The book starts off by explaining how Libby is very stubborn and doesn't listen to anyone including her parents. Her parent’s plan a trip to Italy and Libby doesn't seem very interested in their plans. Since they are going to be gone for a while Libby has a party with her friends and they say their goodbyes for now. The parent’s double check their things and checks the map again and realizes they have to cross through dangerous waters but do not think anything of it. They take off and everything is going smoothly until they enter the dangerous waters. Everyone is asleep except the mother, but Libby wakes up who wakes up Duncan. Duncan goes out to the main decka dn hears shots fired. They start shooting flares at the other boats which didn’t do much at all. The mother was shot in the Leg and is…
In The Secret Life of Bees Lily, the protagonist deals with an unsettling amount of inevitable parental conflicts. In the beginning of the novel, Lily runs away from home to escape a abusive father who constantly mistreated her, to find a way to discover the true meaning behind her mothers death. The author makes parental conflict a trouble for Lily throughout the whole novel. Lily has the guilt of believing she accidentally killed her own mother. She is sourced of the information considering her deceased mother, given to her by August and T-Ray, her feeling of being unwanted, and her feeling of the need to feel the love of a family.…
She explains how she finds her sister so childish compared to herself and how her brothers are in a different world once they leave the house. The rising action happens when you start to see changes in Esperanza’s personality. Esperanza starts to care about what she wears and is aware of how her body is changing. The climax or the vignette that is the hardest to forget is when Esperanza and Sally went to the carnival and when Sally left Esperanza, Esperanza got raped. After that vignette, Esperanza changes even more and she notices what she is capable of doing in her future. For example, she meets the three sisters that tell her what she must do in her future. The last vignette shows how much Esperanza matured and how she realized that she is Mango…
Lily Owens is lying in her bed watching bees squeeze in and out of cracks in her walls. She thinks about her mother, who died when Lily was a child. She also thinks about Rosaleen, a black woman who looks after her and her father, T. Ray. When the bees begin to swarm around Lily, she wakes T. Ray to show him but when he comes, the bees are gone. He threatens to make her kneel in grits if she wakes him again. Lily decides she will catch some bees in a jar to prove she was not making up the story. She starts to think about the day her mother died. She was packing hurridly when T. Ray comes home and they start fighting. Lily there was a gun, picking it up, and an explosion.…
Rising Action-Each new student held some talent in addition to their imaginations. Lynda Hannah became into the next Van Gogh, Ruth can perform and solve complicated math problems, and Sandy writes detailed poetry, this being odd because none of them had been able to do these things before. Kit discovers her inner specialty as well, composing wonderful piano music. Ruth had identified this as "ESP" or extra-sensory perception, and is excited, but Kit is further disturbed, especially after waking up to playing the piano with Jules recording it, confirming her earlier suspicions of hearing music she recognized from somewhere else. After investigating, Kit learns that past students at Blackwood were famous artists who died young and continued their contributions of creativity by using the current students as puppets. Kit asks Natalie, the maid, who had tried to help but was subsequently let go by the seemingly nice instructor, taking a letter from Kit to Tracy. Of the twenty former students, three committed suicide, one fell from the third floor of a building (considered an accident), and the other sixteen students were put in insane asylums.…
The Secret Life of Bees is a novel written by Sue Monk Kidd that was published in 2001. It is about a girl named Lily who runs away from home with her maid Rosaleen. They wanted to get away from danger and racism. In the house, Lily finds out secrets about her dead mother and tries to learn more about her. The story shows a lot of cruelty. When an author uses their writing to represent cruelty in a story, it can be helpful in contributing to the overall theme or message. The cruelty that occurs in the story is racism, and it helps develop the theme of anyone can overlook stereotypes. In the book cruelty is shown when the three men are harassing Rosaleen on her way to register to vote, and when Lily was afraid to tell anyone that she and…
Another theme that Kidd would like to share is truth. She understands that hearing the truth isn't what everyone wants at some points, but some people rather hear lies. The emotions are confusing some people would like to hide away then facing the facts. Kidd constructs a flexible and logical life for lily. She applies the love and the past of Lilys mother. She wants the readers to understand no matter how many people lie to you that the truth will always hurt, that the truth is the truth, and there's nothing anybody can do to change it. Kidd’s second idea is that she wants people to adapt to what is real.…
Often, to embrace others, one must uncover their motherly nature. In The Secret Life of Bees this statement is frequently true and displayed through many situations. The Secret Life of Bees is an insightful novel which shows the importance of embracing others in tragic situations. The novel begins with the main character, Lily, explaining how at night she lies in bed and watches the bees which fly around her room. Following the death of her mother, Lily lives with Rosaleen, a maid, and her father, who is extremely restricting. Later in the novel, Lily and Rosaleen escape to Tiburon following an incident of racism in which Rosaleen is harassed by five white men. When they arrive Lily finds August, a beekeeper, and her two sisters who kindly allow Lily and Rosaleen to stay at their house until she is ready to depart. In the end Lily is given permission to live with August and discovers that her mom also once lived with August. Throughout Sue Monk Kidd’s novel many major topics are founded on the concept of Motherly Instincts in women and how this ability should be embraced not criticized. Reasons for this which can be found in the novel are: August, the Beehive, and Black Mary.…
Lily’s blame for accidentally killing her mother causes her to be unsatisfied with her life. Lily, with vague memories, is aware that “it was [her] fault…
Sue Monk Kidd incorporates literary devices throughout her novel The Secret Life of Bees. Monk uses devices such as symbolism, character relationships, and motifs to help the reader better understand her novel and have a connection with it as well. The symbolism of the black Mary, the relationship between August and Lily, and the motif of bees are incorporated into the novel.…
Lily Owens is a complex character that went through a trauma in her childhood that affects her as we read the first chapter. She lives alone with her father after her mother died in an accident years before. Her father, T. Ray, owns a peach farm and has Lily working at a peach stand to sell them during the summer. Lily and T. Ray have a black maid, Rosaleen, who Lily sees as a surrogate mother. She even fantasizes about Rosaleen being white and marrying T. Ray, or her and T. Ray being black and living like a family with Rosaleen.…
Many times throughout a person’s life their opinions are always changing; as we grow and develop our ideas, our beliefs mature as well. As a child someone could say their favorite TV show is Arthur then when they get older it could be CSI. In The Secret Life of Bees Lily’s understanding of race is changing throughout the whole book. At first she sees race as a political issue. Then, toward the middle of the book she notices that African-Americans are not the only ones hurt by racism. Lastly, at the end of the book Lily does not even mind what someone’s race is and just is unconcerned with race.…
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,…
A mother influences a child’s growth, specifically a daughter, and helps them towards independence and maturity. “ The Secret Life of Bees” written by Sue Monk Kidd is a novel about a young teenage girl, who runs away from her unloving and bitter father to search for the secrets of her dead mothers past. This novel allowed the author to share the importance of the truth and accepting the realities. Kidd also explores forgiveness, racism and feminine power. The author demonstrates that a family can be found where you don’t expect it, perhaps not under your own roof, but in that mysterious place where you find love. Although Lily has suffered through the loss of her mother and father, she has gained a new family. This new family provides her a place where they help her accept and overcome the difficult times in her life with guidance as well as a place where she’s able to develop new relationships of friendship.…
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…