Friday, May 14, 2010
Letting Go
In the Secret Life of Bees there are numerous burdens that are carried by every single individual in the story like every one else in life. The ones that I will focus on will be on the burdens of T. ray and Lily. The burdens that they both carry are very similar yet they react differently to them. T.ray carries the burden of knowing that his wife left him and she did not leave him for another she just left him because he was destroying her inside, he ruined her. T. ray must of felt like he was the cause of everything. He deprived Lily’s mother from happiness and life. He was not able to give her what she needed. He was not able to make her happy so she just left him. Upon her return he finds her coming back but not for him. She came back for Lily. This must have been another burden for him feeling that not only did she leave him, she was also taking all they had their daughter. Poor T.ray just had a lot of things hitting him and I truly feel that even though he did not cope with everything properly I can see where he was coming from. His wife did not want him and when Lily grew up neither did she. He was burdened by loneliness and guilt of possibly being the reason as to why his wife and daughter were unhappy. Lily had a similar yet different burden. She had the burden of taking the life of her own mother. What she loved most in the world is the very thing that she took away from herself. Her father would remind her that she was the one to kill her, which to him was probably away to vent his emotions somehow. Not only would T.ray remind her that she took her mothers own life but he would also tell her that her mother left her and did not want her. T. ray would say these things to her to make her feel the same way he did, unwanted. Towards the end of the story Lily comes to realize that what her father was telling her along was true, which gave her and even heavier burden. She felt like no one wanted her either. I believe that T.ray and Lily were both heavily burdened by what happened to Deborah. Her leaving and her death affected both their lives and their futures. It is no wonder that they acted out in the impulsive ways that they both did. They were burdened by the death of Deborah, her unhappiness and their lack of ability to change how she felt. They both felt responsible for not making her happy enough to make her stay, which I believe is a very heavy burden. However I am glad that at they end they were both able to let go of the past and hurts. They needed to close the door behind them to better able see what was ahead in life for them and finding happiness and freedom in letting go.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
I like that you focused only on T. Ray and Lily, because they are definitely carrying the heaviest story specific burdens for The Secret Life of Bees. I like that you seem to feel compassion and sympathy for T. Ray because I think it's too easy to simply brush him off as a racist, abusive, bigot when in reality he's just a hurt man. Bill Crosby says in his new book that "hurt people hurt people" which is important because it lends humanity to the abuser. T. Ray is most definitely emotionally scarred and burdened by Lily's mother Deborah, the woman he worshiped. It also doesn't help, as you said, that now Lily despises him as well, double rejection. T. Ray, as a simple Peach farmer, doesn't have the intelligence or the means to seek out help for his grief and during the time, there wasn't much help available so what can we really expect from such a man? I like that you pointed this aspect out because I shared you views, I felt frustration towards T. Ray but really I felt compassion for his tattered life. Your perspectives on Lily are also very good. Lily's biggest burden wasn't that she had busted Rosaleen out of jail or ran away, but simply that she was responsible for her Mother's death, a murderer as she saw it. This is something I hadn't really fully explored in my own analysis but now reading yours, it sheds a new light on the burden. Being a young girl, Lily doesn't understand the idea of an accident and is afraid to tell anyone, even her closest ally Rosaleen about the circumstances of her mother's death. This is the one burden she carries alone, throughout the entire novel, the one that causes her the most anguish and despair and the one she had to work through before she could really be free.
ReplyDelete