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 …show more content…
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 …show more content…
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
Lily’s mother was stripped of her limits by Lily’s father and her sense of independence was gone. As Lily’s mother said, the more she accepted her husband's apologies, the more her tolerance for the abuse went up, which ultimately resulted in Lily’s mother being somewhat of a villain while her father was alive. Lastly, Lily’s dad plays the role of an antagonist perfectly as he shows the reader what a negative force looks like. Lily continuously shows the reader of the book the violent temper and the mental and physical abuse that they had to encounter with Lily's father.
As shown above, Lily and Scout have had different ranges of exposure to African Americans, however they both eventually developed mature thoughts involving race and represented strong female characters in the midst of male-dominated societies. Similarities and differences between Lily’s and Scout’s many beliefs, spread throughout The Secret Life of Bees and To Kill a Mockingbird, creating two striking and intricately woven characters, who will continue to amaze me for years to
“They were pure and innocent—something that wasn’t often found in this world of greed, disgrace, and self-gratification” (Preston 88). Clover often thought of the girls in his cellar as flowers; his mother taught him that flowers were pure and beautiful, and that is what he wanted his family to be similar too. One night, Summer Robinson is walking alone in the dark, something her crazy-hot-protective boyfriend ☺ always tells her not to do. She suddenly hears and sees a man walking toward her saying “Lily”, and he soon calls her Lily. Because of this, Summer feels uneasy and tries to find an escape route; the man kidnaps her and brings her to his cellar.
This evidence portrays how desperate Lily is to know literally anything about her mother no matter how simple. Lily later on her journey to find more about her mother learns more about her mother . Though this information on her makes Lily no longer
Lily barely knew her own mother, and T. Ray, her father, abuses her and could care less. Lily gets to experience the parent-child love from Rosaleen. Kidd asserts that the interaction between different races can lead to loving
Lily spots the shelf of honey jars in a store, with a black Mary pictured on them. “I pointed to the honey jars. ' Where did you get those?’ He thought the tone of shock in my voice was really consternation. ' I know what you mean.
She makes it out of the hospital with Roseleen and to a nearby road. They discuss options and decide to run to a town close to then known as Tiburon. They come across a shop and see little jars of honey. Lily and Rosaleen go to the house where it is being made and meet the people there. The people who sell the honey are known as the Sisters of Mary and all show different traits that make them unique.
A historical fiction novel, The Secret Life of Bees, written by American author Sue Monk Kidd, focuses on a young girl named Lily who runs away from her home, and tries to discover more about her mother, since she only remembers seeing her when she was very young, and does not know why she hasn't seen her since. Lily believes the reason for this is because her mother left her and her father. This creates confusion for Lily, and makes her question why her mother would leave, leaving her to be frustrated. In The Secret Life of Bees, Kidd uses tone, simile, and syntax in order to show the theme of the emotional impact of feeling a sense of abandonment.
“A wonderful novel about mothers and daughters and the transcendent power of love” (Connie May Fowler). This quote reflects the novel, The Secret Life of Bees, by Sue Monk Kidd because the protagonist in the story, Lily Owens, her mother have died when she was four years old and she didn’t feel loved by her abusive father, T. Ray Owens, until she met the Boatwrights family with the housekeeper, Rosaleen, and stayed with them. The Boatwrights family are the three black sisters who are August, May, and June. This novel took place in Sylvan and Tiburon, South Carolina, where Lily grew up and where she found the answer to her questions.
The Secret Life of Bees, an American novel written by Sue Monk Kidd, presents Lily Owens’ journey to seek for the love of a mother, as she ran away from home to stay at the Boatwright sisters’ house to escape her father’s abuse. Throughout the book, readers can infer that Lily misses her mom immensely, however, aside from yearning for her mother’s presence, Lily also expresses her curiosity in her mother’s life before her death. One day, she finds out from August that her mother has left her and ran away from home before she died. This knowledge alters everything that Lily feels for her mother, and she completely forgets about the motherly tenderness that she dreams of everyday. Instead, all she can feel is resentment and hatred.
The ladies sharply change their minds about Lily going to Ellisville they want her to marry after all. This reason is because they no longer will have to pay for her way to Ellisville. They quickly take her off the train, in all of the commotion they forget the only thing Lily loves her hope chest. They reversed their decision and now are pressuring Lily to marry, while Lily pleads, “But I don’t want to get married . . . I’m going to Ellisville” (11).
In the story, Kidd’s use of characterization successfully reveals the theme that people's lives are more complex than they appear. Kidd demonstrates this theme using the characterization of Lily, T. Ray, May, and Deborah. One character that Sue Monk Kidd uses to portray the theme, is the main character Lily. In the beginning of the story, the author shows that Lily can be both mature and immature at times. An example of her maturity in the text is when she says, “People who think dying is the worst thing don’t know a thing about life” (Kidd 2).
Every day bees are disappearing from their colonies at dangerously rapid rates. Everyone should become bee keepers and/or have bee gardens. It is the peoples’ duty to protect and save the bees. Bees play a major role in our everyday lives, and they go unnoticed. Without bees our food supply would quickly decrease.
The main example in which Kidd used throughout The Secret Life of Bees novel was with the symbolism of Lily by bees. When this book was written its purpose was to represent racism within the US around the civil rights movement. But racism is really just taking two different parties which appear different but are equally smart, can perform the same tasks, and are emotionally equal, Caucasians and African Americans. So the real importance of the way Kidd uses bees as a symbol within the novel is to understand what Kidd is representing at a larger scale, not just within the story itself, racism present within the
Two of her sisters have this problem and it has genuinely affected August for better or worse. Lily’s father, T-Ray, deals with his mental illness by using violence and taking his anger out on Lily because of what happened with his wife Deborah. This causes Lily to feel unloved by her father. In the beginning of the story, Lily runs away from home to escape her tragic life with T. Ray.