Preview

The Secret Life Of Bees Writing Prompts

Good Essays
Open Document
Open Document
619 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
The Secret Life Of Bees Writing Prompts
Prompt 1: In The Secret Life of Bees every character holds a secret and ever big event that happens in the story brings a message. The most important message that Lily brings to the story is hope. Hope and aspiration is represented by the bees that keep recurring throughout the story. In the very beginning when Lily had barely anything to look up to, every single night bees would come into her room. “ The bees came the summer of 1964, the summer I turned fourteen and my life went spinning off into a whole new orbit, and I mean a whole new orbit” ( Kidd 1 ). Everything seemed to be holding Lily back in life and when the bees came into her room that one night everything changed. It couldn’t just be a coincidence that out of everybody Lily …show more content…
This book shows social challenges on a real and personal form. Although many characters in the book can represent the extremely difficult challenges of racism back in the day, Rosaleen sticks out to me most and the brutal challenges she faced would rarely occur today. The social norm of racism has drastically changed over time. In the past it was a completely normal thing to do what people did to rosaline and nobody would stand up for her. Another thing happening at that time was segregation. White people were raised at that time that anyone different or anyone that had any pigmentation to their skin wasn’t equal. “ Why is it sports is the only thing white people see us being successful at? I don’t want to play football,” he said. “ I wanna be a lawyer.” ( Kidd 120 ). When Lily was growing up, she never once heard of someone of color being a lawyer, so that subject was pristine to her. It was rare for anyone to step out of the boundaries of what was socially acceptable back then. Zach and Rosaleen overstepped what was the social norm in the 1960’s being someone of color, which brought a meaningful message to the

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Satisfactory Essays

    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…

    • 75 Words
    • 1 Page
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    Secet Life of Bees

    • 2200 Words
    • 9 Pages

    chapter so that the reader can understand the was Lily feels using the bees in the quote…

    • 2200 Words
    • 9 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    The Secret Life of Bees, by Sue Monk Kidd, is a story about the power of women and their ability to overcome, growing up and love. The protagonist, Lily Owens, lives in South Carolina with her widowed father T. Ray. When Lily was four, her mother died somehow, T. Ray blames her death on Lily. All Lily wants is her mother and to be away from her abusive dad. She is raised by an African – American nanny named Rosaleen. The day the Civil Rights Act is passed, Rosaleen decided to go exercise her newly acclaimed right to vote and is thrown in jail by some racist men in town. Lily wants to save her nanny as well as get away from T. Ray, so she helps break out Rosaleen and they head across South Carolina in search of something better. They are…

    • 343 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    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.…

    • 5592 Words
    • 23 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    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…

    • 162 Words
    • 1 Page
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    ‘Goodbye,’ I said, and there was a tiny spring of sadness pushing up from my heart.” Lily is aware that all of her memories are in that house and her town, but she takes the risk of never returning again to help the people she loves. This is a true act of heroism taking risks for the people who mean the most to you. In The Secret Life of Bees women are made to think that they are inferior to men and that men hold all the power. Lily’s father T-Ray treated women very unequally and often said that women had less opportunities and were not able to do all the things that men can do. Growing up her whole life with only T-Ray and no mother-figure has left Lily to believe that women really are inferior and not as capable as men. After meeting the daughters of Mary Lily started to no longer underestimate the power of women as she saw the example of Mary, who was a women that was able to do remarkable things. She also learns the power of women by meeting the boatwright sisters who are all remarkably strong. All the women in The Secret Life of Bees are inner heros in their own way and they all show the true…

    • 747 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    Secret Life of Bees

    • 559 Words
    • 3 Pages

    Lily Owens, who is the main character of The Secret Life of Bees, by Sue Monk Kidd, is a courageous girl who overcomes many challenges throughout the novel. For one thing, when she is curious, she is determined to do anything. Another example is she is not afraid to twist up the truth for her needs. Lastly, Lily performs heroic acts throughout the story. Throughout the novel, Lily Owens demonstrates the meaning of courage.…

    • 559 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Better Essays

    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…

    • 1352 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    When I was in first grade my entire class went on a field trip to Bee City Honeybee Farm, Petting Zoo, and Nature Center. On that field trip, we learned a lot about bees, (though now that I’m older, I recall just about one thing from that entire trip) and other animals.…

