Sue Monk Kidd's The Secret Life Of Bees

801 Words4 Pages
“New beekeepers are told that the way to find the elusive queen is by first locating her circle of attendants” (Longgood). Lily’s mother was thought to be the queen bee throughout the novel The Secret Life of Bees, and the Boatwrights to be her “circle of attendants”. Another perspective, Sue Monk Kidd could be seen as the “queen” and her created characters seen as the “attendants”. Lily, Melissa, and May have been found to have the most significance to the plot. Sue Monk Kidd carefully considered the names which she placed throughout the novel to make it so they were always relevant to the current situation, all of the names significant in their own way. Lily, meaning innocence and standing for beauty; May who was based off of Maya, the Roman Earth goddess for allusion; and Melissa which stood for bees or honey. Sue Monk Kidd bases her novel around Lily, the main character of the book, which is where the significance of names begins. The name “Lily” is a symbol of innocence and beauty. The character Lily is a teenager who, though she was not the most innocent of teenagers out there, was innocent at heart. She was…show more content…
April is never depicted as alive in The Secret Life of Bees, she always lived through May. “May” stood for Maya the Roman goddess, and Maya stood for allusion. May is known as an allusion for April who stood for the world, and when she died May took the weight of April’s world on her shoulders, which made her cry often whenever someone else got hurt. “The only parts not submerged were her hands. They floated, her palms little ragged cups bobbing on the surface, the water weaving in and out of her fingers” (Kidd 192-193). Maya was the Roman Earth goddess, when May killed herself, she returned to nature, she lay in the river with a rock on her chest in the middle of the woods returning herself to what she had always
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