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Secret Life Of Bees

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Secret Life Of Bees
The novel The Secret Life of Bees written by Sue Monk Kidd represents the maturation and development of one main central character. Before Kidd wrote this novel, she graduated from Texas Christian University with a B.S. degree in nursing, and she worked in nursing for many years. Later in life, in Kidd’s mid-twenties, she grew to love writing, and she eventually attended school for writing and obtained a degree in this profession. The novel, The Secret Life of Bees, started off as a short story that Kidd wrote, until she decided to turn the short story into an actual novel, she published in 2002. Although this is not Kidd’s first novel written, she often focuses on the development of one main character in her novels. In this novel, Lily Owens, …show more content…
Near the end of the novel The Secret Life of Bees, Lily demonstrates how she has grown throughout the novel, by accepting the death of her mother and the constant neglect from her father, T-Ray. When Lily accepts the death of her mother and her father’s treatment of her, she is able to grow up and become the mature young lady who can live with a difficult past. Lily, with the agonizing past, she does have, her past will affect the person she will be in the future. In this quotation, T-Ray states, “I could tell you I did it. That’s what you wanna hear. I could tell you she did it to herself, but both ways I’d be lying. It was you who did it, Lily. You didn’t mean it, but it was you” (299). In this quotation, T-Ray suggests that Lily finally finds out the real truth to what really caused the death of her mother, and she accepts it knowing that she is not able to change it. Lily’s acceptance of everything that has gone wrong in her past illustrates how she has turned into a mature young lady at the end of the novel. She illustrates this because she does not react in any way to T-Ray showing that the truth does not affect her, in which would have in the past. In the past, Lily would have started to go bezerk, started to cry and started to run away to be somewhere quiet; but, now she accepts it and moves on with life because she knows there is nothing she can do about it now. A final way Lily develops into a young lady through acceptance, is when she finally told the Boatwright sisters the truth about everything. Before, when Lily arrived at the Boatwright sister’s household, she was too scared to tell them why she really came; so instead, she came up with a lie that the Boatwright sisters believed. But. as time goes on, Lily develops into the young lady who can accept her past; she does this by telling

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