Secret Life of Bees Literary Analysis and mini summary
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. In the novel, Kidd uses the facts that August and T-Ray give to Lily to portray an even more intensified version of what really happened compared to what Lily fully remembers. This further increases the conflict with Deborah and Lily so that readers establish a firm understanding of the strength between the two women. This conflict really starts when Lily is told by T-Ray that she shot and killed her mother in a freak accident (Kidd 18-19). She later is told and refuses to believe that her mother ran away from home an had only returned to grab some clothes and then leave again (Kidd 39). Even though Lily keeps a special hatred for her father throughout the entire novel, she does start to feel as if she is a terrible person due to theses facts. The idea of killing her mother grasps on to Lily and hangs on throughout the entire novel. She eventually learns the entire truth from the family she had been staying with, that had been right there with her from the start, acting as mother figures to Lily even considering the racial differences between Lily and the black family