Imagine bees flying gently around their hives, bringing nectar back from the outside world, caring for their queen and each other, and creating the honey that we often take for granted. What do bees represent to the world? These little creatures have long been recognized as hard-working, determined insects, but they can also represent other things. In her fiction novel The Secret Life of Bees, Sue Monk Kidd uses the motif of bees to mark changes in Lily’s life and motivation to love and forgive.
For example, a swarm of bees visits Lily one night in her room in Sylvan. The bees surrounded her but did not bother to sting her. “Looking back on it now,” Lily says, “I want to say the bees were sent to me. I want to say they showed up like the angel Gabriel appearing to the Virgin Mary” (Kidd 2). According to the passage, the bees were a foretelling of the changes her life was about to undergo. Furthermore, in the store in Tiburon, Lily ponders over this while looking at the jars of Black Madonna
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For example, while teaching Lily how to behave around her bees, August explains how to avoid getting stung and ends with “Above all, send the bees love. Every little thing wants to be loved” as well as reminding Lily that “the world was really one big bee yard, and the same rules worked fine in both places” (Kidd 92). Here, August and the bees teach Lily to love other people, even when the people could potentially hurt her. Lily uses this lesson later, after she learns about her mother. “I guess I have forgiven us both, although sometimes in the night my dreams will take me back to the sadness, and I have to wake up and forgive us again” (Kidd 301). Even after everything that she and her mother have done to each other, Lily still forgives them both. Working with the bees taught Lily to be kind and gentle, to love the world and forgive
In The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd, Lily’s journey is related to our school motto: “Monstra Matrem: Show Thyself a Mother” because she was looking for a mother’s love. Specifically, the motto describes a request for maternal care and to live in the spirit of caring. For example, Lily describes her daydreams when she says, “I used to have daydreams in which she was white and married T. Ray, and became my real mother.” (Kidd 12). This quote shows how Lily wishes Rosaleen was her legal mother since she was the only female figure in Lily’s life at the time.
In Tiburon Lily finds herself with August, the women who took care of her mother and knew the answer to Lily’s most asked question. When she and Lily finally have their conversation about her mother, August reveals the grand answer. August states “No, honey, she came by herself. ”(Kidd, 251) By the time August tells Lily the truth about her mother, Lily gets emotionally destroyed.
Lily was driven to August by her mother, “ They know the queen is their mother.” (Kidd, 149). The sense that she had to be there has always been in her heart. Lily found her through a jar of honey on the sale stand because the black Virgin Mary stood out to her. Ever since Lily had met August, She felt closer to her mother and to finding out what actually happened to her mother.
Lily arrives at the Boatwright sisters house and sees the statue of the black Mary for the first time. While she is viewing the black Madonna, she gets mixed feelings of hating herself and adoring herself and begins to feel guilt. “Everything about that smile said, Lily Owens, I know you down to the core. I felt she knew what a lying, murdering, hating person I really was. How I hated T. Ray, and the girls at school, but mostly myself for taking away my mother”(71).
In the beginning of The Secret Life of Bees, Lily has a hard life. Through her well meaning actions, she takes a journey that turns her life around. Lily breaks the law by taking her caregiver away from harm. She ignores the common idea of racism and looks at who people are. This enables her to grow close with many wonderful people who she would have otherwise been expected to shun.
The Secret Life of Bees Narrative Fathers hate this girl because of this one simple trick! In The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd, Lily killed her mother by accident when she was a child. So as she grew up, she did not have a mother figure. Her dad was abusive to Lily too.
