Ensayo Secret Life Of Bees

CHRISTIAN AMERICAN SCHOOL OF GUATEMALA |
HONORS ENGLISHMs. Laura Cometa |
The Secret Life of the Bees |
10th GradeJune 13, 2012 |

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The Journey
Love has the ability to transform our lives if we want it to. We see this in a book written by Sue Monk Kidd in 2002, The Secret Life of the Bees. This book has a first person narrator; it is narrated by the protagonist, Lily Owens.The genre is fiction because it has events that are not factual and sometimes invented by the author. The setting takes place in South Carolina in 1964. Most of it takes place in the town of Tiburon, where the Lily Owens finds the Boatwright sisters, who live in a pink house and make honey. The main characters are Lily, who lost her mother at the age of 4, T. Ray Owens, Lily’s father, Rosaleen,Lily’s maid and best friend, the Boatwright sisters, and Zach who is Lily’s love. In the novel, Lily runs away from home, and rescue Rosaleen from jail. Then they go to Tiburon and meet the Boatwright sisters. The author of this book uses a unique writing style in order to convey important themes to us, the readers.
Every author has his or her own type of diction. In this book, the diction that SueMonk Kidd uses is Southern diction, because this novel takes place in the South. The diction is slang, and informal. An example is “You’re gonna have to walk the whole day” (26). The word “gonna” is slang for “going to”. Another example is “Ain’t nothing much gonna be open but firecracker stands the grocery store” (26). “Ain’t” is slang for is not. Another example is, “I don’t care, I just wanna getout of the house some on my birthday” (26). The slang here is “wanna” which means “want to”. I also found “hush”, which they use often to mean “be quiet” (35). It is a term of solace, used mainly in Jamaica, and it means never mind or don’t worry. Sue Monk Kidd also uses slang when she writes “Cause if I hear you’ve been anywhere near the hospital, I’m calling your daddy again” (45). She uses“cause” in place of “because”. As you can see, you can find a lot of idioms and slang in this book which help us to imagine how the characters really sounded.
The author also uses different types of figurative language. One of those is personification. For example she writes, “Finally I walked to the window gazed out at the peach tree stretching halfway to North Carolina, the way they held uptheir leafy arms in gestures of pure beseeching.” Personification is when the author gives human traits to non-living objects, so this is personification because the peach tree doesn’t stretch in real life. Another type of figurative language is simile, which is a comparison using the words “like” or “as”. For example the author writes “The night seemed like an inkblot I had to figure out” So this isan example of simile because she’s comparing the darkness of the night with an inkblot. A metaphor is a comparison without using “like” or “as”. For example: “I had nearly finished a glass of juice before I let myself look at the little highway of broken graham crackers and marshmallow bits that May was constructing across the floor, how it started at the sink and angled toward the door, thickwith golden crumbs and smudges of sticky white”. This is metaphor because she says that the road of cookies is like a highway. As you can see The Secret Life of the Bees has many types of figurative language.
The Secret Life of the Bees is a book with many themes. One of the most important themes is self-acceptance. This is because Lily is really shy and she doesn’t feel good about herself, butwhen she meets the Boatwright sisters they help her to increase her confidence by showing her that she’s not a bad person. Mrs. Henry says, “Please, Lily, you are insulting your fine intelligence. Do you have any idea how smart you are?” This example shows that people tried to encourage her of believing in herself. Faith is another theme in the novel because when she meets the sisters they...