August Boatwright’s relationship with Lily shows her caring personality. August takes Lily in and becomes like a mother to her. Their relationship is significant to the rest of the novel because they make everyone else see that skin color does not matter.
Lily’s mother died when she was little. “Someone who thinks death is the scariest thing doesn't know a thing about life.” (Kidd 202). She has a few of her mother’s possessions and uses them to imagine what her mother would have been like. “When a bee flies, a soul will rise.” (Kidd 206). She lacks a loving parent because her mother died and her father physically and verbally abuses her. When she runs away from home she goes to Tiburon, SC because that location is written on the back of her
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“Above all, send the bees love. Every little thing wants to be loved.” (Kidd 92). People thought August was strange for letting a white girl stay in her home, but August did not think anything of Lily’s skin color. “To strengthen relationships and build trust, focus on the things that are going well.” (Gillespie page 3) August and Lily did not focus on other people. They just focused on their relationship. “I wanted to make her love me so that she would keep me forever. If I could make her love me, maybe she would forget about Beatrix the nun going home and let me stay.” (Kidd 94). Lily thinks that when the truth comes out August will make her leave, but August loves Lily and will not make her leave. “Most people don’t have any idea about all the complicated life going on inside a hive. Bees have a secret life we don’t know anything about” (Kidd 148). August realizes from early on who Lily really is. Lily’s mother, Deborah, lived with the Boatwright sisters and Lily found them. Even though August knows the truth, she does not say anything to Lily because she does not want to make her confess if she is not ready. “Asking questions to get additional information and wondering aloud are two of the easiest ways to give ourselves a moment to stop before reacting.” (Gillespie page 2). August wants to react in the right way when Lily tells the truth. When Lily finally does tell August the truth, August does not get mad and is very sensitive with Lily’s feelings. “Empathizing means imagining how the other person might be feeling and what the person's emotions, thoughts, or circumstances might be - all without trying to fix the problem.” (Gillespie page
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.
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 the beginning of the novel, as the reader is first introduced to Lily’s character, she comes across as an extremely negative young girl. While thinking about
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.
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 meaning behind Sonsyrea Tate’s statement can be found deeply rooted within Sue Monk Kidd’s novel, The Secret Life of Bees.
I really was impacted by T. Ray’s quote during the height of the tension about Lily’s past mistakes, “ ‘It was you who did it, Lily. You didn’t mean it, but it was you’ ” (Kidd 299). This moment was one of my favorites because it showed the growth the lead character had made toward not only forgiving her mother, but forgiving herself. When Lily chases after her father to finally get the raw truth about the fateful day her mom died, it reveals that she is finally ready to come to terms with her past, no matter what really happened. At the beginning of the book, she can’t accept her mother’s death, her disappearance, and her lack of love from her parents. Coincidentally, she grasps at any excuse to punish herself because she is unsure of who she is.
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.
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
The character who changed the most in the novel, The Secret Life of Bees, was Lily Owens. Firstly, Lily’s change stems from her abnormal relationship with T. Ray. T. Ray abuses Lily. Sue Monk Kidd writes when Lily is punished with grits, “I swayed from knee to knee, hoping for a second or two of relief, but the pain cut deep into my skin” (24). This punishment physically hurt Lily, and aided to the constant physical abuse performed by T. Ray. From the beginning of Lily’s life, she is afraid of doing wrong to avoid horrible punishments. Therefore, Lily believed that she is unloved. Secondly, Lily’s actions motivated change. The moment when Lily finally told August Boatwright the startling truth about her past, is the moment she learns to trust
The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd is a realistic fiction novel that tells the story of Lily Owens, a 14 year old girl living in South Carolina, in 1964 with her father; T. Raye, and her housekeeper, Rosaleen. Lily and Rosalyn get into an argument with a couple white men. Rosaleen pours her chew on one of the white men because of their obscure comments. Times being how they were in 1964 Rosaleen was put in jail for spitting on a white man. Lily decides she needs to break Rosaleen out. I will present to you the main character’s personality, the main idea of this novel, and how I personally related to the main character.
Soon after her fourteenth birthday, Lily escapes to the Boatwright sisters’ house in Tiburon, South Carolina, with Rosaleen, who is arrested for assaulting a white man. Upon her arrival, Lily faces different racist situations and meets her first love, a handsome black boy named Zach. The novel The Secret Life of Bees demonstrates that although racism has a negative impact on everyday life, it also influences Zach and Lily’s development in a positive manner. Segregation in South Carolina happens everywhere and every day. Indeed, racism is manifested through the media, the law, which legitimizes segregation, and the perceptions that white and black people have of each other.
Since I want to tell the whole truth, which means the worst parts, I thought they could be smart, but not as smart as me, me being white. Lying on the cot in the honey house, though, all I could think was August is so intelligent, so cultured, and I was surprised by this.” (Kidd.78). Meeting and interacting with August depicts how much involuntary prejudice she had inside of her that she was not previously aware of. Lily used this experience to learn how you can’t judge a person based off their race and made herself rethink her thoughts on African-American people.
However, the plot twists with the introduction of the character ‘Lily’. Lily functions as a provider of unknown knowledge to not only the audience but eventually to the character, Mark Rutland.
August was correct when she said that Lily must be her own mother. Lily will not always have someone to care for her. If this happens she must learn to care for herself. Lily was also relying too much on the statue of Mary. When the statue of Mary was chained up Lily could not go to her for help.
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.