Setting: When it rains it pours…

Have you ever been out on a sunny day with not a cloud in sight or even a slight percentage of rain on your weather app? Then next thing you know a few clouds roll in a there’s a slight drizzle, but before you know it your driving in a torrential downpour. Well, believe it or not or emotions can act the same way. One minute you’re trapped around your own walls you’ve built around your emotions, the most sensitive parts of your being, determined not to let anyone in and see your most authentic emotions that can leave you vulnerable. Next thing you know you can’t seem to pick up the bricks to rebuild that wall and everything that was anxiously awaiting to be released comes tumbling out. 

In Sue Monk Kidds’ novel, The Secret Life of Bees, the setting is directly connected to the narrators’ inner emotions. Selective description of nature serve as Kidds’ primary tool in depicting the narrator’s flood of emotions as they relate to her surrounding setting when she breaks down her own walls to discuss a topic she’d never fully known how to face. Readers are thoughtlessly immersed into the story of the characters as they begin to feel an emotional connection that relates to their own lives despite it being from a fiction novel.

WARNING: NOVEL SPOILERS BELOW ! ! !

Fourteen year old, Lily Owens, found herself overwhelmed with the memory of her late mother and has had to carry it around with her for most of her life.  On the night she finally decides to let someone in, she sits down with her newest friend, August Boatwright, who works at a twenty-eight acre bee farm she inherited along with her sisters May and June. August babysat Lily’s mother, Deborah Fontanel Owens, as she was growing up and had the answers to most questions Lily wondered about her mother. The author uses selective detail in illustrating Lily’s surrounding environment to describe her distraught feelings.

“The sky was split by a zigzagged path of lightning…”(Kidd 252). Kidds’ choice to describe the sky as “split” and “zigzagged”  gives readers insight to Lily’s disturbed mind as she contemplates whether or not her birth was an unwanted misfortune for her mother.

“[Lily] My mother had been looking for love, and instead she’d found T. Ray and the farm, and then me, and I had not been enough for her”(Kidd 252).

“[August] Depressed people do things they wouldn’t ordinarily do.

[Lily] Like what abandon their children? I couldn’t stop. The rain spattered my sandals, dripped between my toes”(Kidd 253).

In the author’s description of the rain water getting in small crevices, like between her toes, Lily’s inner mind battle is alluded to. Whether she likes it or not, all the possible answers to the questions she’s never know the answer to are seeping through to the innermost parts of her mind and heart. Internally Lily has always had this struggle but has found ways to keep it hidden from the surface, but after she opened up the floodgates the thoughts she always had inside poured out.

On multiple occasions, I’ve found myself building this invisible walls and bottling things up from those closest to me. I’ll never forget my father comparing emotions to soda in a bottle, he explained to me how you can only shake a bottle of soda for so long before it explodes, and after a while the same will happen to a person with their thoughts and emotions they hold in and mask as being nothing for a long time. We are all trying to survive in this crazy world and no one is perfect, So take the time to let yourself truly feel what your going through and confide in those closest to you.

Because hey, a little rain never hurt anyone, but hurricanes can have disastrous outcomes.

Citations

• Kidd, Sue Monk. The Secret Life of Bees. Penguin Books, 2013.