Secret life of bees term paper

Source Card 1:

Source Card 2

Source Card 3

Source Card 4:

Source Card 5:

Note Card 1 Source:2 Paragraph: Author Biography Quote:\"Sue Monk Kidd was born Sue Monk on August 12, 1948, and raised in the small town of Sylvester, Georgia, which served as a model for Sylvan, South Carolina, in The Secret Life of Bees. \"

Note Card 2 Source:2 Paragraph: Author Biography Quote:\"Kidd began to read widely in literature and spiritual classics, as well as mythology and psychology. Thomas Merton and Carl Jung are two writers who influenced her in these areas. Her first book, God's Joyful Surprise, was in the tradition of contemplative spirituality (1988). When the Heart Waits, describing her own spiritual transformation, followed in 1990, and was critically acclaimed. It is this kind of spiritual experience that is woven into her novels.\"

Note Card 3 Source:2 Paragraph: Author Biography Quote:\"she did not major in English but took a B.S. in nursing in 1970 from Texas Christian University.She worked as a registered nurse in pediatrics and surgery, eventually teaching nursing. She married Sanford Kidd, a theology student, and they had two children, Bob and Ann. While living in South Carolina where her husband was teaching at a liberal arts college. ...From there, she took up her old dream of writing fiction and became an accomplished short story writer, studying at Emory and Sewanee and the Bread Loaf Writer's Conference. In 2002, Kidd published her first novel, The Secret Life of Bees, and it stayed on the bestseller lists for over two years. It has sold millions of copies and has been translated into twenty-three languages...She has served on the board for Poets and Writers, Inc., to encourage emerging writers, and has been Writer-in-Residence at the Sophia Institute in Charleston. Selected awards include the Book Sense Book of the Year in paperback, 2004, for The Secret Life of Bees... and the Southeastern Library Association Fiction Award in 2005, for The Secret Life of Bees.\"

Note Card 4 Source:3 Paragraph: Symbolism Quote:\"Honey-sweet but never cloying, this debut by nonfiction author Kidd (The Dance of the Dissident Daughter) features a hive's worth of appealing female characters\"

Note Card 5 Source:1 Paragraph: theme Quote: \"All I had to do was remember the Father'sday card I made for you when I was nine and still hoping for love...I expected it to get propped on your dresser and the next day I find it on the telephone table when you have peeled a peach on top of it, and the skin and pit are stuck to the paper. I have always wanted to you that was DESPICABLE. D — DESPICABLE A — ANGRY D — DUD OF A FATHER D — DISAPPOINTMENT Y — YOKE AROUND MY NECK Writing this... brings me J-O-Y to finally say these things to your face... I felt relief to get all that out of my system, but I had lied about it bringing me joy. I almost wanted to write another letter that I would not send and say I'm sorry.

Note Card 6 Source:3 Paragraph: Literary Criticism Quote:\"an offbeat plot and a lovely style...Kidd's success at capturing the moody adolescent girl's voice makes her ambivalence comprehensible and charming. And it's deeply satisfying when August teaches Lily to \"find the mother in (herself)\"--a soothing lesson that should charm female readers of all ages.\"

Note Card 7 Source:1 Paragraph: Symbolism Quote:\"Lily Melissa Owens, your jar is open\"

Note Card 8 Source:1 Paragraph: Symbolism Quote:\"'every bee has a role to play...there's the queen bee and her attendants' 'She has attendants?' 'Oh yes, like ladies-in-waiting. They feed her, bathe her...I've even seen them caress her...She's the mother of every bee in the hive, and they all depend on her to keep it going. I don't care what their job is-they know the queen is their mother. She's the mother of thousands.'\"

Note Card 9 Source:1 Paragraph:Character Quote: \"I know that is an absurd thought, but I believe in the goodness of imagination. Sometimes I imagine a package will come from him (T.Ray) at Christmas Time...and in his card he will write, 'Love, T.Ray.' He will use the word 'love,' and the world will not stop spinning but go right on in its courses, like the river, like the bees, like everything. A person shouldn't look too far down her nose at absurdities. Look at me. I dived into one absurd thing after another, and here I am in the pink house. I wake up to wonder everyday.\"

Note Card 10 source:4 paragraph: literary criticism Quote: \" The stunning metaphors and realistic characters are so poignant that they will bring tears to your eyes. Public libraries should purchase multiple copies\"

Note Card 11 Source:2 paragraph: character Quote:The first person narrator and main character is a rebellious and spirited girl of fourteen in the summer of 1964... Lily is likeable for her honest voice and passionate spiritual searching... she is unusually sensitive to the injustice around her, but she has strength and hope... Though Lily has inherited a bigoted way of life, she is willing to examine it in herself and change. She has a poetic and spiritual way of seeing the beauty around her. Something of an ugly duckling at home in Sylvan, South Carolina, she blossoms at the home of the Boatwright sisters in Tiburon where she runs away.

