Analysis of The Portrayal of The Protagonist of Sue Monk Kidd's 'The Secret Life of Bees'.

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Maranatha Christian University

ABSTRACT

Dalam tugas akhir ini, saya menganalisa penggambaran tokoh utama dalam sebuah novel karya Sue Monk Kidd yang berjudul The Secret Life of Bees. Tokoh utama dalam novel ini adalah seorang remaja perempuan bernama Lily Melissa Owens yang mengalami perubahan karakter dalam perjalanannya menuju kedewasaan.

Perubahan karakter yang dialami oleh Lily dalam novel ini tidak terlepas dari peranan komunitasnya. Di awal cerita, Lily dikisahkan hidup di dalam sebuah komunitas di mana ia tidak pernah mendapatkan bimbingan dan penerimaan baik dari ayahnya maupun teman-temannya. Akibatnya, Lily tumbuh menjadi seorang anak yang naif, penuh penyesalan, tidak percaya diri dan tidak memiliki keberanian dalam menentukan pilihan hidupnya.

Setelah Lily melarikan diri dari rumahnya dan masuk ke dalam sebuah komunitas terdiri dari orang-orang kulit hitam yang mampu memberikannya bimbingan dan penerimaan, ia mengalami perubahan karakter menjadi seorang anak yang lebih bijaksana, percaya diri dan berani menentukan pilihan hidupnya.

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APPENDICES

Synopsis of The Secret Life of Bees

Lily is a fourteen-year-old girl who lives with an abusive father, T. Ray, after her mother, Deborah, has died when Lily is four.

When Lily accompanies Rosaleen, her African-American maid who wants to register herself to vote, some racist men appear and assault Rosaleen. The police come and arrest Rosaleen. Knowing that T. Ray will not free Rosaleen, Lily decides to run away to be free from T. Ray and free Rosaleen from the jail. They go to August’s house, where Lily’s mother used to live in the past.

At August’s house, Lily finds a new community who accepts her warmly. They treat her as their own family. She also learns a lot of things about life and develops her skills in writing and beekeeping.

August tells Lily that Deborah once leaves her before coming back again to take Lily out of T. Ray’s house, but she accidentally dies. Feeling abandoned, Lily hates her mother. August, who loves Lily, gives her time to reflect. Finally, Lily understands that no one is perfect so that she wants to forgive her mother.

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28 Biography of Sue Monk Kidd

Sue Monk Kidd was born on August 12, 1948 in Sylvester, Georgia. The fact that her father often told her many tales when she was still a child has influenced her to be a writer.

The cultural climate of the 1960s left her feel uncertain about her career choice. By the age of sixteen, she decided to pursue a nursing career instead and graduated with a B. S. Degree in nursing from Texas Christian University in 1970. Then she became a nursing instructor at the Medical College of Georgia in her twenties. During that time, she met Sandy Kidd then got married. The couple have two children.

In her thirties, Kidd finally joined writing classes because she still had her old desire to become a writer. She also became a freelance writer of nonfiction articles and biographies as well as a Contributing Editor at Guideposts magazine for several years.

In the 1980s, her two nonfiction books, God’s Joyful Surprise: Finding

Yourself Loved and All Things are Possible, were published. In 1994, She wrote a

short story titled The Secret Life of Bees that later became a novel published in 2002. The novel receives numerous awards. In 2005, she wrote The Mermaid

Chair that won a lot of awards as well. Her newest memoir, Traveling with Pomegranates: A Mother-Daughter Story, co-authored with her daughter, Ann

Kidd Taylor, was published in 2009.

Now, Kidd lives beside a salt marsh near Charleston, South Carolina with her husband and a black Labrador.

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CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

Background of the Study

Bildungsroman is a German literary term for a genre of novel which

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Maranatha Christian University maturation process that the protagonist experiences, he or she usually becomes a better person at the end of the story.

Sue Monk Kidd is a notable American writer who is best known for her

Bildungsroman, The Secret Life of Bees, which was published in 2002 (“The

Secret Life of Bees”). Having taken a writing course in Emory University, one of the best universities in United States, she developed her writing skills and wrote short stories which received several awards (“About Sue Monk Kidd”). Being successful in writing short story, she wrote nonfiction and fiction which also gain success because of the inspiring stories within them. Some of her nonfiction works are When the Heart Waits (1990) and Traveling with Pomegranates (2009) while some of her fiction works are The Mermaid Chair (2005) and The Invention

of Wings (2014).

Kidd is a writer who lives in the postmodern period of literature, which began in the 1940s. The story of postmodern novel is often about “quest for understanding the self, finding a grasp of one’s place in the world” (Sorondo). In relation to characteristic development in Bildungsroman, understanding the self is one of the results that the protagonist achieves after development.

In this thesis I choose to analyze one of her novels; The Secret Life of

Bees, set in Sylvan, South Carolina, United States, in 1964. In the novel, the

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Maranatha Christian University Taylor. They give Lily acceptance, guidance and encouragement which help her characteristics to gradually develop. At the end of the story, Lily becomes a better person.

As a bestselling novel, The Secret Life of Bees has been successfully adapted into an award-winning movie. Since its publication, the novel has “found a wide readership and [has] received much critical acclaim” (“The Secret Life of Bees”). The novel also becomes a phenomenon after being sold “more than 6 million copies” (“About Sue Monk Kidd”) and listed by Barnes and Noble as “the sixth bestselling book of the decade” (“Sue Monk Kidd”). In addition, this book is “taught widely now in high school and college classroom” (“About Sue Monk Kidd”).

