Before meeting the Boatwrights, Lily, who is white, assumes all black women are uneducated laborers or maids like Rosaleen. At the same time, the novel challenges pernicious racial stereotypes. In one scene, a trio of white men harasses Lily's mother-figure Rosaleen Daise, who is black. Set in South Carolina during the civil rights movement, The Secret Life of Bees presents examples of overt racism. THE NOVEL TACKLES RACE RELATIONS IN THE 1960S. Ray, Lily finds solace with the beekeeping Boatwright sisters, and confronts the terrible truth about her mother's death. In this case, Kidd's novel follows the journey of its narrator, a 14-year-old girl named Lily Melissa Owens. It's also known as a coming-of-age story. THE SECRET LIFE OF BEES IS A BILDUNGSROMAN.Ī bildungsroman is a novel that charts the moral or psychological growth of its protagonist.
THE SECRET LIFE OF BEES FULL MOVIE FULL
But few know the full truth behind this inspirational novel.
THE SECRET LIFE OF BEES FULL MOVIE MOVIE
("She would brush it into such a tower of beauty, people all over heaven would drop their harps just to admire it.") The movie doesn't make a big declamatory deal of this, but after a few days with the Boatwrights, Lily looks magically presentable, pretty because for once she's been cared for.A tale of love and loss, sisterhood and trauma, Sue Monk Kidd's 2002 novel The Secret Life of Bees has won the hearts of millions of readers around the world. In the book Lily daydreams of meeting her mother Deborah in heaven and after 10,000 years telling Lily she was not to blame for her death, Deborah would spend the next 10,000 fixing the girl's ratty hair. The film is full of sweet, subtle touches. With her high forehead, Afro coiffure and commanding hauteur, she is a preview of militant black women like Kathleen Cleaver and Angela Davis and the least maternal of the Boatwright brood. June (Alicia Keys), a teacher, is the no-nonsense one. Her emotions are deep and constantly near the surface she is given to weeping and keening when she sees the pain of others. May (Brit actress Sophie Okonedo) has long been in mourning for her dead twin sister April. Lily wants to die too and when she runs away and discovers the Caribbean-pink house of the three Boatwright sisters, it's as if she's died and gone to heaven.Īugust ( Queen Latifah), who runs the bee farm, is the matriarch of the clan, beaming wisdom and common sense to a child voracious for any human touch. Two of them die violently, two more are attacked by racist whites. No question, she is bad luck for the people she loves. Ray is a sullen beast, punishing the girl by making her kneel on grits (coarse-ground corn meal, to those of you those of me who are ignorant of Southern cuisine). Lily is dreamy, wistful, self-hating and suicidal T. Ray (Paul Bettany), who runs a peach farm. "That's all I know about myself." For the past 10 years, she has been raised by been the prisoner of her father T. "I killed my mother when I was four years old," Lily says at the beginning of the film. I hope so, because adapter-director Gina Prince-Bythewood has made an honorable movie, wonderfully attentive to the skills of its excellent cast, that turned this devout cynic into a believer. Can a time-capsule movie like this one have any resonance today? Can it find an audience to nurture in the old, noble, now-discredited Hollywood traditions? Today, the dominant tone is irreverence, sarcasm, facetiousness. But that was back when most big films tended to serious sentiment. The obvious reference point is To Kill a Mockingbird, whose girl narrator, Scout Finch, is 6 to Lily's 14, and whose fictional setting is Maycomb, Ala., instead of Bees' Tiburon, S.C. (You've heard of Huckleberry Finn? Gone With the Wind?) The novel is set in rural South Carolina in 1964, which is just about the time it would have automatically been turned into an Oscar-nominated movie. So Bees is another entry in the long tradition of books and movies about whites being nurtured and schooled by the example of the black underling. "I feel they are like hidden royalty dwelling among us." Why did Kidd, a white woman, choose these heroines? "I grew up surrounded by black women," she told one interviewer. (It wasn't, though it did make Good Morning America's reading list.) The 2002 novel is a coming-of-age story about a white girl, Lily Owens ( Dakota Fanning), who flees her abusive father and, in the company of her black nanny Rosaleen, finds refuge and surrogate motherhood with three Afro-angelic sisters who run a bee farm. Follow Monk Kidd's The Secret Life of Bees might have been written with the calculation of getting chosen for Oprah's Book Club.