“Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself” (George Bernard Snow).
Sue Monk Kidd’s novel, The Secret Life of Bees, centered around the development of the life of Lily Owens, a young, South Carolinian girl. Upon running away from her abusive father, Lily unwittingly set in motion a series of encounters and experiences that would later help to define her own character. This novel is the story of Lily’s coming-of-age, a sequence of events of drastic mental maturation, and in each of the most critical encounters and experiences, Kidd emphasized their meanings through the application of devices, such as indirect characterization, symbolism, and allusion. Together, they demonstrated what Lily believed in, what she wanted …show more content…
Because of this, she became fascinated with almost anything that represented a mother-daughter structure, especially beehives and the Boatwright Household. The two have a symbolic relation to each other, which is evident when August Boatwright claimed, “‘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). In a beehive, females are dominant, and the queen is their remote, yet heavily influential, leader. In the case of the all-female Boatwrights, Our Lady of the Chains serves as their queen in faith, and August as their queen in daily life. Along with this, beehives are sensitive and vulnerable communities, resulting in the creation of multiple defensive mechanisms and methods. The Boatwrights have taken similar measures, such as August leading the Daughters of Mary, as a religious output for troubling matters, and May building the Wailing Wall to relieve her internal pains and struggles. Both systems heavily relied upon a benign and central female authority, something Lily desperately wanted back in her life.
Along with these facets of personal morals and wants, Kidd exemplified Lily’s religious side on multiple occasions, such as her optimistic tendency to believe in godly miracles, when faced with a grim reality. An example is the Biblical Locust Plague, which …show more content…
They were bits and pieces that revealed her morals, her wants, her interests, her beliefs, and a host of other parts to her mentality. Only when fitted together, would these devices form the whole image. They gave the readers an indirect approach when interpreting Lily’s characteristics, allowing them to generate their own evaluations, and gain a more intimate understanding about them. Kidd did not want to disclose to the readers who Lily Owens was, but wanted them to find out for