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Insecurity In Sue Monk Kidd's The Secret Life Of Bees

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Lily’s insecurity is displayed through her actions in school when encountering the more popular girls, “I started picking scabs off my body and, when I didn’t have any, gnawing the flesh around my fingernails until I as a bleeding wreck” (Kidd 9). For instance, Lily’s act of shying away from others and picking at her scabs helped to emphasize her discomfort when people she considered her betters, in style at least, surrounding Lily and reminding her about her own less than satisfactory personal looks. Furthermore, her self-consciousness, along with her inborn daringness led her to run away from home, and take Rosaleen with her. In brief, the lack of parental guidance for Lily led her to be slightly unstable, and embarrassed about herself in general led her to run away from home, and the instability caused her to start stealing and lying. In Sue Monk Kidd’s book, The Secret Life of Bees, the color blue symbolized the love others felt towards Lily. Therefore, T. Ray’s …show more content…

In addition, the allusion to the Ranger Seven mission to the Moon helped to symbolize the veil coming off of Lily’s eyes, and to demonstrate her realization that her mom wasn’t the perfect person she had always believed her to be. “‘On July twenty-eighth, the United States of America will launch Ranger Seven from Cape Kennedy, Florida,’ he said. It was going to take a 253,665-mile flight before it crash-landed onto the moon. The whole point was to take pictures of the surface and send them back.” (112-113) Furthermore, the allusion to the Ranger Seven mission to the Moon helped to symbolize Lily’s coming of age, along with her eventual understanding that she must stand up to her father. Therefore, Kidd alluded to the Moon mission to demonstrate Lily’s journey to adulthood, and the realizations she had during the aforementioned

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