The Secret Life of Bees- Sue Monk Kidd *COA*

         Lily Owens is a fourteen-year-old white girl from Sylvan, South Carolina. She lives with her abusive father T- Ray a local peach farmer. Lily’s mother- Deborah Fontanel- was killed when she was four-years-old she was shot with a pistol on accident. Lily picked it up to give it to her when it went off unexpectedly. She still blames herself about Deborah's death.

         The setting of this story is Sylvan, South Carolina and Tiburon, South Carolina in the summer of 1964. In Tiburon Lily is in August Boatwright's house and T-Ray Owens' house. This is an important in the story because it is the typical place where there are stereotypically a lot of black people and it's usually hot. The white people in Tiburon are meaner to black people because they know that South Carolina is typically a predominantly black state.

         Lily Owens is a frail and thin girl. She was put in a bad situation when she was born because she was surrounded by domestic violence due to her father T- Ray. Lily's living circumstances only got worse after December 3 1954 when she accidentally shot her mother Deborah Fontanel when she was four-years-old. Her best friend is her housekeeper/ nanny Rosaleen is her motherly figure and helps keep her out of trouble, to protect her from her father's wrath. Lily I feel is a character that shows determination and a longing for motherly love. Lily finds a lot of confidence in her self after she sees Rosaleen's confrontation with a group of white racist men in Sylvan. This confidence was so strong that it allowed her to run away from home, risk her life by breaking Rosaleen out of jail and to go searching for her mother's past. This is how the setting switches to Tiburon, South Carolina from Sylvan, South Carolina. Lily goes out to Tiburon because she hopes that there is a chance she will find a link to her late mother's past. She got this idea because she found an old picture with her mother and on the bottom the caption said "Tiburon, South Carolina". Lily has a lot of internal conflicts throughout the story like she wants to feel loved but feels like an outcast everywhere she goes because she does not have mother like all of the other children. She has also fallen in love for a black boy named Zachary Taylor who she cannot go out with because of the prejudice and segregated society that she lives in. Though Lily does not have a physical mother in her life she does have a lot of female protagonists that altogether equal her motherly figure. The two main protagonists are August and Rosaleen. August is a unique, unmarried, black beekeeper that owns a lot of property and is educated. She did not turn up her nose at the idea of taking in a white runaway girl with her housekeeper. Throughout the story August takes Lily away from her low self-esteem state and put her in a confident world that Rosaleen refers to as her "dream world". Without August, Lily would not have matured into a young lady and would still be the frail and shy child she has always been. 

         I find that there are a lot of themes and symbols in this book. Like the bees, the bees in this story are Lily's unspoken guides throughout the books. In the beginning of book, she speaks about the bees flying around her room in T- Ray's house. The bees are also the ones that gave her final decision on leaving T-Ray's house when she finally decided to run away. Beehives are also a theme in this book. In the story beehives serve as a parallel community that August has created in her house. The bees live, work and produce honey in the beehives and in Augusts’ beehives the females dominate. The queen bee stands as the mother of all bees like in Augusts’ mind that the Virgin Mary stands as the mother of all women that she is close to. These women August calls the Daughters of Mary. As the story goes on Lily learns about the ways of a beekeeper and the bees and becomes a successful beekeeper by the end of the story. I also think that irrational racism is a theme in the story. During the story Lily struggles with her own racism, she is not a racist but throughout the story she finds that a lot of her stereotype thought were abolished because she realized that they were not true. Lily assumes that all black people are the same, coarse and uneducated. These specific thoughts stop when she meets August Boatwright. This shows that these are the type of African Americans that Lily was exposed to, making this her thoughts on all of them. Lily also thought that black people could not be extremely handsome like young Zachary Taylor her crush, who is a black resident of Tiburon. 

         In the Secret Life of Bees there are many different aspects to the main plot of the story. There are many different protagonists that are direct people and ways of life (i.e. Racism would be an indirect Antagonist) and vice versa. Lily matures a lot throughout the book with the help of other people and b herself and her own actions and by the end you feel almost as if you knew her from when she was a child and you have watched her grow into a beautiful, radiant, and confident young lady.