An Outsider's Perspective on Social Politics

As I warned you, social politics are a thing that not even I, with my squirrelly cluelessness, can avoid. I've been waiting for the right book to toss around my opinion on the subject, and The Secret Life of Bees is probably as good as I'm going to get.

To begin: social politics are the attempts of constructed groups to gain a comparative advantage over each other. They're different from regular politics because they don't always travel widely-shared, explicit modes like elections, and because they are more frequently peopled by clichés and ideals. They're a favorite of Marxists, and like many Marxist theories, they're thought to be inescapable.

That's the first and last paradox to hurdle. Is everything we do an assertion of power over another class, race, etc.? Many people would disagree, but the assertion is that sitting in front of your computer and reading a literary blog is a luxury purchased at the expense of everyone else in the world who doesn't have that opportunity. After all, they say there's no such thing as a free lunch. The ideology that most promotes the awe of social politics also tends to find fault with behavior that doesn't make everybody equal–not only in freedoms and opportunities, but also in comfort, possessions, behavior, morals, personality, etc. I'm not straying too far into the political: this has everything to do with literature, being the branch of criticism that analyzes the social spheres of the winners and losers in any novel. In The Secret Life of Bees, if Sue Monk Kidd gives Lily a sandwich, it has a different import than if she gives Zach a sandwich. This has nothing to do with their lives and everything to do with their gender and skin color. What could be more natural?

The trick is that a level of this is always necessary. If I pretend that all my characters' races, etc. are random or arbitrary, then I'm both kidding myself and making room for a ton of accidental cultural slander. This is a trap that catches most of the crappier fantasy authors in the biz. Assuming that their legendariums are coming entirely out of their own heads, their characters and cultures reflect medieval Western Europe time after time. (Some are beginning to show signs of America, but this may be the result of declining levels of research.) Culture is what's literally inescapable, and writers shouldn't try. After all, we're creating culture. To admit anything less would be selfishly to insist that our ideas, including the language in which we write, are our private property. In this case, I shouldn't let anybody read my books.

Culture, however, is not at all the same as social politics. Oh, the two almost always intersect. There are many examples of culture without social politics, but a Marxist literary critic could read class warfare into almost all of them. Social politics, on the other hand, finds existing without culture a lot like breathing in space. After all, culture is the structure given to the shared beliefs of a society, and without more than one person to share political ideas, you've got a dictator on your hands.

People will read social politics into any book not because of their ideology, but because of who they are. I read The Secret Life of Bees much differently from the way my mother read it, because I've never been a fourteen year-old girl. I can share as much of Lily's ethics or personality as I want, but I don't have the experiences Kidd has written into her backstory. And neither I nor my mother has specifically African American memories, nor South Carolina ones. We understand the characters the same way we understand other people; that is to say, we read imperfectly.

Once this is understood, there are many ways to leap from the platform. All of them have to do with the outcome people want each other to have after reading the book; we want others to agree with us. Some readers insist that Lily should triumph in the end, and that she should come to a deeper understanding with the black characters who support her. This, it can be argued, would create an optimism that encourages other people to seek a similar understanding with their neighbors of a different social background. Other readers, especially the grumpy varieties of postmodernist, want a sad ending in which the iniquities of the real world (for example, racist dads) strangle Lily's dreams and her relationship with August, Zach, and the rest of the gang. The point of this would be to create a pessimism that would fuel the reader to go forth and fix such iniquities.

I don't believe that these outlooks are worthless. I, like most authors, tend to write mixed outcomes, with optimism and pessimism holding hands. But it becomes dangerous to neglect looking at a story from the inside. And, unlike a view of which class is oppressing which, it's absolutely necessary for reading. I tried to connect with Lily's choices in spite of never having been a fourteen year-old, white, lower-middle-class, South Carolina girl in the year 1964. Kidd's words and my thoughts are both human, and so however imperfect my understanding of the political setting, I am the better off for having read it.

