The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd - Essay Example

Sue Monk Kidd, "The Secret life of Bees" Sue Monk Kidd, "The Secret life of Bees Sophisticated Narrative ReviewIntroduction Many novels in American literature draw on the Civil Rights Movement for material. Among these Civil Rights Movement novels there are no recovered gems, but even the least memorable of these books has an immediacy and involvement that can be lost in more purportedly objective genres of writing. Authors of Civil Rights Movement fiction often identify some aspect of these years of protest as a defining moment in their lives and a significant influence in then-work. Images from several events appear recurrently in Civil Rights Movement novels. Whether she is a major character or merely an asterisk to the action, the white woman is, by virtue of her symbolic importance in Southern history and culture, a significant presence in novels about the Civil Rights Movement. This might be counterintuitive since the white man would seem the likely arch-adversary in the civil rights dilemma—or worse, focus on the white woman might appear as an attempt to usurp the centrality of African Americans in favor of the group furthest removed from civil rights issues. And yet, the white woman was at the center of those issues. The white woman is central to civil rights issues and to fiction that specifically and substantially depends upon the Civil Rights Movement for material because she was the supporting beams and pillars of the culture the Movement sought to dismantle. That the relationship between the white woman and the Civil Rights Movement has been neglected suggests only that the significance of this relationship has been somehow overshadowed, not that it is insignificant. In 2002, a novel hit the New York Times best-seller list. The setting was the rural South in the late sixties, just after the passage of the Civil Rights Act. The main characters, take refuge with a family of women who live in a house on the outskirts of town. The book is Sue Monk Kidd’s The Secret Life of Bees. Its heroine, Lily Owens, thus achieves spiritual transcendence through communal living with a family of women, self-styled religious rituals, and racial integration. Kidd’s novel exemplifies the two trends that have emerged most clearly in American women’s fiction over the last quarter of the twentieth-century: the move on the part of women writers to a creative and individualized religious practice rather than a traditional institutionalized one, and the examination of the intersections of religion, gender and race as they shape identity. Major Themes Everything from the novel line to the references of the Civil Rights Movement occurring in 1960’s makes the story more realistic. Although Kidd doesnt believe that any of the characters are drawn specifically from her own life, she did draw from details and recollections of her adolescence for the actions and mannerisms of many of the characters. Also, at the beginning of every chapter and from one of the characters in the novel itself, we are shown the scientific facts about bees and a life in a bee hive. This makes the novel itself is not only more interesting, but it gives it a uniqueness unlike any other. Kidd has stated that she drew inspiration from the honeybees that lived in a wall of her house in Georgia while she was growing up, providing a frame for her novel. She remembers the humming sound of the bees and the honey that seeped out of the wall. She said that she imagined a young girl lying in bed with bees sifting through the cracks in the wall and the thoughts that may have surrounded her life. Throughout the novel there is an important theme of death giving way to life. In the very beginning of the novel, Lily says “People who think dying is the worst thing don’t know a thing about life” (2). Here, we see how Lily’s life has been profoundly affected by her mother’s death. This statement suggests that living with someone else’s death can be more painful than dying. In this case, Deborah’s death has given way to Lily’s miserable life. However, as the novel progresses, it’s easily recognized that death also can be a positive force ones life. After May’s death, August tells Lily, “Putting black cloths on the hives is for us. I do it to remind us that life gives way into death, and then death turns around and gives way into life” (119). Death as giving way to life is seen twice in this novel as a positive force. The first instance is the way that May’s death propels June to marry Neil, thus establishing their new life together. The second time is when Lily finally reconciles with her mother’s death and is set free to truly begin her own life. The major theme of this novel is expressed in its title, which comes from a statement made by August, “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” (148). Throughout the novel, the reader learns how most characters are not what they seem on the surface. People’s lives are usually much more complex and complicated than they appear. In order to show this, Kidd builds on the hive and bees as a metaphor of life. Bees represent people working together in a society, which is represented by the hive. “The queen, for her part, is the unifying force of the community; if she is removed from the hive, the workers very quickly sense her absence. After a few hours, or even less, they show unmistakable signs of queenlessness” (3). The beehive has been known in history to represent the soul, death, and rebirth. The hive