The Secret Life Of Bees Effect Of Love

Grace Gaeke
Mrs. Allison Smith
English 9 Honors
10 February 2023
The Effect of Love In Sue Monk Kidd’s novel, The Secret Life of Bees, the main character, Lily, represents a lack of love. From early on in her life, her father shows disrespect to her, and upon facing the racial injustice of the 1960s she flees to somewhere she believed her mother once lived to find the love she lacks. We should pursue love.
Importantly, love prevails over anger and hatred. One example of this is when after Mary day, August goes into the honey house and shows Lily a box of her mother’s old things, including a photograph of Deborah and Lily when Lily was tiny: “Me and my mother. I didn’t care about anything on this earth except the way her face

To illustrate, when the daughters of Mary gather around in a circle and they all go around to touch Black Mary’s heart, Lily tries to touch it as well but gets stopped: “I walked toward black Mary with my hand lifted. But just as I was about to reach her, June stopped playing. She stopped right in the middle of the song, and I was left in silence with my hand stretched out. ” (Kidd 111) As we later find out in the novel, June resented Lily’s mother, Deborah, because she was white. Furthermore, June wasn’t the warmest towards Lily in the novel which caused Lily to believe that she didn’t belong at the boatwright sister's house. Another key detail is that the statute of the black mary represented the idea of forgiveness and choosing love. Similarly, at the end of the novel, June and Lily come to like each other by moving past their differences and accepting the fate of the future. Specifically, when Lily is bringing up her birthday to T. Ray and asks for a charm bracelet, he in response negates her: “It caused a kind of sorrow to rise in me that felt fresh and tender and had nothing, really to do with the bracelet. I think now it was sorrow for the sound of his fork scraping the plate, the way it swelled in the distance between us, how I was not even in the room.” (Kidd 22) T. Ray truly loved Deborah and when she left him and was later killed, it left him heartbroken. Although not knowing this till the end of the

To demonstrate, when Lily, Rosaleen, August, and June are preparing for Mary Day, Neil walks in and wants to talk to June privately: “ ‘ Hell, ’ he said, ‘ I came over here planning on ask you, for the hundredth time, to marry me. ’ … ‘ All right, ’ she said. ‘ Let’s get married. ’ “(Kidd 222) June fear for her previous marriage about when she was left at the altar prompted her to turn down Neil numerous times. Although, when May dies, her last wish is for them to live in the present and not let the weight of the world consume them as it did her. The combination of May’s last wish and Neil continuously showing affection to June prompted her to finally accept Neil’s proposal. Another great example of this is when Lily comes to August to seek answers to her many questions about her mother. Lily starts to cry to August about killing Deborah: “August slid up to the edge of the chair and opened her arms, the way she’d opened them to June that day they’d found May’s suicide letter. I leaned into them, felt them close around me. One thing is beautiful beyond my words to say it: August holding you.” (Kidd 238) August’s love, compassion, and sympathy for Lily don’t directly end Lily’s suffering but they offer her comfort in her time of pain. Based on the little amount of time that Lily spent with Deborah, she believed that her mother was the perfect person that solely loved and cared for Lily. Whereas, August, being older than Lily and wiser