The Secret Life of Bees

By -
The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd is a story of a young girl trying to find her identity in the midst of racism and segregation. Lily is a white teenager that runs away from home and finds solace at a bee farm with three sisters. We follow Lily through various struggles as we see her mature into the person she becomes at the end of the novel, finding her happy place with the bees. One of my favorite parts of the book as a whole was the extensive amount of symbolism in the story. It wasn’t one of the stories where you had to pick out the symbolism, but here it was extremely obvious. The author chose to open each chapter with a reference to bees that we can somehow relate it back to the protagonist.
The bees in the novel served as Lily’s guides in the novel. We see them talked about from the very beginning when they came out from behind the walls and she tried to wake up T. Ray to see them. It’s almost as if the bees were encouraging to leave the house and eventually led her to find the truth about her mother. Later when she goes to Tiburon, keeping the bees becomes her occupation. Bees symbolized her personal growth and exploration and helped lily move forward in her situation. For every important action that happens in the story, there is always a time where bees play a role. For example, when she realized she loved August, she let the bees rest on her body. She even finds the life of the bees similar to her own life. They care for their mother, continue working, and work unbelievably hard to service. They allow Lily to understand the power of community. 
Kidd does an excellent job in portraying the life of bees and comparing it to the life of Lily. I think this book would be excellent to teach in the classroom because of the extensive amount of symbolism. There is plenty of information to dig into and its also just an innocent fun read! 

            

Comments

  1. UnknownOctober 25, 2017 at 8:28 PM

    Yes, great post. The Bees helped Lily make the decision to leave and get away from T.Ray, and kept her fed,occupied, and employed. Bees are life.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Growing Pains - The Symbolism of the Tree in Speak

By -
I have felt the paralyzing pain of internal disease. The kind of trauma that causes your mouth to curl in and swallow you whole. I, like so many other women, are walking the halls in Melinda’s shoes in “Speak.” I thought Laurie Anderson did a phenomenal job of twisting all of the tribulations a high school girl goes through, into the tree that Melinda is. Whether we’re as strong as an oak or weak as a bush, we have all gone through the disease that strikes Melinda from the inside out. Melinda is like a half-dead tree. Some parts of her strive to blossom and create beauty. Other parts are broken and diseased. Like a dead tree, Melinda needs to save herself and “cut off the damage, [so it] is possible for the tree to grow again” (187). The symbolism of a tree is significant in “Speak.” Trees reflect her growing process. In the beginning, Melinda is a sick and lifeless tree. Her view is negative and dark. She’s so far past repair, bursts of sunlight do her no good. Sunlight would be pe...
Read more

Postmodernism in Curious Incident

By -
Before I start writing, I first want to acknowledge that I just really loved this book! It seemed like a lot of the class had trouble enjoying or appreciating the novel because it's so different stylistically, which is understandable, but all of those unique elements helped make the novel more authentic. The main topic I want to focus on (also what I'm writing my paper on) is how a lot of postmodernist elements were used in the novel to make Christopher come to life. While obviously not every postmodern novel is about an autistic kid, I think Haddon really used a lot of these elements to his advantage and they ended up working out really well to characterize Christopher. One of the major postmodern elements which helps this book really craft an authentic portrayal of autism is the fact that it's metafictive. Basically, this means it's a "story within a story." Readers would be extremely limited just reading the parts of the novel which are meant to be C...
Read more

How Starr Goes from Acting to Embracing in The Hate U Give

By -
In The Hate U Give, Starr Carter is caught between two worlds. She lives in a predominantly black neighborhood, but her father sends her and her brothers to a private school where she is surrounded by white people. She talks about acting differently depending on what group she is around, which can create some identity problems. She says on page 11, "Funny how it works with white kids though. It's dope to be black until it's hard to be black." When at Williamson, she sees white kids that think it's cool to engage in black culture, but she knows they don't understand what she goes through in her Garden Heights community. She witnessed her friend Natasha's death when she was 10 years old, and she sees gang activity in her community all the time. When she is among her black friends, like at the party, they tease her for hanging out with the white kids. This reminds me of a Drake song where he says, "I used to get teased for being black, and now I'm...
Read more