Lily Owens In The Secret Life Of Bees

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In South Carolina throughout 1964, The Secret Life of Bees tells the narrative of a fourteen year old girl, Lily Owens, who has been twisted around the indistinct day her mother, was murdered. At night lying in bed in her room , the bees often visit Lily. She holds a dreadful secret: Her father has made her believe that she shot killed her mother, Deborah, when Lily was just four years old. She has a very vague memory of that day — when her parents were arguing and she picked up and shot the gun that her mother had dropped (Kidd 74) — and this mental representation continues to haunt her as she desires to know more about her mother. Lily’s second mother, Rosaleen, insults three racists in town, they take flight to Tiburon, South Carolina— the city that grasps the hush-hush to her mother’s past. Then, they were welcomed in by a peculiar trio of beekeeping sisters. Lily finds a place of safety in their attention-grabbing world of bees, honey, and the Black Madonna. She …show more content…
Ray. T. Ray and Lily live just outside Sylvan, South Carolina. There, T. Ray owns and runs a peach farm, and Lily helps him out by selling peaches at a stand on the roadside. He treats Lily more as his employee and not like his child. Their maid, Rosaleen treats her like the daughter she never had. She often wishes she could run away with Rosaleen and escape from T. Ray's madness. When she feels gloomy or lonesome from time to time she goes to dig up her tin with belongings from her mom. She often refers to the quote “bees swarm before death.”(Kidd 2). She starts to think about if those bees are swarming for her death. Death isn't an awful thing to Lily. She says that people, who think that death is the worst thing, do not know a thing about life. Her mother died when she was four years old, therefore now she thinks of death as just a fact of life, and consequently it just doesn't bother her very
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