Similarities Between The Secret Life Of Bees And Huckleberry Finn

In The Secret Life of Bees written by Sue Monk Kidd and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn written by Mark Twain are two novels that both portray young white protagonist dealing with racial tension. In the book, Secret Life of Bees, it tells a story about a fourteen-year-old girl, Lily Owens, who is haunted by memories of her mother and abusive father, T-Ray. She runs away with her African American caregiver, Rosaleen, to Tiburon, South Carolina town to explore her mother’s past. That was the last place her mother was at. There, Lily meets the Boatwright sisters, who accept Lily and teaches her about beekeeping and the Black Mary. The Black Mary is the statue that represents the Virgin Mary. The Black Mary is a powerful symbol in the book because

it brings divine feminine empowerment to Lily and the dominant women that surrounds her. She eventually learns about her mother through her journey and living with the Boatwright sisters. She encounters racial tensions by having to stand up for Rosaleen when she is faced by white men and when she’s in Tiburon she is troubled by people seeing her with a black woman.

In contrast to Kidd’s novel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is about a young boy named Huck, who is “sivilized” by two sisters, Miss Douglas and Miss Watson. Huck runs away from home and travels down the Mississippi River with a runaway slave named Jim. They both take on numerous adventures. While Huck is with Jim he starts to learn how to become a gentleman. Huck’s dad, who is abusive and an acholic, kidnaps him and they are forced to live down by the river. Although, Huck was happy being away from Widow Douglas and Miss Watson he becomes comfortable with the free life from both religion and school. As Huck travels down the river he begins to face tremendous number of life-threatening situations and his conscience. He helps an innocent man escape slavery and decides that helping Jim escape is the right thing to do even if he suffers the consequences to go to hell. As both, Lily and Huck run away with black adults, to protect their African American friends and ultimately develops world views that are more

accepting.

On their journey, they make ethical decisions that encourage them to become more independent and to practice a free will religion, whether worshiping feminine empowerment or just believing in good and evil. However, their final worldview is quite different from each other, with the difference in time. One can argue that the characters in these two novels are reflections of the authors. Evidently, Sue Monk Kidd uses Lily to show how being surrounded by dominant women can be empowering. She conformed to universal spirituality from baptism. Like, Lily who was raised Baptist and then worshiped the black Mary. Whereas, Mark Twain does not belong to religion, instead he argued how can one believe in something we are not certain of? Huck reflects him because in the entire book Huck does not have positive views on religion and when he says hell is fit for him. All in all, in The Secret Life of Bees and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Mark Twain and Sue Monk Kidd uses the main characters Huck and Lily to help present their worldview of religion. Though, the books were written in two different time periods they both have a similar setting and overall message and differences related to the

author.
Reading Sue Monk Kidd’s autobiography, The Dance of the Dissident Daughter I discovered that Kidd was a very religious woman. Her experiences an awakening that drove her to begin a journey to practice feminine spirituality. She discusses the fear, anger, healing, freedom and empowerment she experienced while on her journey to a new form of faith. Kidd takes authority of her life into her own hands. She was used to putting male authority figures at the center of her life and accepts to come second. She becomes equipped to this new form of religion and shows how inspirational it is in her book, The Secret Life of Bees. Sue Monk Kidd’s journey of finding a spiritual practice is shown through Lily. In Sue Monk Kidd autobiography, she explains how she was raised in a Christian home and then began to research and practice feminine spirituality. She writes, “I had been struggling to come to terms with my life as a woman- in my culture, my marriage, my faith, my church, and deep inside myself. It was a process not unlike the experience of conception and labor. There had been moment, many moments really, when truth seized me and I ‘conceived’ myself as a woman. Or maybe I reconceived myself” (Kidd 8). Kidd expresses her troubles she has a woman and how that affects the certain things in her life. This was the first step she took to find the problems within herself. She admits to the things that was holding her back from getting to find herself. She then explains her childhood, “I had been raised in the Southern Baptist Church, and I was still a rather exemplary member of one, but beginning in my early thirties I’d become immersed in a journey that was rooted in contemplative spirituality of the ‘church fathers’ of the monks I’d come to know as I made regular retreats in their monasteries” (Kidd 14). Kidd’s mother raised her in a Christian home. She attended Sunday school and morning service regularly. She was invested in learning more about the language that was used during church services. Kidd asks herself what, “God our mother” means. She wanted to learn more about it. As Kidd got older she realized that, “Women have been largely missing from positions of church power, we’ve been silenced relegated to positions of subordination by biblical interpretations, doctrine and God has been represented to us as exclusively male” (Kidd 18). Kidd acknowledges that women do not hold authoritative positions within the church and she does not like how women are limited to no having a position in the church. Kidd believes that all women should be able to have a position within the church. She says that women are shadowed behind the men in the church. She also says that “God has been represented to us as exclusively male” in which she may not agree to because of the way women are treated in the church. Moreover, this form of silence is shown through Lily, the main character in the Secret Life of Bees, because she does not have the opportunity to be a young lady because her actions are dominated by her abusive father. Lily also attended a Baptist church with her father. She was not forced to attend her father church, but she was not involved in it. Sue Monk Kidd could use Lily to show her journey as a child.