The Secret Life Of Bees Literary Analysis

Kidd’s The Secret Life of Bees traces the psychological development of a young white girl named Lily. The novel is told from the white girl’s perspective. It begins with Lily’s mourning the death of her mother, Deborah. She lives in a permanent loss blaming herself for shooting her mother. She lives in Sylvan, South Carolina, with her abusive father, T. Ray, and their housekeeper, Rosaleen. In her quest for freedom, Rosaleen has been exposed to the white men harassment and abuse. Likewise, Lily has endured her father’s harsh nature. By using the picture of the Black Mary, both of them end up at Tiburon, a city in South Carolina, written at the pictures of Lily's mother. At Tiburon, they meet the Calendar Sisters, August, June and May, the owners of the Black Madonna Honey business. These women have a group of female characters named the “Daughters of Mary,” celebrating all together “Our Lady of Chains.”

Kidd employs various motifs due to her indulgence in studying, “Bee legend and imagery, worked on the design of the house in which the bees lived, and contemplated the idea of the Virgin Mary” (Tischler 179). The same critic points out that Kiddwitnesses the social and the racial struggle that the African-Americanpeople have been through with their quest for the rights to vote in 1964 (179). Kidd is also known for her poetic language that is filled with symbolism and allusions that is mostly employed in her