The Secret Life of Bees: A Reflection

The Secret Life of Bees: A Reflection

This year the incoming freshman class was asked to read Sue Monk Kidd’s The Secret Life of Bees, a coming-of-age novel set in the deep south during the summer of 1964. Faculty, staff, resident assistants, and anyone else who wanted to lead a discussion was given a free copy of the book and invited to participate. I don’ t know whether the students were given free copies as well.

Today (whoops — yesterday; it’s after midnight as I blog this) I sat at a table with a few students I recognized and many I didn’t. While some of the other freshman seminar teachers were taking attendance at the book discussion, I didn’t — I’d rather trust my students.

After spending a few minutes dragging comments out of my tablemates, I asked who had actually read the book. Everyone at the table pointed to one student, who admitted (confessed?) that yes, she had actually read the whole book — though she didn’t seem to understand what I was talking about when I mentioned “catholicism”. The room was noisy, so it’s possible she simply couldn’t hear what I was saying; still, it kind of threw me for a loop when here we are at a Catholic school, one of the central images in the novel (besides bees, of course) is a picture of the Black Madonna, and the central characters have concocted for themselves a sort of folk Mary-worship that is pretty much a parody of what all good Southern Baptists are taught to fear from those scary, statue-worshiping papists.

The other students at my table had at least started the book, and most did contribute when asked… one even said her mother had a black nanny, which surprised me; all the students were from the midwest or northeast, so the Deep South setting of the novel didn’t seem to resonate very strongly with them. Still, they all seemed intelligent and I liked the chance to get to know them. I did feel a little bummed when nobody from my breakout table contributed to the lively all-group discussion.

During that closing event some polite and well-spoken male students called the book “girly”, resulting in some lively but good-natured gender friction. Since Seton Hill has only officially been a co-ed school for two years now, I’d rather see a book that emphasizes gender. And, while the book presented a cross-racial teen romance and presented white males as a pretty vicious and ugly lot, Lily (the protagonist) is so likable, and the novel presents such a hopeful image of female racial harmony, that I did think it was well worth reading and discussing.

I did find it hard to accept that the novel is supposed to have been written by a 14-year-old girl. Passages in which the first-person narrator refers to “snot and boogers” are appropriately adolescent, but other passages are clearly an adult woman reflecting on youth from a great distance. It didn’t bother me too much, until the last chapter, which has passages written in the present tense (suggesting that Lily has just finished scribbling what I’m reading, not that the manuscript has been carefully constructed from memories and edited and crafted to perfection). Samuel Clemens uses much the same conceit in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, even though Huck is supposed to have been illiterate just a year before. Maybe that’s just a convention of books with adolescent narrators.

8 thoughts on “The Secret Life of Bees: A Reflection

  1. The book may have seemed slow to you because you are slow or maybe immature, thank for your input though and remember other people generally do not care about how slow or boring a book or anything was to you.

  2. I didnt enjoy this book very much. Nothing really exciting happend, there was just a lot of character development in Lily, and certain areas of the book were slow and seemed to drag.

  3. Yes, I didn’t care for the book a whole lot. Sometimes things seemed to drag on for a bit too long. The characters in the book weren’t all that bad though. I really think their should have been more action though!

  4. personally i thought this book was really boring and had to much emotion in it which made me bored.other wise the books writing was decent.the characters went through a lot of drama and the descriptive words were good, and helped understand the plot of the book.

  5. I actually enjoyed the author’s writing style. In slow times, the words tended to have a little more relaxed tone. When the characters were going through a lot or were under a lot of stress, the words were more upbeat. It was really cool reading about the author’s life and experiences growing up after I was finished reading the book because I recognized things from the book that she went through in her own life, such as her growing up in Georgia. Lily’s personal search coming of age also was most likely a reflection of the author’s experience growing up and finding herself.

  6. The Secret Life of Bees, with a young girl at hand and uphill battles, this book just didn’t make out for me. I think Sue was trying to portray the everyday life back then and now. She shows a variety problems that we faced back then and today, for example, racism with Rosaleen, how pregnancy can affect your life and with the role of women, and also the effects of what you can learn from the surroundings as Lily experiences it. Again I think that this book interprets to its audiences the perspectives of daily life.

  7. Tom, if you were hoping for more action, then that supports the observation that the book appeals more to women than men. I personally found the depiction of longing, the slow uncovery of the mystery of her mother’s past, and the final confrontation scene to be gripping — even while I thought parts of the book were preachy.

  8. What did you think of the writing style? I personally thought this book was boring. She wrote with good descriptive words, but nothing really happened. Even though there was a lot of character development in Lily, she never did anything more than free Rosaleen. I was hoping something more would happen, something that would make Lily do something drastic.

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