The Secret Life of Bees: Style 1 key example

The natural world is an important part of this novel, and Kidd makes comparisons to bees, weather, flowers, and mother figures very regularly to help the reader understand Lily’s (sometimes contradictory) feelings. As the novel is written in the first person, Lily’s perspective is their only point of access to her story, The author also employs a Southern slant to Lily’s diction and that of the novels’ other characters to ground the story in its 1964 South Carolina setting. Kidd’s use of diction also distinguishes the book’s characters from one another. For instance, Rosaleen’s speech patterns feel distinct from both Lily’s and from the Boatwright sisters’, which helps to establish the differences between the women’s backgrounds and levels of privilege. 

Kidd also adjusts her sentence structure to mirror Lily's emotional state and the environment around her. This is most clear in the changes to pacing and syntax in Lily’s speech. Scenes involving Lily's unfeeling father, T. Ray feel stark and clinical. They usually stick to a brisk pace, which Kidd creates with clipped sentences and blunt syntax. By contrast, when Kidd writes chapters set in the Boatwright home she uses longer, more detailed sentences that slow the story’s pacing. This structural shift fills those chapters with sensory details like color, food, and sounds from the honey house. Lily’s sentences become richer and longer as she allows herself to open up to the pleasures of life with people who love her. As a younger child in T. Ray’s house her figurative language is limited, but as she grows older she begins to incorporate more metaphors and similes to describe her understanding of the world around her.