The Secret Life of Bees

The Secret Life of Bees, a work of fictional realism by Sue Monk Kidd, was published in 2002. Sue Monk Kidd began her writing career as a memoirist; her first three books are spiritual memoirs that track her transition from traditional Christianity to feminist theology. This blend of the Christian contemplative life and the worship of the divine feminine is a key feature in The Secret Life of Bees. The novel was a New York Times best seller, won a 2004 Book Sense Book of the Year Award for its paperback edition, and was nominated for the Orange Broadband Prize in Fiction. The novel was adapted into an off-Broadway play and then into a movie that came out in 2008. Other works by Kidd include The Invention of Wings and The Book of Longings.

Set in 1964 South Carolina, The Secret Life of Bees is a story told in first-person memoir narration by its protagonist, Lily Owens. The book follows the form of a bildungsroman, a story centered around the growth or coming of age of its main character. In the present tense of her adulthood, Lily recounts the summer of 1964, when she turned 14 and her life changed forever.

Plot Summary

The Secret Life of Bees is a coming-of-age novel told in past-tense memoir narration by its protagonist, Lily Owens. Lily is 14 in the summer of 1964, when the heat of the South Carolina summer is no match for the racial tensions across the United States. Lily has centered her entire life around the story of her “motherlessness,” which happened at Lily’s own hands when she picked up a gun off the floor during a fight between her parents and accidentally killed her mother at four years old. Lily finds her opportunity to leave home in search of her mother after her Black caretaker and mother-stand-in, Rosaleen, is arrested on her way to register to vote. After Lily breaks Rosaleen out of the hospital she is in due to being beat up by a group of white men who harassed her, she decides that they will follow a photo that her mother left behind of the Black Madonna with “Tiburon, South Carolina” written on the back.

Lily and Rosaleen hitchhike to Tiburon, where, at the first store Lily enters, she sees a photo of the very same Black Madonna her mother had plastered to the front of a row of honey jars. Lily and Rosaleen are taken in by the three Boatwright sisters: May, June, and August, who live in a pink house on a bee farm. While Lily bides her time in telling the matriarch of the house, August, the truth about who she is, she and Rosaleen live in their honey shack, where, unbeknownst to Lily, her own mother stayed 10 years earlier.

During this time of living and working with the Boatwright sisters, Lily feels both at home and increasingly alienated. Some of this alienation stems from her holding on to her secret, and some of it is a result of this being Lily’s first time as the only white person in the space she is occupying. Lily and Rosaleen’s relationship evolves during this stay as Lily’s desire for a mother leads her to seek out a mother figure in August and then Mary/Our Lady of Chains, until eventually Lily learns that there is a divine mother within herself that can care for her.

Lily experiences a beekeeping education with August over the course of the summer that holds many lessons for Lily about the importance of all the roles in the hive, the necessity of the queen, and how honey is both for adding sweetness and for protection. In her time at the pink house, Lily is able to witness and consider the lives of others, especially those who are different from her, in a way that she never has before. Lily has been so consumed by her own hurt it has rendered her incapable of seeing the suffering of others, especially others who have caused her pain, like her father T. Ray, who is cruel and abusive of Lily.

In a historical moment of violence, change, and sorrow, Lily and the characters in and around the pink house in Tiburon, South Carolina, are tasked with moving through their own personal grief and fear in favor of life and its possibilities. Through the use of the extended bee and beekeeping metaphor, the sister’s observance of Mary and the divine feminine, the ambient anxiety of living in an uncertain and often hostile world, Sue Monk Kidd shows these characters as they are drawn closer to each other and come to realize that the sorrow they all hold can sometimes be lessened if they share the burden.