The Secret Life of Bee's: Religion

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The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd was an interesting book to read. Though I’ve seen the movie when I was younger, I thought it would be cool to read since I lost the memory of what it was all about. The book takes place in the South during the time of Jim Crow Laws and the Civil Rights Movement. A young teenage girl named Lilly Owens who is motherless and raised in a home with an abusive father, looks for peace and guidance while in the world on her own. In an interview, the author explained how important faith is in life and how it makes us the people we are. After seeing how she views life I’ve noticed that religion and unity were some of the themes that she based the book on. One huge example of symbolism that she uses is the correlation to bees and her journey to accept and forgive the things that she has gone through in life. In Christianity and Judaism, it has been said the character traits of Jesus can be seen in bees. Kidd uses this great story to detail how a young girl’s journey to find herself leads to a new family, faith and forgiveness.

At the start of this story, Lilly describes her last memories of what she saw of her mother. Which happened to be a fight started between her and her father “T-Ray” which led to her mother’s death. “I saw him take her by the shoulders and shake her, her head bouncing back and forth” (7) This also allows her to foreshadow the guilt that she lives with on a daily basis. “The noise that exploded around us. This is what I know about myself. She was all I wanted. And I took her away.” (8) The constant pain that Lily lives with is calmed when she meets people like August Boatwright and Zach - people that didn’t look like her but offered her everything that she had lost and needed. The Wailing Wall was a place where she was allowed to release all of her pain and suffering and the Black Madonna was the religious figure she looked up to and reminded her of her mother most.

The Secret Life of Bees makes me believe that sometimes the people you least expect to help you can sometimes be the ones to help you when you need it most.

Comments

  1. Griffin ThomasOctober 18, 2019 at 1:00 PM

    Great post! I love that you brought up forgiveness in the religious aspect of the novel. In that last scene with T Ray at the Boatwright house where she refuses to leave, I felt a theme fo forgiveness. I do not think that Lily completely forgives him and might not be able to ever. However, I feel for Lily to move on she need to forgive her father in a way so that what he has done to her won't follow her around anymore.

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