The Secret Life Of Bees By Sue Monk Kidd

The Secret Life of Bees is a heart throbbing and touching novel about a young girl named Lily Owens who goes on a long journey far away to find out the truth about her mother, and in the process, finding herself. Filled with apprehension and self doubt, Lily grew up with her abusive and cold hearted father after the death of her mother when she was just 4 years old. She didn’t know much about her aside from what she was told growing up. Lily grew up with the weight of her mother’s death on her shoulders. Subsequently after her 14th birthday, and having been beaten by her father one too many times, Lily runs away with her nanny, Rosaleen, to Tiburon, South Carolina. After stumbling across August Boatwright’s bright pink house,

The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd is a book discussing the internal strife of a young white girl, in a very racist 1960’s south. The main character, Lily Owens, faces many problems she must overcome, including her personal dilemma of killing her own mother in an accident. Sue Monk Kidd accurately displays the irrationality of racism in the South during mid- 1960's not only by using beautiful language, but very thoroughly developed plot and character development. Kidd shows the irrationality of racism through the characters in her book, The Secret Life of Bees and shows that even during that time period, some unique people, were able to see beyond the heavy curtain of racism that separated people from each

My novel selection is “The Secret Life of Bees.” The novel was written by Sue Monk Kidd in 1997-2001, near Charleston, South Carolina. I choose this novel due to its nature. The set is in 1964. The Civil Rights Act and segregation were at its peak. The story is of a young white girl named Lily. She lives on a peach orchard with her emotionally detached father. Her mother died when she was four years old. She comes to find love in a series of strong African-American women. One of the first influential women to love her was her caretaker. Her name was Rosaleen and she had worked the fields for her father. “Rosaleen had worked for us since my mother died. My daddy- who I called T. Ray because “Daddy” never fit him- had pulled her out of the peach orchard, where she’d worked as one of his pickers.” (print) Lily then finds the Boatright sisters. She finds the Boatright sisters after raveling to find the “Black Mary” she found on a photograph in her mother’s belongings. Lily felt locating the lady in the photograph would solve the mysteries

When a parent dies, any child will cling to the other parent for emotional support and comfort for dealing with such a loss. In Lily’s case, she wanted her fathers support more than anything but he was cold, abusive, and stuck in the past, that he wasn’t able to give her anything except for take his anger out on her, when she disobeyed him. Although if someone does not get that support from the other parent, and if someone else is there that is understanding and kind, its amazing to see how much you can start to really rely on them and grow a close relationship. When Lily deals with the loss of her mother and the poor treatment of her father, she doesn’t know what to do with herself, she has a load of all different kind of emotions, and it really harms her well-being. Lily deals with guilt because she has visuals that she was the one that killed her mother, and on top of that she has her father telling her that her mother left her and she just abandoned her, making Lily feel unimportant and then at the same time guilt. Rosaleen is the closest role model that Lily has for a mother, Rosaleen cares and sticks up for Lily but Lily doesn’t really have the mother-daughter connection with her. Although Rosaleen provides comfort for Lily, she helps her with her father and in return Lily defends Rosaleen as well as save her life from the hospital after she got beaten.

"New beekeepers are told that the way to find the elusive queen is by first locating her circle of attendants." (57) This quote is at the beginning of chapter three and not only foreshadows many things to come, but within the quote, two of the novel’s main metaphors are mentioned, bees and the queen, which is referring to society and a mother figure. Although this quote is largely interpreted as a metaphor for Lily looking for a new queen or mother figure, and perhaps August being that mother, I believe that it has another meaning as well. I believe that the Black Madonna also serves as a “queen” and mother figure to all the women in “The Secret Life of Bees.”

In the 1960s, America struggled with segregation between whites and blacks. People of darker skin tones were separated from those who had lighter tones. There were separate bathrooms, restaurants, and stores that segregated the two races. Black people were stripped of common privileges because of the way they appeared, such as voting and seating areas on public transportation vehicles. It became a lifestyle to most people as it was rare anyone would integrate with the other race. If integration did occur, it was frowned upon by the community. Examples of integration occur in the two novels The Color of Water by James McBride and The Secret Life of Bees written by Sue Monk Kidd. Each book shares its own story of integration during the

