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Definition of Simile
A simile is a figure of speech that directly compares two unlike things. To make the comparison, similes most often use the connecting words "like" or "as," but can also... read full definition
A simile is a figure of speech that directly compares two unlike things. To make the comparison, similes most often use the connecting words "like... read full definition
A simile is a figure of speech that directly compares two unlike things. To make the comparison, similes most often... read full definition
Key Examples in The Secret Life of Bees
Chapter 1
Explanation and Analysis—Bees at Night:
Although her father doesn’t keep bees himself, Lily’s room at T. Ray’s house fills with them anyway. As Lily watches the bees slip in and out of her bedroom wall in The Secret Life of Bees, Kidd uses visual imagery and a simile describing the bees’ wings to show how Lily ties the bees' movement to her own sense of longing.
At night I would lie in bed and watch the show, how bees squeezed through the cracks of my bedroom wall and flew circles around the room, making that propeller sound, a high-pitched zzzzzz that hummed along my skin. I watched their wings shining like bits of chrome in the dark and felt the longing build in my chest.
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Explanation and Analysis—Petal Lips:
Lily smells Rosaleen enter a room in T. Ray’s house, enjoying the familiar, spicy scent of the snuff that she always carries.Kidd foreshadowing and a simile to show how Lily senses Rosaleen’s presence before the other woman even speaks.
Unlock with LitCharts A+When she stepped in the room, her scent floated out to me, dark and spicy like the snuff she packed inside her cheek. She held her small jug with its coin-size mouth and a handle for her to loop her finger through. I watched her press it along her chin, her lips fluted out like a flower, then spit a curl of black juice inside it.
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Explanation and Analysis—Flock of Angels:
Using a simile and hyperbolic language, Kidd illustrates Lily’s troubled thoughts about death and about how she deserves to be punished for killing Deborah. Lily lies awake in her bed and thinks about her mom, and about a legend she heard that bees swarm before a person dies:
Unlock with LitCharts A+Bees swarm before death. She was full of crazy ideas that I ignored, but I lay there thinking about this one, wondering if the bees had come with my death in mind. Honestly, I wasn’t that disturbed by the idea. Every one of those bees could have descended on me like a flock of angels and stung me till I died, and it wouldn’t have been the worst thing to happen. People who think dying is the worst thing don’t know a thing about life.
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Chapter 2
Explanation and Analysis—A Great Lap:
Lily uses a simile to describe the combination of need and relief she feels when she finds Rosaleen bathing in the river after their fight. When she sees Rosaleen washing the blood and sweat off herself in the water, Lily struggles to speak:
Unlock with LitCharts A+I opened my mouth. I wanted something. Something, I didn’t know what. Mother, forgive. That’s all I could feel. That old longing spread under me like a great lap, holding me tight.
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Explanation and Analysis—Like a Bull:
In this passage from Chapter 2, the author uses a simile and a metaphor to show both T. Ray’s anger and Lily’s fear and sadness as she prepares to run away from home. Lily pauses for a moment before walking out of her childhood room forever:
Unlock with LitCharts A+When I checked the window, T. Ray was coming out of the orchard toward the house, fists balled, head plowed forward like a bull wanting to gore something. I propped the note on my dresser and stood a moment in the center of the room, wondering if I’d ever see it again. "Good-bye," I said, and there was a tiny sprig of sadness pushing up from my heart.
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Chapter 3
Explanation and Analysis—Thoreau:
In this reflection the author uses allusion, simile, and the motif of finding comfort in nature to show how Lily sees her escape from T. Ray’s house as the start of a new life. As she wakes beside the creek next to Rosaleen, she thinks back to her favorite authors from English class:
Unlock with LitCharts A+Next to Shakespeare I love Thoreau best. Mrs. Henry made us read portions of Walden Pond, and afterward I’d had fantasies of going to a private garden where T. Ray would never find me. [...] A barge of mist floated along the water, and dragonflies, iridescent blue ones, darted back and forth like they were stitching up the air. It was such a pretty sight for a second I forgot the heavy feeling I’d carried since T. Ray had told me about my mother. Instead I was at Walden Pond. Day one of my new life, I said to myself. That’s what this is.
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Explanation and Analysis—Red Hot Toes:
As they walk toward Tiburon having escaped the jail, Lily asks Rosaleen what she dreamed about the night before. Rosaleen answers in a way that surprises her, using visual imagery and a simile to describe a startling dream:
Unlock with LitCharts A+She gazed at the treetops, rubbing her elbows. "Well, let’s see. I dreamed the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., knelt down and painted my toenails with the spit from his mouth, and every nail was red like he’d been sucking on red hots." I considered this as we set off for Tiburon, Rosaleen walking like she was on anointed feet, like her ruby toes owned the whole countryside.
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Chapter 14
Explanation and Analysis—August the Griddle:
Summer in South Carolina is stiflingly hot. Here, the author uses both a metaphor and a simile describing temperature to link the late-summer weather to Lily’s emotional state at the end of the book. Lily describes an August day, noticing how the heat affects her body and her feelings:
Unlock with LitCharts A+The month of August had turned into a griddle where the days just lay there and sizzled. I plucked leaves off the elephant ear plants and fanned my face, sat with my bare feet submerged in the trickling water, felt breezes lift off the river surface and sweep over me, and still everything about me was stunned and stupefied by the heat, everything except my heart. It sat like an ice sculpture in the center of my chest. Nothing could touch it.
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