Lily Owens Character Analysis

Many individuals have a philosophy of life, but Lily Owen’s is unique. Throughout The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd, Lily Owens develops her philosophy of life. At the opening of the novel, she is an innocent girl whose nightmares become a reality the next day. Once she has the truth of her mother’s death imprinted into her head, everything Lily considers correct is proven wrong. After running away from the jailhouse with Rosaleen, she struggles with a drastic change in age, from an innocent 14-year-old to a 40-year-old. With an increase in familiarity, and as she progressed her outlook on life changed with her. By the closure of The Secret Life of Bees, Lily Owens experiences love, anger, happiness, and sadness in larger doses than
The story of her mother’s presence frightened Lily since all she wanted is to sense her mother’s closeness to the house. Before coming clean with August a few chapters behind, Lily has a difficult time figuring out whether to tell her. “And I was struck all at once how life was out there going through its regular courses, and I was suspended, waiting, caught in a terrible crevice between living my life and not living it. I couldn’t go on biding like there was no end to it….I would have to come clean,” (Kidd 176). Lily is faced with living her life or letting everything yield its own course. Lily makes a hard decision; bide her time until the last moment or finish it, but she decides on the latter. When May dies it is a tragic event for everyone in the Boatwright household, not just the sisters. “Mostly, though, I saw the blaze of love and anguish that had come so often into her face. In the end it had burned her up,” (Kidd 199). This was how Lily saw May’s emotional outbursts. Lily points out that disaster overwhelms everything eventually which is a foreshadow of events to come. Since May experienced the loss of others, it buried her and she could no longer handle it. Pages later, Lily undergoes the loss of her mother and the true story of what happened when she died. After an extended amount of time, she overcame the depression with the help of August and Rosaleen. “I worked with heaviness inside, with my spirit emptied out….There was Rosaleen’s heart so full toward me it broke through into her sweating face,” (Kidd 265). Lily familiarizes herself with hardships and the truth which alters it in an emotional way. It demonstrates that she has to take charge of her own life or it will crumble and fall apart unless a suitable person is there to