is presided over by the queen, or mother-figure. In explaining that bees have secret lives that are not immediately perceptible, August speaks metaphorically of people. As the plot progresses, we learn that almost every character has an explanation for his or her actions that cannot be seen immediately. We know that Lily is pretending to be someone that she is not in order to find out about her mother. We learn that May is so emotional because of her twin’s suicide (142). August tells Lily that T. Ray was not always the cruel man he is now. He was once tender and sweet and become embittered when Deborah died (201). Lily also finds out that her mother was not the perfect women she imagined. Throughout this story, Lily learns people, like the bees, are often motivated by forces that cannot be understood immediately. Analysis of The Secret Life of Bees The group in The Secret life of Bees is racially mixed: the house is owned by a black woman and her two sisters, and it is a white teenage girl and her black housekeeper who flee there, the girl from her abusive father and the housekeeper from a group of white men threatening to imprison or even murder her. Their hostess, is portrayed as a maternal figure, though she has no children of her own, and is close to nature through her work of keeping bees. Neighboring women come regularly to her home to participate in religious services, which she has patch-worked together from disparate religious traditions that center around supplication to a Black Virgin Mary. The white teenage girl who has taken up residence in the house, is able to overcome the emotional scars left from her past, through her hostess’s spiritual mentoring and the beliefs and rituals in which she participates. This girl must then face down her father, a man who uses violence to humiliate and control her, in a climactic confrontation that parallels the men’s raid on the Convent in Paradise by Tony Morrison. In perhaps the most striking similarity to Paradise, the novel closes with the white teenage girl evoking an image of a black Virgin, protecting and comforting her as a mother. Kidd’s novel is narrated exclusively by its fourteen-year old heroine, Lily Owens. Lily represents a youth who remains uncorrupted by the adult world, similar to Salinger’s Holden Caulfield—and because of Kidd’s foregrounding of racial relations, still closer to Harper Lee’s Scout and Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. Most readers will sympathize when Lily’s father threatens her and she is excluded from “charm school” at the local Women’s Club because she has no mother, and cheer her on when she runs away from her father and thus escapes the social marginalization she feels in their community. Lily’s innocence stands in contrast to racial divisiveness of the world around her. The summer of 1964, the year in which the book is set, witnessed the passage of the Civil Rights Act, and the violence that followed in its wake first touches Lily through her black housekeeper, Rosaleen. On her way into town to register to vote, Rosaleen has a confrontation with three white men, and is arrested, beaten, and then hospitalized by the prison. Lily’s scheme to sneak her out of the hospital further necessitates their flight from the town. As we learn later, Lily’s parents married because her mother, Deborah, was pregnant. When Lily was four, Deborah ran away, enraging and embittering her husband (Lily refers to him as “T. Ray,” an abbreviation of his first name, Terrence Ray). Like K.D. in Paradise, who comes after the Convent women with the posse from Ruby after his lover, Gigi, has rejected him, T. Ray’s response to Deborah’s abandonment is violent: he treats Lily like another version of her mother and projects his rage, suspicions and insecurities about his wife’s sexuality onto her. Withholding affection and inflicting violence on Lily becomes a means of retribution towards his wife for rejecting him. At fourteen, Lily has had no sexual experience, yet the possibility of her emergent sexuality clearly disturbs T. Ray and he punishes her for it. “It was fashionable to wear cashmere twinsets and plaid kilts midthigh,” she explains, “but T. Ray said hell would be an ice rink before I went out like that—did I want to end up pregnant like Bitsy Johnson whose skirt barely covered her ass?” (9). When T. Ray discovers Lily out in their orchard at night, a place to which she retreats to think about her mother, he calls her a slut, assuming she has snuck out to meet a boy, and punishes her by forcing her to kneel on a pile of grits. It is not until Lily has run away, however, that she actually has her first romantic encounter with a black teenage boy as kind and free from racism as Lily is herself. Lily’s escape from and eventual victory over T. Ray is linked to her emerging sexual autonomy and reflects the larger, widespread desire in modern culture to reconcile sexuality with spirituality, that scholars as diverse as the theologian and former monk Ean Begg identify. These qualities have been associated with the emergence of the Black Virgin in modern culture.1 Referred to in Kidd’s novel as “Our Lady” or the “Black Mary,” the Black Virgin embodies all the possible qualities—the spiritually medicinal power of nature, political rights of the oppressed, sexual freedom, and maternal protection and forgiveness. This image plays a still more prominent role throughout The Secret Life of Bees. The qualities of the Black Mary, however, are expressed most clearly through August Boatwright, as