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In The Secret Life of Bees, what are three places in which gender and racial stereotypes are broken? What do these examples illustrate?

One scene in The Secret Life of Bees in which racial stereotypes are broken is the episode in which Lily shows Rosaleen the black-skinned statue of Virgin Mary:





"I could tell it was having an effect on her by the way she kept gazing at it with her mouth parted. I could read her thought: If Jesus' mother is black, how come we only know about the white Mary? This would be like women finding out Jesus had had a twin sister who'd gotten half God's genes but none of the glory" (page 80). 



In this scene, even Rosaleen, who is African-American, is surprised that the Virgin Mary is African-American, as Mary is usually portrayed as white. Lily likens this recognition to the idea that Jesus had a twin sister, as women, like African-Americans, have largely been left out legends of religious glory (except as mothers like Mary). In this scene, Lily's ideas about the Virgin Mary challenge racial and gender stereotypes.





The book also challenges gender stereotypes. Lily feels like she is not a real girl because she does not know how to dress in traditionally feminine ways or style her hair. She says, "I worried so much about how I looked and whether I was doing things right, I felt half the time I was impersonating a girl rather than being one" (page 19). Lily tries to attend charm school to acquire what she thinks of as necessary female style, but she is barred from doing so because she doesn't have a mother or grandmother. Rosaleen challenges typical ideas about gender when she says, "You don't need to go to some highfalutin school to get charm" (page 19). Rosaleen looks down on the traditional idea that femininity comes from knowing how to arrange flowers, talk to boys, or apply lipstick. She is aware that charm comes from being a fair-minded and bright person, as Lily is. 


Another scene in which Lily breaks racial stereotypes is when she realizes that Zach is far more handsome than her stereotyped idea about African-Americans. She says, "If he was shocked over me being white, I was shocked over him being handsome" (page 170). She says that people in her school made fun of African-American features, but now she realizes that she had been wrong. Racist ideas suggest that African-Americans aren't good looking, but Lily realizes these ideas are wrong. These examples teach the reader that stereotypes about gender and race are flawed and do not apply to real people. 

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