The literary element that I choose to analyze from this novel is the portrayal of the protagonist. Protagonist by definition is “the central character in the conflict, whether he be a sympathetic or an unsympathetic person” (Perrine 44). The protagonist in the novel is a dynamic character who goes through development and becomes a better person at the end of the story. A dynamic character is defined as a character who “undergoes a permanent change in some aspect of his character, personality, or outlook.” (71)

Statement of the Problem

After reading the novel, there are some things I would like to discuss: 1. How is the protagonist portrayed in the novel?

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Maranatha Christian University Purpose of the Study

The purposes of writing this thesis are:

1. To see how the protagonist is portrayed in the novel.

2. To understand the purpose of the author by creating such a character.

Method of Research

The method I use is library research. I start by reading the novel, The

Secret Life of Bees. Then I analyze the novel by using formalism. I take some

references and resources from the Internet and books to support the analysis and assist me in writing the thesis. Finally, I draw a conclusion from my analysis.

Organization of the Thesis

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CHAPTER THREE

CONCLUSION

After analyzing the portrayal of Lily Melissa Owens of Sue Monk Kidd’s

The Secret Life of Bees, I would like to draw some conclusions. After Lily’s

characteristics develop in a positive way, she becomes a better person at the end of the story.

Lily’s development is influenced by the absence and the existence of guidance, acceptance and encouragement in her community. In the novel, there are two communities that Lily lives with. The first one is the community in Sylvan, South Carolina, consisting of her father, Terrence Ray Owens, and her peers in school. The second one is the community in Tiburon, South Carolina, where Lily lives after she runs away from her house in Sylvan. The community in Tiburon is an African-American community, consisting of August Boatwright, the Daughters of Mary and Zachary Lincoln Taylor.

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Maranatha Christian University becomes a remorseful person who does not know how to overcome her regret for being the cause of her mother’s death.

Lily never gets acceptance from her father and her peers in school. Without acceptance from them, Lily cannot acknowledge her own value which makes her become an insecure person. She shows insecurity about her looks and about being herself in the community.

Moreover, Lily does not get encouragement to stand for herself, especially when she is treated inconsiderately by her father. As a result, she becomes a compliant person. She is being compliant not only toward her father’s abuses at home but also to the bullying that she receives from her peers.

In Tiburon, Lily gets acquainted with a new community, consists of August, the Daughters of Mary and Zach. Lily receives guidance from August about human’s imperfection and about uselessness of regret so that she becomes wiser about her view on her mother’s imperfection and on dealing with her regret. Lily finally decides to forgive her mother for leaving her in the past and forgive herself for being the cause of her mother’s death.

Lily also gets acceptance from the Daughters of Mary and Zach. They value Lily as a part of their lives. Acknowledging her value in others’ lives, Lily gets confidence on herself so that she becomes secure about both her appearance and about being herself in the community.

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Maranatha Christian University encouragement that Lily receives from August, the Daughters of Mary and Zach have made Lily’s characteristics able to develop in a positive way.

Through the portrayal of Lily and her development, I conclude that Kidd wants to show the reader not only the importance of guidance, acceptance and encouragement to develop one’s characteristics but also role of community in building one’s characteristics. Community is important in one’s development in consideration that humans are social creatures who live in a community and interact regularly with each other. They learn about life mostly from their communities, especially for young people like the protagonist who does not have much experience in life and still rely on other people in shaping her perspectives. This is why community has an important role in building one’s characteristics.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Text

Kidd, Sue Monk. The Secret Life of Bees. New York: Penguin Books, 2002. Print.

References

“About Sue Monk Kidd”. Sue Monk Kidd. N.p, n.d. Web. 11 Mar. 2013. “Bildungsroman”. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. Encyclopædia Britannica

Inc., 2013. Web. 23 Oct. 2013.

“Bildungsroman”. Online Etymology Dictionary. Douglas Harper, 2014. Web. 20 Feb. 2014.

“Biography of Sue Monk Kidd (1948-)”. GradeSaver. GradeSaver LLC, 2013. Web. 23 Mar. 2013.

“Compliant”. Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English. Pearson Education Limited, 2014. 3 Mar. 2014.

“Incompliant”. Merriam-Webster.com. Merriam-Webster, 2014. Web. 4 Jun. 2014. “Insecure”. Def. 1. Collins English Dictionary. Haper Collins Publishers, 2013.

Web. 22 Sep. 2013.

“Maturity”. Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English. Pearson Education Limited, 2013. Web. 7 Des. 2013.

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Maranatha Christian University Perrine, Laurence. Story and Structure. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,

1974. Print.

“Remorseful”. Oxford Dictionaries. Oxford University Press, 2014. Web. 14 Apr. 2014.

“Secure”. Oxford Dictionaries. Oxford University Press, 2013. Web. 24 May. 2013.

“Sue Monk Kidd”. Lyceum Agency. Lyceum Agency LLC, 2011. Web. 10 Mar. 2013.

“The Secret Life of Bees”. SparkNotes. SparkNotes LLC, 2013. Web. 28 Aug. 2013.

Sorondo, Alex. “What is Postmodern Literature?”. Examiner.com. Clarity Digital Group LLC, 2014. Web. 5 Jun. 2014.