Mara Scribner
7/6/10
The Secret Life of Bees

One topic that comes up very frequently over the first eight chapters of The Secret Life of Bees is dealing with the loss of a parent. I can relate to this and find it interesting because my father didn’t die, but he was not in the picture for the majority of my life. It is very different went a child grows up without a mother, like Lilly had to, but whether the father or mother is absent it still strongly affects the child.
It seems to me that Lilly would like to be more feminine. She spends a lot of time looking in the mirror looking at her changing body. She also spends a lot of time thinking about Zach, perhaps in a way she shouldn’t be thinking about him. She seems very confused with her femininity and with the direction her life is going. I feel that a lot of this could be caused from the absence of her mother. She didn’t have a mother around to teach her exactly what it means to be a woman and how to act and think like one. All she had was T. Ray, who obviously didn’t really attempt to raise her to the best of his abilities. He could care less about how lady-like she would become. I believe that if he had taken on the role of the father and the mother, which sounds odd but I have seen it done, Lilly might be a little less insecure about herself now. I feel that it is very good that she is spending time with August, June, and May in this stage in her life. August seems that she is stepping in as a mother figure for Lilly. Lilly strongly needs a strong female figure to look up to and to learn from. Rosaleen wasn’t civilized enough or educated enough to fill in as a mother figure for Lilly, but August is perfect. She is educated, savvy, and loving, which is just what Lilly needs right now in her life. I believe that many of the insecurities that people have that were caused by something in their childhood will never completely go away. To me, they are like an addiction. They can always come back, easier than you would like them to, but if you try to heal yourself of it you can if even for a temporary while.