the spiritual leader of the women’s community Lily enters. August plays a very similar role to Consolata in Paradise by taking the outcast Lily into her home, and teaching her about the Black Virgin as a way to help her overcome her painful past. T. Ray’s abusive fathering is thus countered by the nurturing mothering Lily receives from August. That August eventually reveals herself to have been Lily’s own mother’s housekeeper, and that she had sheltered her mother years before from T. Ray, contributes to her role as an ideal surrogate mother. Lily’s participation makes the image all the more attractive to an audience hungry for an end to racial divisiveness in America. Nearly forty years after the Civil Rights Movement, Americans appear eager to counter the violence of those images with a vision of integration and healing. The political context of the South in the summer of 1964, with the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the racial violence that both preceded it and followed in its wake, is instrumental to the plot of the novel—and events such as the 1963 bombing that killed four little girls at a church in Birmingham, Alabama, and the 1964 slaying of three civil rights workers in Mississippi are referenced in the fiction. After Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act, Rosaleen resists three white men who attempt to prevent her from registering to vote, the event that prompts Lily and her to flee their home and find the Boatwrights. Later, Zach, the black teenager who works with August and is romantically involved with Lily, is arrested when one of his friends hits a white man with a Coke bottle he has thrown, on a day when it is rumored that a white movie star plans to bring a black woman to the local movie theater and thereby integrate it. This incident with Zach leads to the death of August’s sister, May, when she drowns herself after hearing the news of his arrest. These fictional racial incidents Kidd invents and situates alongside larger historical political events serve a deeper thematic function: they force Lily to face down gendered and national racial violence on a personal level. It is this particular evil of a misogynistic and racist world that becomes a litmus text for the practical value of religion and the idea of God. Kidd’s handling of these issues, however, is disturbing in its convergence with certain racial stereotypes. August effectively mothers the motherless Lily, taking her in and treating her with unconditional love. August is childless (she valued freedom more than marriage, she tells Lily) and as the previous housekeeper and much beloved mother figure to Lily’s mother, August bears a subtle but uncomfortable resemblance to a stereotypical “mammy” who figures throughout Southern fiction, most famously in Gone With the Wind. She is a white-girl wish fulfillment—an all-wise, unconditionally loving, de-sexualized figure with no husband or children of her own, no resentment of the racist treatment she’s received at the hands of whites, no reservations about devoting all her time and affection to the daughter or granddaughter of the employers who exploited her. Rosaleen, similarly, is a character whose only purpose seems to be to mother Lily, a point illustrated by her jealousy of August, when Lily grows close to her. Unlike August, Rosaleen is physically heavy set, uneducated and coarse in her manners. Rosaleen also has no husband or children, but also appears thoroughly content to mother Lily, bringing her a cake on her birthday and comforting her after T. Ray’s abuse. August and Rosaleen, appear to bear whites no ill-will and love and support Lily as much or more than they do their own family. Discussing the extent to which her characters were modeled on people she knew, Kidd explains, “the inspiration for August came mostly for a vision I carry inside, of feminine wisdom, compassion, strength.” August is largely an embodiment of spiritually desirable characteristics in the form of a mother figure. As such, she is instrumental for Lily to recognize and overcome her own racism, for Lily marvels at August’s qualities of mind, admitting that until meeting her, “I thought black women could be smart, but not as smart as me, me being white” (78). August’s younger sister, June, who is a teacher and musician, expresses all the race and class-based resentment of Lily that August appears to transcend. The fact that Lily is white and that they are sheltering her puts their household in danger, June argues. As Lily later learns, June resented her mother because August had to work as a housekeeper for her mother’s family when she was unable to find work as a teacher. In this way, June functions as a type of “madwoman in the attic”—a figure who expresses the resentment that it would be normal for the other black characters to feel. Lily, however, wins even June over in the end through a water fight on a hot day, and the affectionate bonds she forges with August, Rosaleen, June and the other black women who make up the “Daughters of Mary” leave her with “all these mothers…more mothers than any eight girls off the street” (302). A deep-rooted fantasy is thus played out, both of racism forgiven and race transcended, and of being mothered and nurtured. The two desires bleed into one another: mother-love, as entirely pure and unconditional (as it is popularly imagined to be), becomes the most satisfying manifestation of forgiveness from African-Americans that a white female writer can imagine. As Kidd herself explains, Despite