Sue Monk Kidd's The Secret Life Of Bees

“Addressing the wounds of loss and betrayal, Kidd demonstrates the power of women coming together to heal those wounds” (Kidd “Intro” 2). Set during the civil rights movement in the American South, Sue Monk Kidd’s The Secret Life of Bees is a novel about coming-to adulthood and the often neglected longing for universal feminine divine. The Secret Life of Bees portrays the significance of a mother figure to the maturity and growth of her daughter. A mother is the most influential aspect as a daughter grows and helps them move towards independence and maturity. The bees further symbolize the role of Lily’s real ad surrogate mothers throughout the novel.

The significance role of bees is portrayed through the surrogate mothers and friends in …show more content…
Ray left a negative impact on Lily’s life causing unnecessary physical pain and emotional damage while she lived in her father’s household. Lily knees “were swollen with hundreds of red welts, pinprick bruises that would grow into a blue stubble across my skin” (Kidd 25). Lily became numb to T. Ray’s constant anger and “had been tortured like this enough times in my life that I'd stopped thinking of it as out of the ordinary; it was just something you had to put up from time to time” (Kidd 25). Since her mother’s death, she was forced to stand alone during T. Ray’s unnecessary abuse and was unable to stand up for herself. T. Ray punished Lily at will even when she did nothing wrong. For example, while Lily was out in the orchard admiring her mother’s things, T. Ray thought she was out fooling around with a boy. T. Ray wasn’t just capable of physical pain, he was also capable of emotional damage that constantly brought Lily down. She wanted to look fashionable like her classmates and “wear cashmere twin sets and plaid kilts mid-thigh” (Kidd 9), but T.Ray told Lily. Lily felt self-conscious due to the efforts her father made so she would not leave him and become independent. He thought he was capable of controlling her every movement. He tried to keep her under his power as long as he possibly

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