Novel 2009

“The importance of mothers in The Secret Life of Bees”


“The Secret Life of Bees” is a novel written by the American author Sue Monk Kidd, published in 2002. It is a novel about the important of having a mother, about becoming a woman and race relation.

The story is set in South-Carolina, the summer of 1964. The main character in “The Secret Life of Bees” is a girl named Lily. She’s turning 14 years old when the story begins, and she takes us on an incredible journey on her way of becoming a woman, motherless as she is. She lives on a peach farm with her dad, T-Ray, who is quite neglectful and abusive, and they’re dog Snout. Lily’s mum, Deborah, is dead. She died when Lily was four years old, as she and Lily’s father had an argument. Lily’s always put this on her cape, because she thinks she’s responsible for her mother’s death, and every night, before going to bed, for the next four or five decades, Lily has decided that she’s going to apologize to her mother and tell her about the horrible life with T-Ray. Lilly has vague memory of her mother and would like to do anything in her power to know more about her real mother. Lily has a nanny/housekeeper named Rosaleen Daise, she has been a part of the family, and cared for Lily, the last ten years.
Rosaleen is a black woman, but she is wise as well. When Lily is haunted by bees every night, Rosaleen explains her that “Bees swarm before death” and Lily accepts this. After some time Rosaleen is put in jail, because she defends herself during an assault, Lilly’s bees disappear, as well as Lily has an argument with her father, she decides to run away and be as free as her own bees, as well as she is going to free Rosaleen from jail.



“Too many girls grow up motherless, but they come out awesome creatures, no matter how tough they’re upbringing is”! I dear to state this, and I dear to state this because I know that it’s a fact, and Lily in “The Secret Life of Bees” is just another proof for my statement.

A couple of years ago, I met a girl, who grew up without a mother because she was killed in their home country Madagascar. This girl, her sister and her father moved from warm Madagascar to cold Norway in an attempt of starting a new life. She told me that they’d never had any specific problems with the loss of their mother; until they came in the puberty, and couldn’t ask their father for advice anymore. Due to the fact that their father was in great grief over the loss of their mother, he lost contact with his daughters at one point. To compensate for the “loss” of their father and to memorize her mum, the girls started singing and humming their mother’s favourite songs. Now a day they are two of the strongest girls I know, and they have won tons of singing contests the previous years.

This story tells me, and everyone around me, that no matter what outcome you have, you have a possibility to improve you’re situation, and stand on your own two feet.

In “The Secret Life of Bees” Lily makes her own romantic illusions on how her mother was, on having a happy home and on the racism around her in the 1960’s.
She believes that her mother is almost as pure as Virgin Mary, and that if her mother was still alive, she would be respected in the community, because then she’d have two parents who loved her, and she’d have a mother that would go shopping or arrange girls only sleep-over at their house, all the time. Lily believes that they could have a happy home if her mother was still alive. I asked the girl I met a couple of years ago, if she felt the way that Lily does in the book, and she said –“Yes, I do recognise myself in Lily’s illusions and dreams, because sometimes I feel responsible for my mother’s death, even though it wasn’t my fault that I was ill with the flue, and she had to pick up some medicine in the city.”

Lily grew up in the South, and it’s important to remember that she grew up during a time when black people where segregated from other people by different laws and attitudes. She is raised to believe that African Americans are neither beautiful nor intelligent by the society, and that they are second-class, even though this doesn’t stop Lily from reconciling her love for Rosaleen. When Lily and Rosaleen escape, they get in touch with a group of women, called the Boatright sisters, and it is this meeting that changes Lily’s view on both peoples colour of skin and on which people that can be called your mother. Lily realizes that no matter what skin colour you have, whether you’re black or white, huge or thin, you can learn from each other and love each other tremendously. After this meeting she realizes that she’s not lost because her biological mother can’t follow her step-by-step throughout her life, because she is a strong girl, developing in to a woman, and she knows she can make it when she feels the belief Rosaleen and the Boatright sisters passes her.

I love the book, the theme and the fact that the importance of mothers is filled in an awesome way. It shows that no matter what outcome you have, you can still grow in to a better and stronger person.