A beehive without a queen is a community headed for extinction. Bees cannot function without a queen. They become disoriented and depressed, and they stop making honey. This can lead to the destruction of the hive and death of the bees unless a new queen is brought in to guide them. Then, the bees will cooperate and once again be a prosperous community. Lily Melissa Owens, the protagonist of Sue Monk Kidd’s The Secret Life of Bees, faces a similar predicament. While she does not live in a physical hive, the world acts as a hive. She must learn to work with its inhabitants, sharing a common direction, in order to reach her full potential. The motif of the beehive is symbolic of how crucial it is to be a part of a community in order to achieve …show more content…
success. A hive without a queen cannot function, just as a human cannot thrive without a guiding force.
When the book begins, Lily is depressed and guilt-ridden over the loss of her mother and her father T. Ray’s cold and abusive behavior. These are symptoms of queenlessness, a hive in chaos. “The queen...is the unifying force of the community; if she is removed...the workers very quickly sense her absence. After a few hours...they show unmistakable signs of queenlessness” (Kidd 1). Without Deborah in the house, Lily and T. Ray suffered and the distance between them grew. Without a queen bee to give them a direction, they had no sense of community. Lily and T. Ray did not work together to prosper, and neither could function at their full …show more content…
potential. Bees in hives are incredibly interdependent and very social, both traits that assist in the success of the community within the hive. When Lily attends her first meeting of the Daughters of Mary, she sees more of a social gathering than a religious service, revolving around the Black Mary, the queen bee. “Honeybees are social insects and live in colonies...comprising of a single, egg-laying female or queen, and her many sterile daughters called workers...Males are reared only in the times of year when their presence is required” (Kidd 67). The Daughters of Mary spend most of their time socializing with each other. Similarly, this is how August’s house operates when there is no meeting. Both are productive and unified because they share a guiding force: the Black Mary. August says the Black Mary is responsible for their creation, just as the queen bee lays all of the eggs in a hive. Zach, one of the beekeepers, helps August during the busy seasons, when his presence is required, resulting in twice the normal productivity of the beekeeping business. Lily learns many things from speaking with Zach and August, and feels a sense of community through that. When socialization, cooperation, and proper guidance from a queen are present, bees and humans can function at their very best. The Boatwrights put hundreds of jars of honey on store shelves each month, keeping the inhabitants of their house happy and healthy thanks to their way of always helping each other out. “The woman moved along a row of white boxes that bordered the woods beside the pink house, a house so pink it remained a scorched shock on the back of my eyelids after I looked away” (Kidd 67). Lily’s first impression of the house gives a strange personality to the house, as if it is part of an upside down world, placed in the wrong reality. The house and its inhabitants function exactly like a prosperous beehive, and each person can be connected to a class of bee in a hive. August, Lily, and Zach routinely leave the hive to collect the honey. They personify worker bees. May and Rosaleen are the caretaker bees, keeping the hive clean and functioning. June is a mortuary bee. These bees clean the dead out the hive and are required to show respect, just as June does when she plays cello at funerals to pass the dead on to the next life. The Daughters of Mary represent the queen’s attendants, gathering to pray to and appease their queen. The final bee, the queen, is the Black Mary, around whom life revolves in the Boatwright house. When these classes mix and work together at their specific tasks, a hive or house can succeed as a community. Lily finds happiness in the Boatwright house because it is such a community, something she never had in Sylvan with T. Ray. Every hive must have rituals to keep its members healthy and working toward the success of the hive. Rituals are group activities that often result in a stronger sense of unity. During the meetings of the Daughters of Mary, especially during the first meeting Lily attends, the description makes the gathering sound routine. “August had brought in chairs and arranged them in a semicircle facing the wooden statue of Mary. When we were all seated, she lit the candle and June played the cello. We said the Hail Marys together, Queenie and Violet moving strings of wooden beads through their fingers” (Kidd 106). Everyone has a part during this assembly, prays together to Mary, and shares a guiding force. At the end of every meeting, the assembled parties are generally cheerful and say their goodbyes with a smile. The Daughters consider themselves to be “sisters.” The title sisters suggests unity, a bond which boosts the sense of an individual as part of something bigger. This is community, which through rituals and socialization is sure to succeed. Bees rely on their queen to help them through hard times.
