Lily's Eyes
Having a story, such as Sue Monk Kidd’s The Secret Life of Bees, rift in racial drama portrayed from the eyes of an adolescent white girl is a brilliant tactic. First person narration is a very personalized writing style in and of itself; it doesn’t merely open the reader to a different point of view but thrusts them into the story. The reader becomes part of the story, experiencing the author’s narrative as close to first hand as they can without having been physically there. The juxtaposition between the innocents of childhood and the harsh reality of adult life, especially in such a traumatic time as post civil rights South, brings levels of confusion and truths to the reader that could be overlooked any other way.
Utilizing a child’s persona to question social norms and accepted facts and attitudes of a time is far from an original idea, seen in multiple American novels such as To Kill A Mockingbird or, for a brief period, Celie from The Color Purple. Even though it isn’t unusual it is no less intense or shaking. Adults have more control in life; their choices and actions dictate their path. Life just happens to children. There’s an inherent helplessness and naiveté that colors their perception and views. It makes them ideal for questioning the ways life works and for feeling the hardships of life.
By using Lily as a window into her novel, Kidd drives home the atrocity of racism and how convoluted the logic that governs society is. As we see the savage beating of Rosaleen at the beginning of the novel the reader is further taken aback as they realize that a young child is viewing this “By then Rosaleen lay sprawled on the ground, pinned, twisting her fingers around clumps of grass. Blood ran from a cut her eye. It curved under her chin the way tears do,” (pg. 33). It’s such a horrifying scene, and then the reader realizes at the end, with an innocent observation “the way tears do” that this happened in front of a little girl. It brings further horror to a horrifying experience and has questions of how this could happen and why it was allowed to roar through the reader.
When Lily recounts her interactions with boys at her old home and the cruel treatment she suffered at their hands as they forced live fish around her neck, and her observation afterwards, “I think that was the worst part. I could’ve helped them, but I didn’t,” (pg. 229). It’s scenes like these, where childhood cruelty can be used to clarify adult cruelty, where everything is so black and white, that make an adult reader look into themselves and remember times and people that they too could have aided but didn’t. People could have saved Rosaleen from that mob or Lily from her father, but they didn’t. People could stand and fight for people, black or white, but they don’t for their own fears or cruelty prevent them. By looking at these issues through a youth it becomes amazingly clear, and less convoluted in the trappings of adulthood and the right path is laid clear and obvious.
Kidd, Sue Monk. The Secret Life of Bees. New York. Penguin Books, 2002.
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