The Secret Life of Bees

Lily, the narrator and protagonist of the novel, tells the story of the summer of 1964 in from an unspecified time in the present, but much of the narration is told through the lens of Lily as a 14-year-old. Lily is telling her own coming-of-age story, also known as a bildungsroman—a story that deals with a character’s formative years or spiritual education. Lily experiences both over the course of the summer she is recalling. She begins her entrance into adulthood, and she experiences the divine feminine love of the women in the pink house and Mary—the mother to all. Lily is also on a hero’s journey, a convention in mythology in which the hero sets out on an adventure, faces a crisis, and returns home transformed. She is on a quest for something specific (her mother), there is someone standing in her way (T. Ray) and she ends her journey with knowledge of her mother, yes, but more importantly of herself, which is what she was looking for all along. Lily’s entire life has been shaped around her being “motherless” and the crippling knowledge that she is responsible for that. Lily’s only memory of her mother is from the day that she killed her.