Top Ten Text 7

Kidd, Sue Monk. The Secret Life of Bees. New York: Penguin, 2003. Print.

This is a novel set during the early 1960s about a girl named Lily who just happens to accidently kill her mother, have an abusive father, and go to live with three independent black woman that own their own honey making business. This is a novel rife with symbolism, wonderful imagery, and set during a tumultuous time during America’s past. Many of the themes are still prevalent today such as independence, feminism, guilt, race relations, and the role of religion in people’s lives. Throughout the novel Lily must wrestle with her past, America’s expectations of race, and (shudder) puberty. It was a bestseller and had a major motion picture adaptation.

When I attempted to teach this novel, I wanted to give this a feminist slant to it. Which isn’t hard to do, but I just couldn’t quite teach it the way I had planned. Many of my female students seemed powerless in their lives, and I wanted this book to show them a way to become empowered at least start thinking about their own empowerment. Many of the students liked the novel, but I felt like they could have gotten more from it, but that could be just an age/time thing. My ideas flowed from an incident where a male student inappropriately touched a female student’s breasts. I sent the male student out, but this upset the female student; she felt she had gotten him in trouble. This angered me because the girl had obviously not done anything wrong. This novel coincided with that incident, I felt that Lily blamed herself for things beyond her control and would have to forgive herself so that she could one day grow strong and thrive. I’m going to give it another whirl next year, and hopefully the novel will make an impact.