** spoiler alert ** An interesting novel which becomes even more interesting when approaching the vast number of theological inherent within. The following analysis takes a look at the importance of forgiving others in order to forgive yourself and therefore develop a better understanding of who you are.

Lily Owens, an adolescent girl growing up in South Carolina during the 1960s, learns an important lesson about forgiveness in Sue Monk Kidd’s Novel The Secret Life of Bees. In order to learn this lesson of forgiveness, Lily had to leave both her home on the peach farm in Sylvan, South Carolina and her abusive father T. Ray and flee to Tiburon, South Carolina where she ultimately lives with the Boatwright sisters. Rosaleen, her nanny, is her lone companion for this journey. Throughout her life she has lived with many hardships including an emotionally absent father, a feeling of guilt over her role in the accidental death of her mother, a diminished self-wroth due to her poor relationships at school, and the possibility that her mother had abandoned her. These issues are further exacerbated when she breaks Rosaleen out of jail and begins a stream of lies in order to try and re-establish herself in a new environment, protect herself from her past, and discover the truth about her mother. The accumulation of these events forces her to question whether she can offer forgiveness to anyone. She thinks to herself, “People, in general, would rather die than forgive. It’s that hard. If God said in plain language, ‘I’m giving you a choice, forgive or die,’ a lot of people would go ahead and order their coffin.” (277) Ultimately, it is with the help of Rosaleen, the Boatwright sisters, the Daughters of Mary, and the Black Madonna that she is able to come to forgive others and therefore herself.
Lily has numerous issues with self-esteem that arise from her family situation and are made manifest by her perceptions of her interactions with classmates. Her mother died when she was four and consequently she was raised predominately by her father and Rosaleen, neither of whom offered much help with her hair nor her sense of fashion. In fact, she describes the outfits she made for herself in home economics class as “outfits only the Pentecostal girls wore.” (8) This, along with her fear of “clumps of whispering girls who got quiet” when she passed, made her feel that “half the time [she] was impersonating a girl instead of really being one.” (9) This low self-esteem did not simply stem from not having the help of a mother but also from the way her father treated her. Punishments ranged from verbal abuse for instance saying, “You act no better than a slut” to physical abuse when he made her kneel on “a mound of grits the size of an anthill” a punishment she had experienced since she was six. (24) Furthermore, T. Ray dashed her aspirations to attend college because he believed that college was “a waste of money for girls.” (15) Finally, her father serves as a horrible example of forgiveness, a task he lacks the willingness to perform. Despite being alive in the biological sense, he has chosen death over forgiving his daughter, his wife, and himself.
Lily is also plagued by her relationship with her deceased mother who died when she was four as the result of an accidental shooting. The shooting occurred during an argument between her mother and T. Ray. During the altercation, her mother pulled a gun from the closet which was knocked to the floor and picked up and accidentally discharged by Lily, killing her mother. As a result of her role in the shooting, Lily feels an immense amount of guilt which further diminishes her self-worth. “This is what I know about myself. She was all I wanted. And I took her away.” (8) This accident is who she views herself to be. The void she created was apparent to her at the strangest times “Like training bras…the magnitude of driving me to junior cheerleader tryouts…But you know when I missed her the most? The day I was twelve and woke with the rose-petal stain on my panties. I was so proud of that flower and didn’t have a soul to show it to except Rosaleen.” (13) And the only way she could fill even a portion of the void was to take out the three items she had from her mother, a photo, a pair of white gloves, and a picture of the Black Madonna. Her relationship with her mother becomes even more strained with the realization that her mother may have abandoned her. During an argument with T. Ray, he says to her “The truth is, your sorry mother ran off and left you. The day she died, she’d come back to get her things, that’s all. You can hate me all you want, but she’s the one who left you.” (39) Lily refuses to believe her father, but has little to no proof and so she sets off with Rosaleen whom she breaks out of jail and heads to Tiburon, South Carolina in hopes of discovering the truth. From this point onward, she and Rosaleen are fugitives of the law.
