Popular fiction and its effects on society: The Secret Life of Bees

Secret Life of Bees

Taking place in the vicious American South in 1964, the era of the Civil Rights Act and increasing racial resentment, Sue Monk Kidd's The Secret Life of Bees is an plausible story not just about bees, but of the coming-of-age story, of the gift of love to transform our lives, and of the often misunderstood desire for comparable women and human rights. Even though this novel is not one of a reading level that is considered high, Kidd exhibits so many concealed significances, ones that involve the reader to push underneath the surface. Speaking to the wounds of losses, betrayal, and the lack of love, Kidd displays the power of women joining together to deal with those injuries, to evaluate each other emotions and themselves, and to produce a lot of people of real home and family. With that said, all of these attributes bear an impact in popular culture.

The Secret Life of Bees is a story that is invented but it detained my mind as if it were realism. The whole thing from the way the story line flowed to the indications of the Civil Rights Movement going on in 1960's make the story a little practical ring to it. Even though Kidd does not believe that any of the characters in the book are described purposely from her own life, the author did extract from facts and memoirs of her teenage years for the activities and behaviors of quite a few of the characters. Furthermore, at the start of all the chapters and from at least one of the characters in the novel itself, we are given the technical proofs regarding bees and an existence in a bee hive. This constructs the narrative itself is not only more thought-provoking, but it gives it distinctiveness different from any other. Kidd has made the point that she pulled inspiration from the honeybees that lived in a wall of her home which was in Georgia as she was growing up, delivering a foundation for her book. She recalls the days of the humming clatter of the bees and the honey that leaked out of the walls of the rooms. Kidd mentioned that she envisioned a teenage girl that was lying in bed with bees filtering through the splits in the wall and the reflections that may have enclosed her life.

All the way through the story there is a significant theme of death granting approach to life. In the very start of the novel, Lily says "People, who think dying is the worst thing, don't know a thing about living" ((Kidd, 2008)). At this place, we see how Lily's life has been intensely touched by her mother's death. This declaration proposes that living with someone else's death has a much more painful effect than dying. In this situation, Deborah's demise has given way to Lily's miserable life. Nevertheless, as the novel proceeds, it's effortlessly acknowledged that death also can be a promising influence in someone life. After the passing away of May, August expresses to Lily, "Placing the dark cloths on the hives is our doing. I do it to remind us that life pushes into death, and then death has a way of turning back around and giving back into death" (Kidd, 2008). Death as giving shape to life is mentioned twice in this book as a force that is reassuring. The first example is how the destruction of May propels June to accept the marriage proposal from Neil, thus creating their new life with each other. The second time is when Lily completely reunites with the death of her mother and is finally liberated to officially launch her personal life.

The Secret Life of Bees reveals the craziness of racism by not merely representing black and white individuals with dignity and humankind but by also representing how Lily fights with -- and in the end overpowers -- her individual bigotry. Kidd drives further than typecasts to represent whites and blacks with the multilayered characters that we find in our reality. Lily is not a racially prejudiced in the like the groups of men that trouble Rosaleen are racist, but she does express some prejudice and stereotypes at the beginning of the book. She supposes that all African-Americans are like Rosaleen, an innocent blue-collar worker -turned-housekeeper. Lily envisions that all black people are equally harsh and unschooled. But when Lily come across unusual, educated, considerate August Boatwright, she suddenly changes her suppositions and confront her narrow-mindedness concerning race. At the start, Lily feels stunned that a black person has the potential to be smart, thoughtful, and unique as August. Knowing and opposing her surprise permits Lily to know the truth about the threat and senselessness of racism. Like Lily, June has to also learn to suppress cultural stereotypes. As persons, individuals can demonstrate a complicated array of personality traits and features, in spite of skin color or background.

Later, when she starts to cultivate intense emotional state for Zach, Lily once more encounters her own subtle discrimination. Zach is a lovely, handsome, black young man. As a child in Sylvan, Lily understood discrimination from other schoolchildren: it was shown to her that black boys could not conceivably be attractive, because their facial features were so much different from those of white boys. As soon as she realizes that this is not the situation with Zach, she starts feeling hypocritical, as if she has learned something that the bad-mannered kids at her old school had not seen. Nonetheless she also apprehends that her way of thinking had been prejudiced and wrong. As if to fight these predispositions, Lily unwisely disregards the social difficulties that her affection for Zach could produce, even as Zach understands that they possibly may never be able to have a link in the racist South of that time. For diverse motives, both Lily and Zach see that racism, while unreasonable, has real adverse consequences. On the other hand, the two will work together to meet the unreasonableness of racism due to state of mind and actions.