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Novels Into Film: Adaptations & Interpretations

The Secret Life of Bees

by Mark Joy

The Novel

Author: Sue Monk Kidd (b. 1948)

First published: 2002

The Film

Year released: 2008

Director: Gina Prince-Bythewood (b. 1969)

Screenplay by: Gina Prince-Bythewood

Starring: Dakota Fanning, Jennifer Hudson, Queen Latifah, Alicia Keys, Sophie Okonedo

Context

Both the book and the film versions of The Secret Life of Bees are difficult to categorize or fit into a single genre. As the story of fourteen-year-old Lily coming to grips with her past, it is certainly a coming-of-age story. But it also delves deeply into the topic of spirituality, and there are clearly feminist themes throughout, as the major characters are empowered women who are forging their own lives. Also, set in the rural South in 1964, the story plays out against a backdrop of racial tension and the civil rights movement.

Prior to The Secret Life of Bees, author Sue Monk Kidd had written three memoirs dealing with her own spiritual development, in which she moved from a conventional white evangelical Protestant background into a nontraditional feminist spirituality. The last of these, The Dance of the Dissident Daughter: A Woman’s Journey from Christian Tradition to the Sacred Feminine, was published in 1996. The Secret Life of Bees was well received following its publication in 2002, staying on The New York Times Best Seller list for two years. In her second novel, The Mermaid’s Chair (2005), she again dealt with feminist issues and spirituality. That book was turned into a 2006 movie for the Lifetime television network. In The Invention of Wings (2014) Kidd again dealt with race issues, this time in the pre-Civil War South, as the novel is a fictionalized account of the life of Sarah Grimké, who along with her sister Angelina were Quakers from South Carolina who became prominent abolitionists.

The director of the film adaptation of The Secret Life of Bees, Gina Prince-Bythewood, is biracial, raised by adoptive white parents in California. As an adult, she learned that her white mother gave her up for adoption in part because her father was black and her mother’s family did not want to deal with a mixed-race child. She has commented that this background caused her to strongly identify with the feelings of abandonment that Lily deals with in Kidd’s story. Prince-Bythewood attended the UCLA film school, and was a writer and director for several television shows before directing her first film, Love and Basketball (2000), which dealt with an African American man and woman who both want to pursue careers in professional basketball but find their plans complicated when they fall in love with each other. Even before Kidd’s book was published, Prince-Bythewood had been sent a manuscript of The Secret Life of Bees to consider as a film project, but she laid it aside because of the press of other projects. She was later asked to become involved with the project, and was able to convince several well-known actors to be a part of the film.

Poster for the theatrical release of The Secret Life of Bees.

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Film Analysis

For the most part, the film follows the plot line and much of the dialogue of the book. A few scenes are shifted from the order in the novel, however. The book begins with Lily Owens talking about the bees that came to her room in the summer of 1954, “the summer everything changed.” The film begins with Lily (Dakota Fanning) having a flashback about the fight between her parents that ended with her mother being killed. Then Lily states in a voiceover, “I killed my mother when I was four years old. That’s what I knew about myself. She was all I ever wanted and I took her away.” That scene in the film comes several pages into the book, and that poignant line combines dialogue from two different points in the novel, a few pages apart.

Lily and her father, T. Ray Owens (Paul Bettany) live on a peach farm outside of Sylvan, South Carolina. T. Ray has an African American housekeeper, Rosaleen Daise (Jennifer Hudson). Rosaleen’s character and her complicated relationship with Lily is fleshed out much more fully in the book, whereas in the film, Rosaleen seems to fade away once she and Lily reach the Boatwrights’ home. After Rosaleen is beaten by some white men in a confrontation when she was going to register to vote, Lily breaks her out of the local hospital, where she is under police guard. Having not really thought about where they might go, Lily decides to head for Tiburon, South Carolina. In a secret treasure trove of a few things she has from her mother, Lily has a picture of a black Virgin Mary, and on the back “Tiburon, S.C.” is inscribed; so she wants to go there, thinking there may be some connection to her mother’s life. In Tiburon, they find the three Boatwright sisters: August (Queen Latifah), June (Alicia Keys) and May (Sophie Okonedo). They are beekeepers, and sellers of Black Madonna Honey—whose logo turns out to be the same as the image Lily carries from her mother.

In both the book and the movie, it seems that Lily and Rosaleen have found the Boatwrights’ home very easily; later in the book August Boatwright says, “I swear, it make me think you were meant to find us.” Lily and Rosaleen stay with the Boatwright sisters and Lily is raised there, in a loving household; it is revealed in time that the sisters did indeed know her mother. There is much in both the film and book about the culture of beekeeping, although it is brought out more fully in the novel. Surprisingly, however, the bees in Lily’s room at the very beginning of the novel get much thinner treatment in the film. They are used primarily in the film to illustrate the bad relations between Lily and her father, because he doesn’t believe Lily when she tells him they are there.

Much of the novel focuses on Lily’s quest to learn more about her mother. Her father, T. Ray, has told her that she accidentally killed her mother when she picked up a gun that her mother had dropped while he and her mother were fighting. T. Ray tells Lily that her mother had abandoned her, and at the time she died, she had only come back to get some of her things—not to take Lily away with her. Lily comes to believe that perhaps her father has lied to her about this—maybe her mother did come back to take her away. In the book, the reader is left also wondering whether the story about how her mother died is a lie, but in the film Lily knows and seems to accept from the beginning that this story is true. Lily’s mother, Deborah Fontanel Owens (Hilarie Burton) appears in a few flashbacks in the film, and in a framed picture that August gives to Lily, which has her mother holding the infant Lily and looking tenderly at her.