There is a great reason that people like to empathize with the characters, and it has nothing to do with selfishness. Books are lessons that help us deal with the problems we face every day, not just what politicians and scholars see when looking down at a map of humanity. Everything else is founded on the face-to-face drama, which is the only (but generous) source of meaning for the vast majority of people who don't have the luxury of brooding in the ivory tower of progressivism.

Review: The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd (2002)

Look out! Duck! It's another one o' them dastardly Christian novels! Because of certain themes well covered by The Secret Life of Bees, I'm going to split this review into two posts, the second being about social politics. Here's the first, which is about real things.

It's the year 1964. Our white-skinned heroine, Lily Owens, has turned fourteen. It was the best of times, because the Civil Rights Act has just been signed (That's the federal mandate doing away with Jim Crow Laws and enforcing the right to vote regardless of race or ethnicity. There was probably more to the story, but it's not covered in this book, and my memory for history is notoriously bad.) It was also the worst of times, because a culture of racism is still alive and kicking (among other things... sorry). Lily's caretaker and role model, a black woman named Rosaleen, goes to town to exercise her new rights, and finds herself beaten and in jail. Lily takes action into her own hands by fleeing from her abusive father, freeing Rosaleen, and running off in search of the origins of her long-dead mother, whom Lily accidentally killed as a toddler. The fugitive pair are taken in by a trio of wild and crazy bee-keeping black women, who teach Lily a new perspective on spirituality while gradually helping her to discover a painful past.

Here's one of my first reactions to this book: it should be taught in middle school or high school. I'm not trying to devalue it, even though those kinds of booklists are frequently catered toward kids who don't want to be in class as well as the ones interested in reading. But there are many things that make The Secret Life of Bees right for the role. First: the writing style is not obscure or overly subtle. One of the most impressive aspects of Kidd's writing is that she is able to create intricate, flowing description without losing the fourteen year-old girl's narrative voice. Second: the main character is the right age. She's a strong, realistic girl, instead of an unrelatable narrator. Third: it's historical. The Civil Rights Act, the space race, Johnson vs. Goldwater, and some more are good lesson spearheads that enter the plot. Fourth: it's damn good.

If there's one aspect of a book I enjoy more than complex characters, it's complex symbolism. The Secret Life of Bees' symbolism revolves around (you guessed it) bees, which are connected both with the nuclear feminine society and with feminine spirituality. I have mixed feelings about the structure of these relationships, but my overall opinion is positive.

For those not in the know, Christianity carries with it a Marian tradition based around the adoration of Mary, the Mother of Jesus. As far as I know, this is true even of denominations that don't emphasize sainthood in the same way as Roman Catholicism. Like Jesus, Mary was born free of original sin and was assumed body and soul into Heaven. We don't worship her or any of the saints, but we look to her and study her life as the best example of how to live. The Daughters of Mary in The Secret Life of Bees portray her as a black woman because, as one of the characters says, "Everybody needs a god who looks like them." Although I take personal issue with the phrasing, I love the sentiment. I've heard of people who, even recently and in such tolerant lands as New York, have been offended by pictures of a black Jesus or who say Jesus is American, and they're not setting themselves up for much sympathy.

This brings me back to the symbolic structure. The Daughters of Mary are a spiritual and social society created by the bee-keeping women who shelter and mentor our heroines. They create their own hybrid religion which, in the words of our charming narrator, "would make the Pope keel over right there," but which has quite a bundle of good ideas. August Boatwright, the closest mentor to Lily, is a genius for all the answers she has for every question. She's the only unrealistic character by being too perfect, but I enjoyed reading her anyway. All of her bee facts are relevant both to Lily's predicament and to her perception of the Blessed Mother. If the queen dies, the hive becomes despondent and unproductive; the women of the world depend on the guidance of Mary; Lily's emotional turmoil is all based on the death of her mother. I also thought that Lily's familial world was a bit too mired in absolutes; she and her father are both unnecessarily fixated on her dead mother, and her father is crazier than most supervillains. But again, these exaggerations do not detract from the book's high enjoyability.