Lily and Rosaleen hitch a ride to Tiburon where Lily’s lies begin. They stop at a convenience store where she lies to the clerk and steals a can of snuff for Rosaleen while he is not looking. She also learns from the clerk that her mother’s Black Madonna picture is found on the honey produced by the Boatwright sisters on the outskirts of town. She and Rosaleen arrive at their house and Lily creates an elaborate story about their past and their current trip to Virginia. Unbeknownst to her, August Boatwright, the eldest of the three sisters, knows that her story is false since she was the nanny for Lily’s mother Deborah in Virginia when she was a child. Rather than sharing her knowledge with Lily, she allows Lily the opportunity to become adjusted and helps to provide her with the necessary tools to meet the challenge ahead.
During the months that follow her arrival, Lily has an opportunity to learn about herself through interactions with the Boatwright sisters, the Daughters of Mary, and the Black Madonna. From the youngest of the three sisters, May, Lily learns valuable lessons on how to deal with pain and grief by writing the problem on a piece of paper and placing it in May’s version of a “wailing wall.” May also teaches them a valuable lesson about living in her suicide note explaining “it’s your time to live. Don’t mess it up.” (210) This is important in helping to restructure Lily’s worldview. From June, Lily learns how to accept others and what it means to be accepted. In the beginning, June is cold, but after a while, she accepts Lily forming an important bond for Lily because it provides her with a feeling of acceptance that she had lacked up until this point. Her feeling of acceptance is amplified by the Daughters of Mary. This acceptance demonstrated to Lily that “They didn’t even think of [her] being different.” (209) This acceptance was something she had craved in her life to this point and she would turn to them at the most important time, when she needed their help to free herself from T. Ray.
Ultimately, it is August and the power of the Black Madonna that facilitate Lily’s forgiveness of herself and her family. After months spent with August, she decides that she needs to admit the truth and stop living in a dream land. As a result, August confirms that her mother indeed left her, but had returned for Lily when she was shot. The news is not taken well, as the image she had created of her mother was destroyed. Despite August’s attempts to calm Lily by reminding her of her mother’s humanity and our capacity to make mistakes, she is unsuccessful in the moment and concludes by telling Lily, “There is nothing perfect…there is only life.” (256) These words, along with the rituals of the second day of Mary Day, trigger relief for Lily. As part of the ritual, they bathe the Black Madonna in honey as a form of preservation. For Lily, this facilitated contentment “for the first time since [she’d] learned about her mother.” (260) In the Black Madonna, she, like the Daughters of Mary and the slaves before them, found relief . “It seemed to them she knew everything they suffered.” (109) It was this knowledge that meant so much to Lily whether it manifest during the rituals of evening prayer, touching the heart of Mary, the reception of the body of Mary, or the visual image of the Black Madonna in chains. The Black Madonna holds a great amount of power for Lily. August describes this power saying “You have to find a mother inside of yourself. We all do…You don’t have to put your hand on Mary’s heart to get strength and consolation and rescue…You can place it right here on your own heart.” (288) In fact, the “Black Madonna goes into the holes life has gouged out of us.” (302) Because Lily is able to fill these voids in her life with the Black Madonna, she is able to develop an acceptance of her life. She comes to forgive her mother because she realizes that no one is perfect. “You just have to close your eyes and breathe out and let the puzzle of the human heart be what it is.” (285) Since she can not change what her mother did, she must accept it and have faith that she did what she thought was best. She also comes to forgive T. Ray after determining that he did love her mother and that his anger for life existed because he chose not to forgive. Finally, Lily chooses to live her life and forgive herself. Choosing to follow August’s mantra, she realizes that “Regrets don’t help anything.” (280) It is certainly easier to choose death, but the strength she gains from those around her in Tiburon allow her to choose to live and forgive herself and others.