Narrative Analysis
Sue Monk Kidd's novel The Secret Life of Bees and Angela Carter's "The Company of Bees" both feature adolescent female protagonists who escape from a patriarchal world of poverty, abuse and oppression, although the young women end up in very different places. In addition, the stories contain many magical, fantastic and surrealistic elements such as werewolves, witches, magical forests or the three Boatwright sisters acting as shamans or wise women in a matriarchal religion. Carter's short story is a take-off of the Brothers Grimm Little Red Riding Hood tale, even though none of the characters actually have names, while Kidd's novel is set in South Carolina in 1964, at the dawn of the feminist, civil rights and antiwar movements that shaped the entire decade. Indeed, it is a more feminist and matriarchal story than the revised version of Little Red Riding Hood, given that male characters are far less important than Lily Owens and the goddess-like Boatwright sisters, who end up living in a racially-mixed community rub by and for women. This was the 1960s dream of small-scale, human-sized communities, while the Little Red Riding Hood Character ends up literally living in on outlaw or outcast community of werewolves, devils and witches. These creatures do not exactly have egalitarian, democratic or matriarchal attitudes, however, since the story is set in Europe in the late medieval or early modern period, and the young woman ends up giving herself to the werewolf that ate her Bible-reading grandmother.
Both of these stories have strong elements of fantasy and surrealism, such as werewolves or the three black sisters named after months of the year, rather than simply being narratives of the real world as it actually exists. In "The Company of Wolves" neither the country nor village is identified, and not even the characters have names, only roles to play. Obviously the setting is sometime in the distant past, perhaps in the late medieval period, but clearly this is a very alien world and a culture far removed from those of the modern reader. Although the narrator is well acquainted with the local forest, the people of the village and the local myths, superstitions and folklore, at no time is this person given and name, age or gender, but he or she does seem to know the thoughts of Little Red Riding Hood and of the werewolf who seduces her. On the other hand, the setting of The Secret Life of Bees is more familiar -- South Carolina in the summer of 1964 -- and is narrated by Lily Owens. Radio and newspaper reports regularly discuss the major events of the day such as demonstrations, the murder of three young civil rights workers in Mississippi and the Gulf of Tonkin incident, although the tough and practical August Boatwright tunes much of this out because "you cannot fix the whole world" (Kidd 166). Like the wolves, the sisters also live in the woods where they produce honey with magical powers and follow a kind of matriarchal religion. August calls it "the ambrosia of the gods and the shampoo of the goddesses," and Lily finds that she has a natural talent as a beekeeper in this magical garden (Kidd 84). Perhaps they represents shamans, wise women or even goddesses from traditional African religions, and needless to say their adoption of a semi-orphaned white girl would have been highly unusual in the South of that era -- probably even impossible in real life. So would the love affair between the young black student named Zachary Taylor (after a white slave owning president) and a young white girl. In many respects, the home of the three sisters is as removed from any real time and place as the haunted forest of Little Red Riding Hood. Of course the latter finds romance in the arms of a handsome young hunter who also happens to be a werewolf, unlike the original take from the Brothers Grimm in which the woodsman kills the monster after it has eaten grandma and is about to eat the girl.
On one level, these stories are adventure and coming-of-age tales in which young girls who are just entering puberty escape from a patriarchal and authoritarian household and run away into the forest. Perhaps they were originally looking for love or freedom, or simply to get away for a short time, but very soon they find that great...
Members of these groups interact with members of the Giro groups. The images that link these "spirit groups" (Shapiro, p. 832) are "maintained and codified through the agency of the symbols of blood, oil, honey and water." The rituals go well beyond "what Catholicism teaches" and indeed through these cultural activities the participants are rejecting Catholicism (which Lily certainly was doing in Kidd's novel) and saying that slaves have
Twice she disappeared in the fogged billows, then gradually reemerged like a dream rising up from the bottom of the night" (Kidd, p. 67). Bees creating "wreaths around her head" is adding another image to the element of honey and bees. In the ancient Greco-Roman world people wore wreaths as an indication of their rank in society, or their status, or their occupation. Apollo wore a wreath of laurel
Secret Life of Bees Taking place in the vicious American South in 1964, the era of the Civil Rights Act and increasing racial resentment, Sue Monk Kidd's The Secret Life of Bees is an plausible story not just about bees, but of the coming-of-age story, of the gift of love to transform our lives, and of the often misunderstood desire for comparable women and human rights. Even though this novel is
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