the African-American women who prominently populated the world of my childhood, there were enormous racial divides. I vividly remember the summer of 1964 with its voter registration drives, boiling racial tensions, and the erupting awareness of the cruelty of racism. I was never the same after that summer. I was left littered with memories I could not digest. I think I knew even back then that one day I would have to find a kind of redemption for them through writing. (Interview) Kidd finds this redemption through giving voice to a white girl she can identify with, who is in the remarkable and nearly impossible position of not being complicit in the racism of her society, and of being forgiven the sins of the dominant culture through the mother-love of the Daughters of Mary. August, May, and June have names that refer to nature through the fecundity of summer months and are further associated with a harmonious relationship with nature through bee-keeping. The sisters thus come to reinforce the essentialist stereotype of black women as “earth mothers,” in tune with nature and superhuman in strength and love. Kidd makes it clear in the story that Lily’s name is meant to allude to the pairing of lilies with the Virgin Mary, but regardless of the author’s conscious intent, Lily’s name also alludes to whiteness and racial purity—witness the phrase, “lily white”—ironically, casting Lily as a representative of white America. Comparative Analysis: Toni Morrison’s Paradise Morrison’s investigation and representation of Candomblé in Paradise stems from her interest in its African hybrid roots, and her affinity to African beliefs about the spirit world and the “living-dead.” Further, she constructs a “collective bildungsroman,” a form closely associated with African-American literature, as noted earlier, which allows the reader access to the consciousness of multiple characters with competing interests. Lily’s singularity as the sole narrator and protagonist of her story, by contrast, means that readers see the black characters who populate Kidd’s novel only at a distance, through Lily’s eyes, and in terms of how they promote her growth. Yet tellingly, even as the divergences of The Secret Life of Bees and Paradise are informed by race, their authors share a vision of religion that is tested and proved by its transcendence of race—the paradox of a culture saturated by a history of racial tensions and divisions, looking for an answer in a new idea of God. Morrison and Kidd represent a larger trend among American women writers who set out to examine the role of gender in the construction of religion, and religion in the construction of gender, but find themselves grappling with the way Americans have historically experienced race as it informs the formation of religious identity and communities. These questions of race and gender have become prominent in American culture at this historical moment, due to social injustices exposed by the Civil Rights and feminist movements in the 1960s and 1970s. Race and gender thus emerge in the exploration of religion and elsewhere, as the vehicle for larger questions on which groups have been excluded, because of the way hierarchies function within American culture. The exclusion of certain voices and dominance of others in turn inspires writers in marginalized positions to use literature to articulate alternative visions of the world. This cultural phenomenon reaches beyond the works included here, and needs to be considered in light of the tensions between America’s deep valuing of individual identity, and the need of many Americans to rely on group identity as a means of being heard, due to their lack of access to social or economic power. Conclusion The white woman is central to civil rights issues and to fiction that specifically and substantially depends upon the Civil Rights Movement for material because she was the supporting beams and pillars of the culture the Movement sought to dismantle. That the relationship between the white woman and the Civil Rights Movement has been neglected suggests only that the significance of this relationship has been somehow overshadowed, not that it is insignificant. In civil rights fiction, the association between white women and the Movement has proven consistently important. The scrutiny of race, religion and gender’s impact on societies and nations, however, has only intensified in American culture during last decades, and shows no sign of disappearing. Novels and memoirs by women writers, which foreground the problems and possibilities of traditions and communities, continue to proliferate. These two important themes presented in the novel are ones that make each reader want to keep reading. The way she weaves the in and out the bee facts to create a metaphor of life is fascinating. Everyone can relate to this novel because it depicts the true facts of life. It creates inspiration to all people who are experiencing the death of a loved one. They learn that life can go on and in fact, “death can give way to life” (119). This novel explores racism, segregation and angst while maintaining an overall theme of self-acceptance. With humor, grief and drama rolled into one remarkable story. Bibliography Dent, Tom. Southern Journey: A Return to the Civil Rights Movement. NY: Morrow, 1997. Kidd, Sue Monk. The Secret Life of Bees. Viking Adult, 2002 La Vie en Rose. The Secret Life of Bees interview with Sue Monk Kidd. La Vie en Rose Website, 2005 Morrison, Toni. Paradise. New York: Alfred Knopf, 1998. Read More