Lily Owens Transformation

The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd is a coming-of-age story about a fourteen- year-old white girl initially living with an abusive father, a peach farmer. The novel takes place in South Carolina in 1964 during a period of social change in the racist, sexist and segregated deep South. Despite the abolishment of slavery in 1865, subsequent Jim Crow laws ensured that blacks lived as second-class citizens. At the start of the Civil Rights Movement and the Women’s Rights Movement in the 1960s, the subservience of non-whites and women remained conceptually unchallenged in South Carolina. As in the novel’s story of Our Lady of Chains, Lily Owens, the protagonist, resolves to break free not only from her past, but also from the toxic social
With two steps forward and one back, she builds self-confidence and develops principles as she stumbles along her way. Lily’s personal growth accelerates with the lessons she learns living with the Boatwright sisters, and absorbing the message behind Our Lady of Chains. Black Mary is a statue which is found after a harsh storm, lodged in a river and subsequently is taken home and worshipped by a community of slaves. In the Our Lady of Chains story, while a slave owner repeatedly chains up the statue in locations remote from the slaves, it miraculously and repeatedly escapes. The first time Lily meets the Black Mary, now in the home of Boatwright sisters, she describes the statue saying, “her face [was] a map of all the storms and journeys she’d been through” (70). Lily observes that Black Mary’s journey parallels Lily’s life, as Lily has also been through her own metaphorical storm. To escape her storm and ultimately find herself, Lily is required to travel to Tiburon, South Carolina. During her initial Sunday with the Boatwrights, Lily first hears the story of Our Lady of Chains. August tells the group, “They called her Our Lady of Chains because she broke them” (110). This story within-a- story foreshadows Lily’s growth to become a “chain breaker.” Lily’s metaphorical chains include both the mental baggage from her past that Lily must overcome, as well as the conformity
Early in the novel, Lily states, “Lying on the cot in the honey house, though, all I could think was August is so intelligent, so cultured, and I was surprised by this. That’s what let me know I had some prejudice buried inside me”. And “I thought [colored women] could be smart, but not as smart as me, me being white” (78). By these comments, Lily shows racial bias by associating intelligence and sophistication, with skin color. However, by the end of the novel Lily becomes color blind. “There was no difference between my piss and June’s. That’s what I thought when I looked at the dark circle on the ground. Piss was piss” (88). Through her relationships with August and Zach, Lily learns that skin color is neither an indicator of intelligence, nor of worth. Lily says, “It would have been better if God had deleted skin color altogether” (155). Lastly, Lily tells how she and her friend sit with Zach at school, despite being called “nigger lover” for doing so. Lily shows that she is developing the self-confidence to stand up to discrimination by repudiating the values of her