Note Card12 Source:2 paragraph: character Quote:Lily is smart; her English teacher encourages her to write and read. She keeps journals, making stories of her adventures. Imagination is not for escape for her, but is a means of bringing forth something better in life. As she discusses with Zach, one has to imagine what has never been. This ability is what keeps her from becoming bitter or depressed like her father and mother. Rosaleen tells Lily to quit pretending that the Boatwright home is their home, but because she projects so much of her imagination into living there, it does become their new home.

Note Card 13 Source:2 paragraph: character Quote:Lily is open to life and to change, and this keeps her moving in the right direction. Her courage is exhibited in the way she gets Rosaleen out of the hospital, and in the way she does not accept a false and cruel life with T. Ray. She refuses to live the hopeless life her mother chose. Though unworldly, she is resourceful and daring when it comes to running away, finding the Boatwrights through pluck and intelligence. Her quest is to find forgiveness and to find mother love, which she does through the Black Madonna. From the beginning, she is given to mystical experiences of places, events, and people. She thinks about God and questions why things are the way they are. Because of this, she receives answers and matures in the course of the novel.\"

note card 14 source: 5 paragraph: Literary Criticism It is not until Lily stays with the Boatwrights that she learns any other alternative stories to the dead-end ones that she has grown up with. The book chronicles the way in which Lily, or any person, can change the tale of their lives\"

note card 15 source: 5 Paragraph: character . Kidd re-envisions the female role, expanding it even as far as embracing a female image of God. Indeed, in her collection of essays, Firstlight, Kidd has said, 'Discovering our personal stories is a spiritual quest. Without such stories we cannot be fully human ...' In order for Lily to find her own story, she has to hear the stories of other women, who have blazed the trail before her...To begin with, she has no way to connect her background to that of Neil or the Boatwright sisters because she is white and fourteen, and they are African-American and adult. August becomes a sort of mother and teacher who helps Lily resurrect herself by initiating her into a new culture, with new female stories about the secret life of bees and the Black Madonna.Her facility with images and reflection is remarkable for a young girl; her English teacher has told her she should be a writer, and that is what she dreams of... August, in a way, allows Lily to change her own story.

note card 16 source: 5 Paragraph: Author biography \"Kidd says more in Firstlight about writing and storytelling as important tools of \"soul-making,\" for when people share their stories, they come to find \"we are all one story.\"

note card 17 source: 5 Paragraph: Literary criticism In The Secret Life of Bees the reader identifies with Lily's story, sometimes in the particulars, but more importantly, in the stages of her spiritual growth. In all her books, fiction or nonfiction, Kidd maps out the territory surrounding the transformation of the soul.

Note card 18 source: 1 paragraph: symbolism \"Every little thing wants to be loved...is not just to love--but to persist in love\"

Note card 19 Source 6 paragraph: literary criticism Quote: A friend recently wrote to thank me for recommending. The Secret Life of Bees. \"I finished it last night,\" she wrote, \"finished the last third of the book bawling and laughing and feeling both full and empty at the same time when I put it down.\" Maybe my review should end there. What better recommendation than from one who has been moved across a spectrum of emotions all at the same time. But reading is not only about emotion. We read for different reasons, but a connection with characters is often a main reason. Often we identify with stages of our own development. Sometimes knowing someone else, even a character in a novel, has shared an experience, is enough to validate our experience.

Note card 20 source 6 paragraph:literary criticism I studied with a professor one summer who said he looked for a vision of a way out in the novels he read. He said literature that merely confirmed the evil parts of the human condition did not go far enough. He said we already know what is wrong with life. It is the vision that we need.Sue Monk Kidd, in The Secret Life of Bees, provides many of the elements that make for good reading. There is emotional connection, connection with characters, stages of development, shared experience, and vision. She also gives us a larger framework, both knowledge of and a metaphor for life, in the lore of bees

Note card 21 source 6 paragraph: Character Perhaps what compels the reader most is Lily's need to tell her story. The poignant reason she reveals early on. That reason and the few relics she possesses from her mother frame the novel. While Lily's story is the journey to find answers, what she finds is \"there is nothing but mystery in the world.\" The inner journey, however, has more answers than the outer journey. This inner quest begins with loneliness and the prayer, \"fix me.\" Moves to confession and some sort of healing or, at least, acceptance.