Haunted by the her own memories, Lily Owens finds comfort in the humming of the bees. In the novel, The Secret Life of Bees, Sue Monk Kidd writes about the life of young girl whose spontaneous decisions lead her to her mother’s past. Lily’s life has revolved around the lack of a mother. Her father, T. Ray, is a harsh and unloving peach farmer who punishes Lily unreasonably and does not fulfil his father like position. Lily’s adventure begins after catching a few bees in a jar. She empathizes with them as they are stuck and alone, something she understands all too well. On the day of her birthday, Lily and her negro nanny, Rosaleen, go out into town to register for voting. Rosaleen and Lily are on their way when a group of white men begin to harass Rosaleen and degrade her for being a negro. Rosaleen pours her spit jug on the shoes of the man and is given no mercy when she is beaten. With Rosaleen ending up in jail, Lily returns to the comfort of the bees once again. As she opens the jar and watches the bees escape, Lily follows suit and flees from home. She breaks Rosaleen out of the hospital and they hitchhike their way to Tiburon, South Carolina. Lily believes that her mother, Deborah, had once visited Tiburon and where she had obtained a picture of a Black Madonna. Lily has spent her whole life looking for new information and connections between herself and her mother. With luck and fate on her side, Lily finds the home of the Boatwright sisters, the creators of the Black

Just fifty years ago, America was a society of segregation and racism. The dictionary defines racism as “the belief that a particular race is superior to another.” Although it is clear times have changed, racism is still seen in modern american society. It’s also clear that relationships between African Americans and whites are generally better than they were in the forties and fifties. Today, it is rare to witness a black man walk down the street and step off the sidewalk to let a white man walk by, or to see a black man sitting on a different section of the bus or train because a white man told him he has too. But superiority of races is still happening. A lot of this has the do with the ignorance of others. Passed down generation to

Setting of Novel: The Secret Life of Bees took place in the 1960s in Sylvan, South Carolina

The novel The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd is centered around the main character, Lily, and her quest to find a mother like figure. Lily runs away from home in order to escape for former life of oppression, and to try and find herself. She met and was taken in by the Boatwright sisters who introduced her to a whole new world. Symbolism plays a major part in the book and is used by the author to uncover parts of the plot that were not clearly stated. The characters Rosaleen, Lily, and May all change a great deal throughout the course of the book and these changes are shown through the presence of water. The author repeatedly uses the symbol water to show a clense or renewal of characters which marks the beginning of the character’s evolution.

Sue Monk Kidd is a writer from Southern Georgia. She is best known for her most influential piece of writing, The Secret Life of Bees, which has found its way into many classrooms across the country. Many of her fiction novels have tackled controversial and well known issues and themes of the South over the course of history.

Many people say that you need to read the book before you watch movie based on the book because the movie is always different. The movie for The Secret Life of Bees is no exception to that rule. The Secret Life of Bees is about a 14-year-old, white girl, named Lily Owens, living in 1964. While Lily was just 4 years old, her mother, Deborah, died, and her only memory of her mom is hazy and unsure. In her memory, Deborah was packing a bag to leave her abusive husband T. Ray and take Lily with her. Before they could leave though, T. Ray tried to force her to stay, and she grabbed a gun. T. Ray knocked it out of her hand, so Lily wanted to hand it back to her. Then she accidentally shot her mother, and she died. In the summer of ‘64, Lily ran

In the letter “Birds and Bees? No, Let’s talk about Dollars and Cents”, Ben Stein, a lawyer and financial columnist for The New York Times, writes to his son to talk to him about life, and more importantly, money. He wants his son to know the struggles that his great-grandparents had to endure because they did not gain any capital and try to advance themselves financially. Because his son has grown up in a good home and the author is only the second in his family to accumulate any real capital, he wants his son to know what it's like to be successful and persuade him to work hard in order to avoid the struggles that his great-grandparents had to endure.

In the “Secret Life of bees” written by Sue Monk Kidd, Lily and Rosaleen have a strong relationship that brings them closer together. A lot of moments are good and bad. Since Deborah past away Rosaleen has been there for Lily as a housekeeper willing to help. But Lily doesn't consider as a housekeeper she sees her as a friend and mother. Although, Lily sometimes gets embarrassed or fights with Rosaleen, but is always willing to apologize for her errors.

Segregation was formed under capitalism. According to the newsletter, “Capitalism and Segregation at the Roots”, institutional racism in the past is based on "how people perceived one another some groups of people were viewed as being lower than others we see this in how the Romans and Greeks would call non-Romans and non-Greeks ‘Barbarian’. We see even in the Aztec world in which the slur for nomadic peoples was "chichimeca" or dog-speaker" (Stradacero). This means that people from the Romans to the Greeks and even the Aztecs and the Mayans, all viewed their race as