When May dies, the personified bees rely on their religious and beekeeping connections to overcome their tough times. “August showed us how to drape a square over each box, securing it with a brick and making sure we left the bees’ entrance open” (Kidd 205). This ritual comes from a religious belief about bees having a connection with death; this is another form of guidance from the Black Mary. The grieving family turned to Mary after May’s death, and even Lily found herself in the room housing the statue more often than usual. The Black Mary is starting to become Lily’s guiding force; she even calls it “mother.” Lily asks for Mary’s help in order to be happy again. This help, of which the others are in need as well, allows the community to thrive, even with the loss of one member. Through rituals and prayers the Black Mary helps the Boatwrights and Lily overcome hard
times. Bees and their behaviors in hives symbolize death and rebirth, and the mourners look to a fable to provide a positive outlook on May’s death and enable them to keep going. It is a story of a beekeeper who had his bees taken away by the Gods, who returned them after he made a sacrifice to them. “‘His own bees, reborn,’” August tells Lily. “‘He took them home to his hives, and after that people believed that bees had power over death. The kings in Greece made their tombs in the shape of beehives for that very reason’” (Kidd 206). Lily, believing that this will mean a good future, wishes that she could have May buried in such a tomb. This symbol of bees, death, and rebirth occurred once before: in Lily’s room at the beginning of the book. When the bees swarmed in her room as she thought about her mother, it foreshadowed that her mother would be “reborn,” which she is in August Boatwright. When Lily disovers this, she fully becomes a part of the Boatwright family and helps them succeed, while allowing herself to prosper as well. When all of the proper factors for the success of a hive combine, the bees become better than they ever could have been otherwise. Lily demonstrates this change at the end of the book when she realizes that she has many mothers all around her in Tiburon, and chooses to stay with them instead of going back to a depressing and abusive life with T. Ray. “A queenless colony is a pitiful and melancholy community; there may be a mournful wail or lament from within...Without intervention, the colony will die. But introduce a new queen and the most extravagant change takes place” (Kidd 277). Lily is this queenless colony at the beginning of the book and her wail is her constant thinking about her mother, her hatred of T. Ray, and her eventual leaving of T. Ray’s house. When she goes to the Boatwrights, a new queen is introduced and Lily recovers and finds happiness. When the Black Mary and August are introduced, the two people who intervene and become Lily’s new queen(s), Lily thrives under them and becomes a better person. The belief of rebirth regarding bees also connects to the necessity of a queen to function. This is shown when Lily’s situation in the beginning of the book is reprised at the end. August shows Lily a beehive. “‘This one is missing its queen.’ she said. I’d learned enough about beekeeping to know that a hive without a queen was a death sentence for the bees. They would stop work and go around completely demoralized” (Kidd 286). Lily is initially doomed in a similar way, the same way May was when April died, which adds a double-meaning to “beekeeping,” where the task represents her own life. Lily was able to find a way to recover, just like when the man brought a new queen for the hive, and both ultimately end up better in the end. This is a rebirth of Lily’s life where she can function and be happy. This is her ultimate success. This idea of a beehive and interdependence is what brings the Boatwright family together and allows them to be the great people that they are. They, in turn, help Lily become a better person than she was at the beginning of her story by teaching her their secrets. Lily learns how everyone must work together to be successful. Even though this work may not always be obvious and physical, it is always present in the secret lives of bees.
Most runaway youth are homeless because of neglect, abuse and violence, not because of choice. Lily Owens is the protagonist in the novel, Secret Life of Bees, by Sue Monk Kidd, is no different. Lily is a fourteen year-old girl still grieving over her mother's death. T. Ray a man who has never been able to live up to the title of a father, due to years of abuse, has not made it any easier. Lily is a dynamic character who in the beginning is negative and unconfident. However, throughout the novel Lily starts to change into the forgiving person she is at the end.
In life, actions and events that occur can sometimes have a greater meaning than originally thought. This is especially apparent in The Secret Life Of Bees, as Sue Monk Kidd symbolically uses objects like bees, hives, honey, and other beekeeping means to present new ideas about gender roles and social/community structures. This is done in Lily’s training to become a beekeeper, through August explaining how the hive operates with a queen, and through the experience Lily endures when the bees congregate around her.