As with many film adaptations, much from the book has to be cut out due to time limitations. Some things that are spelled out more clearly and fully in novel are only symbolized by visual images in the film. May Boatwright, a troubled soul who feels the pain of others deeply, has a weeping wall where she goes when she is sad, and she writes notes and leaves them between the rocks. She had built the wall herself. At the end of the book, Lily says, “I am the keeper of the wall now,” but this is only hinted at in the film, with a scene of Lily walking along the wall and leaving her diary in a cleft in the rocks.

Perhaps the most significant difference between the novel and the film is the climactic scene near the very end. When T. Ray comes to the Boatwrights’ home to take Lily home, he is reluctantly convinced to leave her there. As he is pulling away in his truck, Lily runs out and asks him a question. In the book she asks, “Did I kill my mother?” T. Ray says that he could tell her what she wants to hear—that it was an accident, or her mother shot herself—but he tells her the truth: “It was you who did it, Lily. You didn’t mean it, but it was you.” But in the film, in one of the most poignant scenes, Lily asks T. Ray if her mother had come back for her, or just to get her things like she’d been told. T. Ray tells her, “She came back for you.” When Lily asks why he lied, T. Ray confesses, “Because she didn’t come back for me.”

Despite some significant variations, the film is generally true to the spirit of the novel, and preserves much of Kidd’s beautiful narration and dialogue. The strong female characters and the themes of love and spirituality also come through clearly in the film, as they do in the novel.

Significance

The film was moderately well received by the public and critics. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) gave the film its 2009 Image Awards for best picture and best director. The film also won People’s Choice awards for best drama and best independent film. The film did well at the box office, with gross domestic receipts totaling nearly $38 million, on a budget of about $11 million.

Some reviewers have critiqued both the book and the film for portraying a somewhat sanitized version of how African Americans lived in the rural South in the 1960s. The Boatwright sisters live in a beautiful home, and are quite wealthy refined. Shortly after meeting them, Lily expresses amazement to Rosaleen, saying, “They are so cultured. I never met Negro women like that before.” It is true that poorer African Americans hardly appear at all in the story. But prosperous African American entrepreneurs, especially if they filled some niche market as August Boatwright does with her high-quality honey, did exist in the South.

Several critics have said the strong heroines in the book are too perfect, and that the dialogue, especially from August Boatwright, comes across as homilies directed at the audience rather than as convincing conversation. Though there is some truth to this observation about the dialogue, the characters are not all portrayed as perfect—although August may come close to sainthood. Lily displays a ready talent for spontaneous lying. June is not too kind to her boyfriend, who wants to marry her, and is cold and suspicious toward Lily when she first comes to the Boatwrights’ home. May, perhaps the most loveable character, is a broken, tragic soul burdened with mental and emotional troubles. As for the portrayal of race relations in the South in the 1960s, there are realistic portrayals of prejudice and violence. When Rosaleen is beaten as she goes to register to vote, and when Zach is kidnapped by white men because Lily sat with him in the black seats in the theater, the scenes are graphic, dark, and disturbing.

Ultimately, while perhaps overly sentimental, and although things (for the most part) may work out a little too neatly in the end, the story is a remarkable statement about the power of love to overcome a disturbed and troubled past.

Bibliography

Cabrera, Marc. “Buzzing about Bees: Pacific Grove Native Turned Film Director Gina Prince-Bythewood Ushers New Project to the Big Screen.” Monterey Herald, 17 Oct. 2008, www.montereyherald.com/article/ZZ/20081017/NEWS/810179948. Accessed 24 July 2017.

Grobman, Lauri. “Teaching Cross-Racial Texts: Cultural Theft in The Secret Life of Bees.” College English, vol. 71, no. 1, Sep. 2008, pp. 9-26.

Kidd, Sue Monk. The Dance of the Dissident Daughter: A Woman’s Journey from Christian Tradition to the Sacred Feminine. HarperSanFrancisco, 1996.

Smith, Carissa Turner. “’Placing’ the Spiritual Metaphors of Contemporary Women Writers: Sue Monk Kidd and Kathleen Norris.” Literature and Belief, vol. 27, no. 2, 2007, pp. 1-28, literatureandbelief.byu.edu/publications/landb_placing.pdf. Accessed 24 July 2017.

Citation Types

MLA 9th

Joy, Mark. "The Secret Life Of Bees." Novels Into Film: Adaptations & Interpretations, edited by D. Alan Dean, Salem Press, 2018. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=Novels_0086.

APA 7th

Joy, M. (2018). The Secret Life of Bees. In D. Alan Dean (Ed.), Novels Into Film: Adaptations & Interpretations. Salem Press. online.salempress.com.

CMOS 17th

Joy, Mark. "The Secret Life Of Bees." Edited by D. Alan Dean. Novels Into Film: Adaptations & Interpretations. Hackensack: Salem Press, 2018. Accessed April 05, 2026. online.salempress.com.

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