    • 332 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    “I didn't know whether to be excited for her or worried. All people ever talked about after church were the Negroes and whether they'd get their civil rights. Who was winning—the white people's team or the colored people's team? Like it was a do-or-die contest. When that minister from Alabama, Reverend Martin Luther King, got arrested last month in Florida for wanting to eat in a restaurant, the men at church acted like the white people's team had won the pennant race. I knew they would not take this news lying down, not in one million years ( page 21 ).” Lily is talking about the Civil Rights Act, which she and Rosaleen were watching live on their T.V. Then Lily wasn’t as excited like Rosaleen because Lily isn’t really politically active. Rosaleen was so excited that when she was watching the T.V she sat there shaking her head and saying,”lord have mercy,” just looking so happy about the Civil Rights Act being signed. Then after it was signed many people were not happy about given African Americans the right to vote. “An uneasy feeling settled in my stomach. Last night the television had said a man in Mississippi was killed for registering to vote, and I myself had overheard Mr. Bussey, one of the deacons, say to T. Ray, 'Don't you worry, they're gonna make 'em write their names in perfect cursive and refuse them a card if they forget so much as to dot an I or make a…

    • 1263 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    The poet Maya Aneton once said “It [is] one of the greatest gifts [a person] can give [him or herself] to forgive. Forgive everybody.” It is difficult sometimes for people to forgive themselves for past issues or transgressions. The result often becomes an inability to exculpate others as well. However, if a person can seek forgiveness, then happiness will become more apparent in his or her life. In the novel The Secret Life of Bees, Sue Monk Kidd demonstrates how contentment becomes prevalent in a person's life through the characters Lily and June once they seek forgiveness. Lily, a fourteen-year-old runaway white girl, not only struggles to forgive herself, but her father, T Ray, and her mother for their wrongdoings in her lifetime. Similarly, June, one of the Boatwright sisters that takes in Lily when she runs away, strives to pardon her ex fiance and Lily’s mother due to the undeserved way they treated June in her past.…

    • 1679 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    The third literary device used in the novel is the motif of bees. Bees are prominent throughout the entire novel but Lily does not realize how the life of bees are closely related to the life of humans until August tells her. August says to Lily that “Most people don’t have any idea about all the complicated life going on inside a hive. Bees have a secret life we don’t know anything about” (148). August is also explaining to Lily the nature of spirituality as it relates to beehives. August has taught Lily all about the communities bees keep inside their hives and the importance of the female power structure in the bee community. Lily’s life is secret like the bees because she is a white girl living in a house with black women, with Rosaleen who’s a runaway, and is a…

    • 612 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The Secret Life of Bees demonstrates the irrationality of racism by not only portraying black and white characters with dignity and humanity but by also demonstrating how Lily struggles with and ultimately overcomes her own racism. Kidd moves beyond stereotypes to portray whites and blacks with the multifaceted personalities that we find in real life. Lily is not a racist in the same way that the group of men that harass Rosaleen are racist, but she does evidence some prejudice and stereotypes at the start of the novel. She assumes that all African Americans are like Rosaleen, an uneducated laborer-turned-housekeeper. Lily imagines that all African Americans are likewise coarse and uneducated. But when Lily encounters unique, educated, thoughtful August Boatwright, she must change her assumptions and combat her prejudice. At first, Lily feels shocked that a black person could be as smart, sensitive, and creative as August. Recognizing and combating her shock allows Lily to realize the truth about the arbitrariness and irrationality of racism. Like Lily, June must also learn to overcome racial stereotypes. As individuals, humans can display a complex array of personality traits and characteristics, regardless of skin color or ethnicity.…

    • 369 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    . (Luce, Bagley) Leaving the safety of the Carver’s and go out into a harsh world on his own as a young boy took courage and a strong desire to learn. This would be one of many schools that the young Carver would attend. This trend carried over into George’s College Years. He applied to a college and upon his arrival they saw the color of his skin and turned him away. (Bagley, Mary) Even though George was a free man, he used the talent he was blessed with to help other poor black men. Once slaves were set free they did not have any land, or job. This left many of them very poor and struggling to survive. What good was it to be considered a free man if you could not have many of the rights that were bestowed on the white man, as if he earned it simply for the fact that he was born white? Men were still not created equal due to skin color. The first use of “racist” as an adjective in the English language came into the picture in…

    • 697 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    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…

    • 1151 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays