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.
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.
In The Secret Life of Bees, written by Sue Monk Kidd, Lily lacks a mother figure in her life, which leads her on a compelling journey as she desperately searches for answers about her true mother. Her abusive father, T. Ray, causes Lily to run away along with Rosaleen, the housekeeper. They are led to the Boatwright household by one of the few things Lily still possesses from her mother, a Black Madonna Honey label. Lily is given the opportunity to create a mother-daughter type bond between her and the Boatwright sisters. August, one of the sisters, acts as the “queen bee” throughout the story. August teaches Lily that a mother does not have to be someone who you share blood with, but rather, a mother is
...inds love along the way. She makes rash decisions in bad situations, faces the truth that she has been avoiding, and finds her place in the world. While her journey takes some unexpected twists, Lily learns to make the best of what she has, and go for what she wants. She learns to move on from the past, and make a brighter future. But most importantly, Lily learns to accept that life is unpredictable and that by doing her best Lily is living life the way she wants to.
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.
The overall message of The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd is motherhood. Motherhood was used throughout the novel. The director remains true to the main theme. She enhances the theme by frequently reminiscing, the memories of the character mother in each chapter. The main character name is Lily Owens and she holds a very dark secret. When she was young her parents got into a huge altercation. Lily’s mom grabbed a gun from the bed. While Lilly’s mom was trying to get the gun, Lily’s dad T. Ray grabbed the gun from her and dropped it. Lily’s mom was yelling at Lily to get the gun so she can hand it to her. But, as young Lily was, she accidently shot her mother and she died at the scene. When she grew older, it began to haunt her more and more each day. In the novel it states that “Just put it out of you head, Lily. It was an accident. You didn’t mean to do it…Mother, forgive. Please forgive” (Kidd 3). This shows that this incident really affected Lily tremendously
Throughout The Secret Life of Bees , there is no shortage of symbolism, coming directly from its namesake, bees. Each connection draws upon the deep and rich meaning behind this wonderful composed text. The bees, however, never are a scapegoat. Similar to Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird character Atticus, they never allow for shortcuts or disillusion with reality. They force you to see the world as it is, and to accept it, and send love to it, for it is all you can, when you are as insignificant as a
Think for a moment of a world without bees; a world without our buzzing friend. They might look like they barely do much to help our ecosystem. However, bees are a vital part of our agriculture and this makes it vital that we keep them around. The bee population decline in recent years is troubling for both us and our little friends. As their friends, we must do all we can in order to ensure their survival which in turn will ensure our own.
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
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, there 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.
The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd is a story about racial struggle between black and white in 1964, which is in the middle of the civil right movement in South Carolina. The narrator and protagonist of the story named Lily raised by T. Ray, her father, who has bias towards black people at all time. Due to the fact that T. Ray often says something regards to racial discrimination, Lily starts to thinks that whites are superior than the others unconsciously. Also Lily was not aware that she is being an unconscious racism because of T. Ray until she starts to live with Boatwright sisters who are black. T. Ray often takes his anger out on Lily since Deborah left the house and it trigged abuses and ignores Lily. Moreover, though T. Ray treats Lily so badly, he seems like and acts like he doesn’t care. In other words, it was impossible to feel any humanity in T. Ray. One of the most important and influential characters named T. Ray is prejudiced, violent and cruel person.
Zaleski, Jeff. “Review of The Secret Life of Bees.” Publishers Weekly 12 Nov. 2001: 33. Rpt. in Contemporary Literary Criticism. Detroit: Gale, 2009. N. pag. Literature Resource Center. Web. 9 Apr. 2014. .
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.
More, Daphne. The Bee Book: The History and Natural History of the Honeybee. New York: Universe Books, 1976. Print.
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