Primary Theme Statement (Claim)- The primary theme that Sue Monk Kidd’s “The Secret Life of Bees”, is that everybody needs a mother figure in their life to guide them through the obstacles and bumps along on their path of life. Unfortunately not every person is fortunate enough to have a mother but that does not mean they cannot find a woman who can fill in for the mother figure.…
The story ‘’The Home Place’’ by Guy Vanderhaeghe is about a relationship between a father and a son. Throughout the story, the readers see and understand the reason behind Gil and Ronald broken relationship. In this story, the author implies that when a father puts is love for is land before his son, their relation will suffer. Vanderheaghe explains his theme with the help of the characters traits, the setting and conflicts.…
What makes a good story interesting is that it can be interpreted anyway that the reader wants to. There are many things that are up for elucidation in the book The Secret Life of Bees. For instance, throughout the whole book Lily struggles with the story that she had shot her mother. Her quest throughout the entire book is to seek justice for her mother’s memory. She does not and has never known know her mother, so she wants to find people that have met her mother or have known her mother in the past. T. Ray is the first person to tell Lily that she actually killed her own mother. When she finds this out [her mother’s pasting], she then resents T. Ray an exceeding amount after this news is understood to her. As a result, she does not believe T. Ray and Lily runs away from home and starts her adventure.…
In the novel The Secret Life of Bees, Lily the protagonist is a young girl growing up with an abusive father and a harsh environment. Lily wants to escape the reality that T-Ray (father) has shaped about herself and her deceased mother . Lily leaves her abusive household going into an unknown situation putting her beliefs and determination into the faith of her mother. Rosaleen, Lily’s…
Zach Taylor is a character in Sue Monk Kidds novel ‘The Secret Life of Bees’. He is a black boy living with the racist culture that is the norm in South Carolina in 1964. Zach’s story and the challenges that he faces show the reader the theme of discrimination, specifically race discrimination. This conveys to the reader the important message that you can succeed despite your circumstances, and that the colour of your skin does not define your worth.…
Being an striking theme in Secret Life of Bees, absence is shown through the novel in many different fashions. It is important to note that her mother's leaves her in a horrific manner, but her father leaves her in a more slow and painful way. Lily will never be completely alright after her terrible childhood, the absence of her mom will always carry a heavy burden on her back. Also, her father’s emotional cold heartedness and disappearance will forever leave her longing for parental love. Overall, her parents left Lily in a hole that she has amazingly dig herself out of with the help of many supporting actors. Abandoned by everyone that loved her at a young age Lily was certainly headed down the road of failure until she met the wonderful calendar sisters, and the Tiburon…
The theme is the second section (chapter 3 and 4) of The Secret life of the Bees by Sue Monk Kidd is that the prejudice of others can weigh heavily on an individual’s judgement. Lily has finally found her next clue which has brought her to the Boatwright sisters. They are highly successful beekeepers that happen to be black. Due to being raised by a father who “did not think colored women were smart” (78), she is surprised by August being “intelligent” (78) and “so cultured” (78). This displays the role of the others in this case her dad who has influenced her to look down on blacks because that’s what he was taught. Although Lily comes to the realization that she had “some prejudice buried inside [her]” (78), many do not. Many fail to question…
One of the beauties of living in this world is the wealth of different beliefs and cultures that surround every person. Even living in someone’s home country does not exclude him or her from witnessing or experiencing different cultures. Anyone can immerse himself or herself in a different culture just by reading a story from an author that lives that culture everyday.…
One of the main literary elements in Sue Monk Kidd’s Secret Life of Bees, is conflict. The author displays this conflict through racial prejudice, Lily Owens and her father, Terrence Ray Owens (T. Ray), and through Lily and her mother, Deborah Fontanel. This book is set in 1964, when African American’s had just gotten the right to vote. T. Ray and Lily lived just outside Sylvan, South Carolina (The Secret Life of Bees, page…
In The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd and Rocket Boys by Homer (Sonny) Hickam Jr., the protagonists, Lily and Sonny, respectively, both learned that they had the power to escape their seemingly predetermined and immutable fates and to decide their futures for themselves. After her mother died in a tragic gun accident when she was four, Lily Owens was left in the hands of her unloving father, T-Ray, and her colored stand-in mother, Rosaleen, feeling as if she does not fit in because she had no mother figure, not “a grandmother, or even a measly aunt” in her life (Kidd 9). Instead of staying with her father, where she would have endured abuse and neglect for the rest of her life, Lily took the reigns on her future and decided that her and Rosaleen would flee to Tiburon, South Carolina, a town written on the back of one of her mother’s belongings, in hopes of…
In The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd, Lily’s life is tough throughout the book, and she probably has not lived the most expected desirable life with the conflicts and struggles she encounters. Lily’s “chains” in the book are the mystery and death of her mother and the prejudice in her communities and the racial assumptions she makes. Although Lily never actually knew her mother, she still plays a huge role in the novel and Lily’s life, and the racial prejudice leads to violence, problems, and solutions.…
Explore the ways in which Kidd strikingly portrays the relationship between Lily and Rosaleen in the course of the novel. Sue Monk Kidd uses Rosaleen as a stand-in mother of Lily to change her from a girl to a woman, and also to adapt her to the environment that is to come. Continuing the entire way through The Secret Life of Bees is her maternal and womanly impact on Lily, and the bond between the unlikely pair is shown throughout the serious and fun events during the story becoming much stronger. Rosaleen, a strong female character, acts as a stand-in mother to Lily, as she guides and endows wisdom and knowledge onto her. Lily acts as a daughter to Rosaleen, really caring about her.…
Lily is a fourteen-year-old girl whose mother died when she was four years old, an accident that Lily feels she was responsible for. She dresses in clothes she made in home economics. She is not a popular person in school. She has jet-black hair that resembles a nest of cowlicks, no chin, Sophia Loren eyes and an inferiority complex. She takes to picking scabs on her body and biting the flesh around her fingernails until they bleed. Boys, even the hard-up ones, ignore her. Rosaleen makes Lily wear breeches in the cold, which are neither fashionable nor complimentary, especially under her dresses. Girls become quiet when she walks past, because she has no fashion…
“People can start out one way, and by the time life gets through with them, they end up completely different” (Kidd 248). During the civil rights era in the book The Secret Life of Bees, teenager Lily escapes her abusive father. She takes her black house maid with her to find answers about her mother, who died when Lily was very young. She leaves T. Ray, her father, and secretly goes to live in a small town of Tiburon, SC with a family of women. These women slowly become her new family with love and patience. Author Sue Monk Kidd uses characters Lily, T. Ray, and June to show that people can be changed by experiences that happen in one’s life, and everyone’s reaction to change varies.…
Racism was a way of life in the South during the time frame of The Secret Life of Bees. At many times in the novel the reader is shown how racism affects each character in the novel. Racism is shown through Rosaleen and Lily’s arrest, Lily and Zach’s love affair, and also June’s dislike towards Lily. Many characters in the novel come to experience racism or discrimination directly.…