People share their secret lives without even talking about them. It only takes a glance or feeling to see that others have faced similar situations and problems, some people even live parallel lives. Despite the fact that many people believe it impossible for a measly insect, like a bee, to know the pain hardships a human faces, Sue Monk Kidd proves them wrong with her book The Secret Life of Bees. In her novel she derives many of her characters from the types of bees that exist in a hive. Lily and Zach have characteristic that are akin to that of field bees, August has that nurturing personality of a nurse bee, and the Lady of Chains is revered by her subjects just like a Queen bee is by her hive. Nowadays, no one ever faces a problem that someone, or something, has already faced. No one really has a secret life all to themselves.
As strong, independent, self-driven individuals, it is not surprising that Chris McCandless and Lily Owens constantly clashed with their parents. In Jon Krakauer’s novel, Into the Wild, Chris was a twenty-four-year-old man that decided to escape the materialistic world of his time for a life based on the simplistic beauty of nature. He graduated at the top of his class at Emory University and grew up in affluent Annandale, Virginia, during the early 1980’s. In The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd, Lily was a fourteen-year-old girl who grew up in the 1960’s, a time when racial equality was a struggle. She had an intense desire to learn about her deceased mother. Her nanny, Rosaleen, with whom she grew very close over the years, raised Lily with little help from her abusive father. When her father failed to help Rosaleen after three white men hospitalized her, Lily was hysterical. Later, Lily decided to break Rosaleen out of the hospital and leave town for good. While there are differences between Chris McCandless and Lily Owens, they share striking similarities. Chris McCandless’ and Lily Owens’s inconsistencies of forgiveness with their parents resulted in damaged relationships and an escape into the unknown.
Sue Monk Kidd’s book, The Secret Life of Bees has an epigraph in every chapter that parallels the events in the story. In Chapter 14 the epigraph says, “A queenless colony is a pitiful and melancholy community; there may be a mournful wail or lament from within. Without intervention, the colony will die. But introduce a new queen and the most extravagant change takes place. - The Queen Must Die; And Other Affairs of Bees and Men” ( Kidd 277 ). The epigraph in Chapter 14 is related to the chapter because it parallels Lily’s adventures and role in the story. The queenless colony the epigraph mentions is talking about the absence of Lily’s mother and how it affects the characters in the story. A mournful wail is a metaphor to the guilt she feels because she is responsible for her mother’s passing. Lily keeps these feelings of remorse and guilt kept inside for a majority of her childhood. Lily has been trying to find a new life, and she does this by becoming the new queen, finally having control of her life.
A poignant and touching classic, The Secret Life of Bees details the coming of age stories of a young girl named Lily. Her life up until the start of the novel was hard, she was friendless with an abusive father and a heavy conscience, as she believes that she is responsible for her mother’s death. Lily’s only solace is her stand-in-mother, a black woman named Rosaleen, so when Rosaleen is hauled to jail for standing up for herself, Lily decided to run away to a mysterious town that has some linkage to her mother. Her escapades lead her to three, wonderful, eclectic, devout followers of Mary, and to a new life. As the story unfolds, an elaborate symbol lies hidden just beneath the surface, one that seems so obvious, but only lies as a hidden
Lily’s biases in The Secret Life Of Bees have altered greatly; she now knows that people of color have the ability to fend for themselves, and that they can be strong and influential people. The most outstanding thing that has caused Lily’s biases to change is the Boatwright sisters. August Boatwright was the person that took Lily by surprise, Lily was raised with this false philosophy that because she was white, she was superior, more intelligent than African Americans. “At my school they made fun of colored people’s lips and noses. I myself laughed at these jokes, hoping to fit in.