Note card 22 source 6 paragraph: symbolism Lily finds in Mary what she needs to face herself, her mother, the women who have nurtured her, and, finally, her father. This Mary is earthy, not ethereal... This Mary is not high in heaven, but a 'Mary with a wide-open door and, inside, all these people tucked away in the secret world of consolation.'....'This Mary,; Lily knows, 'is a muscle of love.' More than that, for Lily, Mary enables Lily to live with herself, with the great sins she has committed, knowing that Mary 'goes into the holes life has gouged out of us.'

Note card 23 source 1 paragraph: character \"all I could think was August is so intelligent, so cultured, and I was surprised by this. That's what let me know I had some prejudice buried inside me.

Note card 24 Source:1 paragraph: character \"Up until then I'd thought that white people and colored people getting along was the big aim, but after that I decided everybody being colorless together was a better plan. I thought of that policeman, Eddie Hazelwurst, saying I'd lowered myself to be in this house of colored women, and for the very life of me I couldn't understand how it had turned out this way, how colored women had become the lowest ones on the totem pole. You only had to look at them to see how special they were, like hidden royalty among us. Eddie Hazelwurst. What a shitbucket.\"

Note card 25 Source:6 paragraph:literary criticism \"the captivating force in the novel is Lily, the young narrator. It is her voice and her plight that drive the novel.\"

source : 6

Note card 26 Source:1 paragraph:theme \"My whole life had been nothing but a hole where my mother should have been, and this hole made me different, left me always aching for something, but never once did I think what he'd lost or how it might've changed him...I leaned over and picked up his knife, bent the blade closed, and handed it to him. 'It's all right,' I said. But it wasn't. I had seen into the dark doorway that he kept hidden inside, the terrible place he would seal up now and never return to if he could help it.\"

Note card 27 Source:1 paragraph:theme \"My stomach did a slow roll. I knew we'd come to the place in the story I feared the most. I began to breathe very fast. ' I was with her when you picked her up at the bus station. She brought me along, didn't she?' August leaned over and whispered against my hair. 'No honey, she came by herself.'\"

Note card 28 Source:1 paragraph:theme \" 'One last thing,' she said, and she drew out a small oval picture frame of tarnished silver...Me and my mother. I didn't care about anything on this earth except the way her face was tipped toward mine, our noses just touching, how wide and gorgeous her smile was, like sparklers going off...I looked down at the picture, then closed my eyes. I figured May must've made it to heaven and explained to my mother about the sign I wanted. The one that would let me know I was loved.\"

Note card 29 Source:1 paragraph:theme \" That day my mother died, you said when I picked up the gun it went off. My eyes were on his eyes...'Did I do it?' 'I could tell you I did it. That's what you wanna hear. I could tell you she did it to herself, but both ways I'd be lying. It was you who did it, Lily. You didn't mean it, but it was you.'\"

Note card 30 Source:1 paragraph:theme \"I guess I have forgiven us both, although sometimes in the night my dreams will take me back to the sadness,and I have to wake up and forgive us again\"

Note card 31 Source:1 paragraph:theme \"I remember thinking that he probably loved me in his own smallish way. He had forfeited me over, hadn't he? I still tell me that when he drove away that day he wasn't saying good riddance; he was saying, Oh Lily, you're better off there in that house of colored women. You never would've flowered with me like you will with them.\"

Note card 32 Source:1 paragraph:character \" I watched till he was gone from sight, then turned and loked at August and Rosaleen and the daughters on the porch. This is the moment I remember clearest of all-how I stood in the driveway looking back at them. I remember the sight of them standing there waiting. All these women, all this love, waiting.\"

Note Card 33 Source:2 Paragraph: Author Biography Quote:\". As a girl, she listened to her father's stories and began writing stories of her own that were praised by her teachers. Kidd has been a life long journal writer, using the material for her stories and books...In 2002, Kidd published her first novel, The Secret Life of Bees, and it stayed on the bestseller lists for over two years.\"

Note Card 34 source:4 paragraph: literary criticism \"In a series of unforgettable events, Lily discovers the truth about her mother's past and the certainty that the hardest thing on earth is choosing what matters.\"

Note Card 35 Source:3 Paragraph: Symbolism \"August, clearly the queen bee of the Boatwrights, keeps asking Lily searching questions. Faced with so ideally maternal a figure as August, most girls would babble uncontrollably. But Lily is a budding writer, desperate to connect yet fiercely protective of her secret interior life.\"