The Secret Life Of Bees Rhetorical Analysis

Some people feel unwanted, as if they don’t belong. Often they have just not found the right place to reside. Sue Monk Kidd, author of, “The Secret Life of Bees” which discusses a girl named Lily who grew up with her abusive father and the guilt of accidentally murdering her own mother. She never felt at home, especially because she hand many questions about her mother, Deborah. She ran away with her nanny, Rosaleen, in hopes of finding a place to call home. In “The Secret Life of Bees,” Sue Monk Kidd’s use of pathos gives her the ability to portray the purpose that one day everybody will have a place to call home, no matter one’s past life or skin color; she takes her audience deeper into this purpose by using the strategies of foreshadowing

Lily suffers from living with an abusive father. She also deals with the guilt of accidentally killing her mother, feeling unwanted, and not knowing the true reason her mother left. For example, “The gun shining like a toy in her hand, how he 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, 8). Deborah, Lily’s mother had previously ran away and came back but Lily was not sure why. When T. Ray came in the room and started yelling, all Lily wanted to do was help. Because of this she has to live with the constant memory of shooting her mother, and questioning herself, whether or not her mother’s purpose in coming back that hot day, was to get Lily. Most readers at this time can not even comprehend the pain Lily feels because most people do not go through times like this. Kidd presents abuse by adding the commentary, “I’d been kneeling on grits since I was six, but still I never got used to that powdered-glass feeling beneath my skin” (Kidd, 24). Nobody will ever get used to abuse. The audience feels sorrow for Lily at this point. She has been dealing with abuse for about 8 years. They feel anger towards T. Ray because Lily is an innocent young girl trying to find answers about her mother. Lily still feels quite

The bees and photographs in the book all link together and help Lily deal with her pain but also find answers she was looking for. Kidd notes, “The bees came the summer of 1964, the summer I turned fourteen and my life went spinning off into a whole new orbit, and I mean whole new orbit. Looking back on it now, I want to say the bees were sent to me” (Kidd, 2). The bees first appeared in Lily’s room. Later in the book she was training to become a beekeeper. This connects with Lily’s mother because Deborah had lived with bees for a few months when she left T. Ray. In a way the audience can interpret the bees as a way of communication for Deborah and Lily. The surprising next quote reads, “...when I found myself looking at a picture of the black Mary. I do not mean a picture of just any black Mary. I mean the identical, very same, exact one as my mother’s. She stared at me from the labels of a dozen jars of honey. BLACK MADONNA HONEY, they said” (Kidd 63). At this point Lily was shocked. The photo of a black Mary that Lily had belonged to her mother, and now she is seeing selves of them on honey. She begins to realize the name of the town, Tiburon, SC, on her mother's copy, must really have a meaning and she most be close to figuring it out. When she meets the Boatwright sisters, the creators of the honey, she soon finds out the importance of why her