker. This connection leads Lily to go to many extents to keep her loved one safe including breaking Rosaleen out of jail and running away with her. Once they break out of jail and hitchhike to Tiburon, they find August’s house. There see the Black Mary statue; looking at it she describes the feeling as “magnetic and so big it ached like the moon had entered my chest and filled it up” (70). She views this statue as a mother figure one that can help fill her chest where her mother had left years ago. Over the course of months, she tells August the truth about what happened to her mom. She also explains the lie T. Ray told her, this is “the first time I’d ever said the words to another person, and the sound of them broke open my heart” (242). Lily for most of her life bottles up the alleged truth of her mother making her feel
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.
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.
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.
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.
At the start of the novel, a general understanding of Lily’s life is explained, giving knowledge about T.Ray, Rosaleen, and her mother, Deborah. Lily describes the little she is able to remember about her mother's death as she was only four years old at the time. A nasty fight had broken out between T.Ray and Deborah, leaving a frightened Lily to be tossed around between the two. A gun had appeared on scene and in an attempt to save her mother, Lily got involved. In a remembrance of this chilling day, Lily reflects, “What is left lies in clear yet disjointed pieces in my head. The gun shining like a toy in her hand, how she 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” (Kidd 7-8). Through reflection, a very heartbroken Lily is able to convey what happened on that dreadful day when her mother died in her own thoughts and beliefs. As a result of this event, Lily begins to carry an immense amount of grief and guilt around as well as losing herself into these bad memories and feelings. Her self love is depleted and her mother is gone, leaving her with T.Ray and her new mother figure,
When someone hears the word quest, their mind automatically goes to a mythical land of dragons and knights in shining armor. However, Thomas Foster’s book How to Read Literature Like a Professor states that this shouldn’t always be the case. In Chapter One: Every Trip Is a Quest, Foster claims that a quest in literature can take place in any time period and can be as mundane as grocery shopping. In order to classify an event as quest, it needs to follow certain criteria. There needs to be “a quester, a place to go, a stated reason to go there, challenges and trials en route, and a real reason to go there” (Foster, 3). Furthermore, considering the definition of a quest by Thomas Foster, it is clear that the novel, The Secret Life of Bees, fits
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.
Intro: Working around the hives; dedicated and faster with each movement. Honey drizzling in golden crevices; a family unit working together, buzzing in harmony. Bees and beehives is a significant motif in the novel Secret Life of Bees: By Sue Monk Kidd because it represents the community of women in the novel. It also represents Lily Owen’s longing and need for a mother figure in her life. And finally, it was significant because the bees lived a secret life, just as Lily and Rosaleen did in the novel.
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.
Ray and her nanny, Rosaleen. T. Ray has told Lily that she is the one that killed her mother when she was four years old, but Lily does not believe her father and wants to find the real truth. Lily leaves Sylvan, South Carolina so she can find out more information about her mother; this is when she finds the Boatwright sisters and her life is changed.
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
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.
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
Grief leaves an imprint on those who experience it. Some can survive its deep sorrow, others cannot. In The Secret Life of Bees, by Sue Monk Kidd, she explores the effect of grief on the main characters. The novel opens with fourteen-year-old Lily Owns struggling with the knowledge that her mother was dead because she, as an infant, picked up a loaded gun and accidentally shot her. She runs away from her abusive father in search for answers of who her mother was. Lily hitchhikes to Tiburon, South Carolina; the location written on the back of an image of the Black Madonna – one of the only belongings she has of her mother’s. There, she finds a pink house inhabited by the Boatwright sisters who are African American women making Black Madonna honey. The Boatwright sisters have had their share of grief with the death of two of their sisters and the racial intolerance they face despite the passage of the Civil Rights Act. The Boatwright sisters and Lily Owens have different methods of coping with grief; internalizing, ignoring, and forgetting are some of the ways they cope, with varying degrees of success. They discover that they must live past their grief, or else it will tear them apart.
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.