Sue Monk Kidd's The Secret Life Of Bees

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An important idea Sue Monk Kidd explores in her coming of age novel, The Secret Life of Bees is the racial prejudice of the 1960’s and the impact this has on the individual and the community. This example of a Bildungsroman is set in the politically tumultuous era against the backdrop of the Civil Rights movement in 1964. We are greeted with an otherwise unimaginable world in which minority groups including the African Americans are being denied basic human rights. It was an environment in which you would have to “drag people kicking and screaming” to abide by the Civil Rights Act. Lily, the protagonist, discovers a family of successful Negro sisters while on the run from her father and in search for information about her mother. The Boatwright…show more content…
She is becoming more and more aware about political activism, and notices how “black people from Tiburon, Florence and Orangeberg are marching today all the way to Colombia asking the government to enforce the Civil Rights Act.”Lily shows an interest here, compared to at the beginning of the novel where she “didn’t know whether to be excited for Rosaleen or worried. Who was winning, the coloured people’s team or the white people’s team? Like it was a do or die contest.” Her idiom reveals her outlook and how she percieves racial rights as overdramatic. She demonstrates growth from her previously oblivious self, all the while explaining the significance of their sacrifice and hardship needed to enforce the Civil Rights Act. A key event in which Lily directly experiences on a first person level is when Jack Palance, a white movie star, plans to come to Tiburon and bring a coloured girl to the theatre. It shocks both white and coloured citizens of Tiburon that he would even dare to invite her to sit “not in the balcony, but downstairs in the white section.” The bare suggestion of this intrusion is threatening to the white’s authority and as a result men would wait for them “with what looked like the handle from a shovel.” Their violent response indicates their strong possession of supremacy and determination to “put them in their place,” exercising brutality to do…show more content…
When the police are at the Boatwright house questioning Lily, she insightfully describes and translates what the policeman actually means. Lily makes it clear how he is “confused about what a white girl like [her] is doing staying in a coloured house. Anything would be better than [her] staying in a coloured house.” Despite the suspicious, rude and belligerent policeman, Lily remains with her family of sisters and illustrates that unity is the goal for racial integration. Not only is her relationship with them socially frowned upon, but it is attached to the idea that she “lowered herself to be in this house of coloured women, and for the love of [her] she couldn’t understand how it got to be this way, how coloured women had become the lowest ones on the totem pole.” In her living arrangements and relationship with the Boatwrights, we see how society views the coloured house as the worst possible option for Lily to live in, and the opinions of others degrade and devalue the coloured sisters and their home. Another example of a relationship used to develop the idea of combatting racism through communit is when Lily and Zach face the challenge of attending a white high school together. The other kids shame Lily for this and give her a reputation of a “nigger lover, which is how it is put to her.” Lily brushes off the harassment, making it clear how her relationship
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