Lily Owens who is the main character in the book Secret life of bees, written by Sue Monk Kidd. Lily is a 14 year old girl who is figuring out her life while trying to uncover her deceased mothers. This book is about her coming of age story and her life and the struggles of living in a racist era in 1964 South Carolina, she is on a journey after escaping her abusive father, to find where her mother would run off to. Lily and June Boatwright are very complex characters, who hold a lot of hate and misjudgement for themselves for their past. Both characters are confronted by these feelings they wish to ignore and they have to learn to overcome them and deal with them to let themselves be happy.
she learns about bees and how to get honey from them and they help her understand who she really is. As Lily gets more comfortable with the family she decides to tell them the truth and finds out that they knew her mother. The bees and the beekeepers help Lily find out that there is definitely a better world available to her. In The Secret Life of Bees, Lily overcomes her fears and present troubles to attain a better life.
In the book The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd, racism plays a huge role in shaping the plot of the story. Though slavery has been illegal for 153 years and African Americans along with other minorities have full rights as American citizens today, racism is still alive and well in the American society. As supported by the Catholic Church, one of the most important Catholic Social Teaching was respect for the dignity of human life. This means that each human life is irreplaceable and should be treated with respect and compassion regardless of age, race, ethnicity, sex, and economic backgrounds. Since racism is defined in dictionary as prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against someone of a different race based on the belief
Facts That Can Ruin a Relationship between Parents and Children In the book The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd, the writer tells a story of a young white girl facing challenges, struggling throughout her life, and trying to find out about the death of her mother. Sue Monk Kidd explains several different factors that can ruin a relationship between a parent and child, for example: the separation of a child from a father, when a father lies to his child and when there is no trust between them. To begin with, the relationship between a parent and a child can lead to separation from each other when there is not healthy interaction with each other or when there is not enough support from a father to a child.
In the novel, The Secret Life of Bees, I related to the character Lily Owens right at chapter one. In the first chapter of this novel, Lily was describing herself as a visual for readers. While Lily was briefly explaining her physical appearance, the line, “…Even the boys who wore their hair in ducktails dripping with Vitalis and carried combs in their shirt pockets didn’t seem to attracted to me, and they were considered hard up” (Monk Kidd 9), relates to many young girls. I, as a teenager, criticize myself very harshly just because a boy may not like me and that is what Lily is doing in this passage. I feel that Lily feeling this type of way and expressing it helped me to connect to her right from the beginning and put myself into her shoes
Lily, who is drawn to the image of the Black Madonna, finds refuge in the Mother Mary statue in the Boatwrights' honey home. Lily was shocked to find a little black statue of the Virgin Mary. The statue has an impact on her because, as stated in the statement, it appears to "understand" her; that is, it appears to know all about her hidden worries and concerns, for example, her guilt over her mother's death.” The lips on the statue had a beautiful, bossy half smile, the sight of which caused me to move both my hands up to my throat. Everything about that smile said, Lily Owens, I know you down to the core.”
She would brush it into such a tower of beauty, people all over heaven would drop their harps just to admire it. You can tell which girls lack mothers by the look of their hair, my hair was constantly going off in eleven wrong directions, and T-ray naturally, refused to buy me bristle rollers, so all year I’d had to rollit on Welch’s grape juice cans, which had nearly turned me into insomniac. I was always having to choose between decent hair, and a good night sleep. (found on page 3) Another way in which bees symbolize Lily is that some bees don’t like leaving their hive and Lily didn’t want to leave because her mom wasn’t there.
Rosaleen and Lily journey to the Boatwright sisters pink house where the sisters welcome them in to stay. At first, Lily lies to the sisters about her early life because she wanted to find out if her mother had stayed there. Rosaleen and Lily learn a lot of things about the sisters when they get there. Once they are there for awhile, Lily begins helping August with the beekeeping and Rosaleen stays in the house to watch over May. They soon learn, that the sisters and the Daughters of Mary have made up their own religion, where they praise the Black Madonna, and have their own worship services at the sister’s house.
Her father always told Lily that her mother didn’t love her. But Lily still longed to find information about her mother. Deborah left a picture from her passed and Lily thought if I am going to find answers about my mother; I need to go to this place. She wanted to know about her mother and she wanted to get away from