In conclusion, although Lily did not fully accomplish her stated reason to go on a quest, she did learn a lot about herself and her worth. The novel, The Secret Life of Bees, met
Grief leaves an imprint on those who experience it. Some can survive its deep sorrow, others cannot. In The Secret Life of Bees, by Sue Monk Kidd, she explores the effect of grief on the main characters. The novel opens with fourteen-year-old Lily Owns struggling with the knowledge that her mother was dead because she, as an infant, picked up a loaded gun and accidentally shot her. She runs away from her abusive father in search for answers of who her mother was. Lily hitchhikes to Tiburon, South Carolina; the location written on the back of an image of the Black Madonna – one of the only belongings she has of her mother’s. There, she finds a pink house inhabited by the Boatwright sisters who are African American women making Black Madonna honey. The Boatwright sisters have had their share of grief with the death of two of their sisters and the racial intolerance they face despite the passage of the Civil Rights Act. The Boatwright sisters and Lily Owens have different methods of coping with grief; internalizing, ignoring, and forgetting are some of the ways they cope, with varying degrees of success. They discover that they must live past their grief, or else it will tear them apart.
According to pages 31 and 32, Lily said, “I watched their wings shining like bits of chrome in the dark and felt longing build in my chest. The way those bees flew, not even looking for a flower, just flying for the feel of the wind, split my heart down its seam.” She was the bee, flying to feel the wind, but full of emptiness because she couldn’t find her flower; her mother. Since the age of 4, Lily grew up without a mother. After the bees came the summer of 1964, she thought, “Looking back on it now, I wanted to say the bees were sent to me. I want to say they showed up like the angel Gabriel appearing to the Virgin Mary, setting events in motion I could never have guessed.”(32) The bees set the course of the novel, and finally, at the end of the novel, helped her find closure for her
This “home” that she finds brightly displays the ideas of identity and feminine society. Though Lily could not find these attributes with T. Ray at the peach house, she eventually learns the truth behind her identity at the pink house, where she discovers the locus of identity that resides within herself and among the feminine community there. Just like in any coming-of-age story, Lily uncovers the true meaning of womanhood and her true self, allowing her to blossom among the feminine influence that surrounds her at the pink house. Lily finds acceptance among the Daughters of Mary, highlighting the larger meaning of acceptance and identity in the novel. The meaning behind Sonsyrea Tate’s statement can be found deeply rooted within Sue Monk Kidd’s novel, The Secret Life of Bees.
The setting in the Secret life of bees helps set the overall structure of the book. As the setting changes, and certain events take place, so does the characters views on life. The most change seen is on Lily, the main character. Her values multiply and her perspective on cultural order shifts from one mind set to another. Although one part of the book’s setting limits the opportunities of the characters; the other part opens those and different opportunities. The setting in The Secret Life of Bees is vitally important because it impacts the main character and the people around her through events that transpire in the book.
The bees symbolize Lily’s unspoken guides throughout the novel. Kidd’s constant reference to the bees indicate that Lily eventually understands the importance of female power in the bee community, which she connects to her own life. When Lily initially sees the bees in her room, Rosaleen warns her that they can sting her if she tries to catch them, but Lily ignores her and continues to trap them, thus asserting her determination. Later, the bees reveal the message to Lily that she should leave her father. Kidd notes that one bee landed on Lily’s state map that she kept tacked on the wall, foreshadowing Lily and Rosaleen’s journey to Tiburon (10). The bees also symbolize the secret life that Lily lives as she hides her secret of running away from home. The hive represents society while the bees represent all of the humans inside. August tells Lily about the hives and announces, “Most people don’t have any idea about all the complicated life going on inside a hive. Bees have a secret life we don’t know anything about” (Kidd 148). The beehive cannot sur...
Lily’s emotions also fluster after perceiving the statue of the Black Mary. “I didn’t know what to think, but what I felt was magnetic and so big it ached like the moon had entered my chest and filled it up….Standing there, I loved myself and I hated myself. That’s what the black Mary did to me, made me feel my glory and shame at the same time,” (Kidd 70-71). Lily is skeptical of how to react in the presence of the Black Mary which proves she still has yet to unravel her sincere feelings towards the Black Mary.
Lily has a lot of mother figures in her life. In ?The Secret Life of Bees? two mother figures that she has are Rosaleen and August. A mother cares for her young and guides them trough life. She comforts and soothes them when they need it. Lily?s Mothers are Rosaleen and August. Both act as mothers for Lily in different ways.