Movie - The Secret Life of Bees and the Black Madonna - Essay Example

Movie, The Secret Life of Bees and the Black Madonna The movie, The Secret Life of Bees unravels in the 1964 South Carolina marred by racial tensions. The movie depicts the story of a little girl Lily Owens who is continually enervated by the memories of her dead mother. To escape her painful life and her abusive relationship with her ill tempered father, Lily escapes with her caregiver Rosaleen to a town in South Carolina. Here, Lily is taken in by the Boatwright sisters and finds comfort and peace in their world marked by female camaraderie, bee keeping and the cult of Black Madonna.

The black Madonna in the movie The Secret Life of Bees is an important and pivotal symbol that conveys and array of religious and temporal meanings. It is indeed true that the original Black Madonna did carry a holy meaning in Europe since the times immemorial. However, in the movie The Secret Life of Bees, Black Madonna is a very potent symbol that connotes different meanings to the varied characters portrayed in the movie. To the Daughters of Marry it happened to be a hub around which revolved their entire spiritual life.

To Lily, the figure of Black Madonna did convey a relationship with and a link to her late mother. In a larger context, in the movie, the statue of Black Madonna, time and again represents a symbol of aspiration, yearning and hope. The Black Madonna does serve several roles in the overall plot. As a feminine symbol it represents maternal love and the varied mother surrogates that soothed and comforted Lily as she pondered on her relationship with her late mother and the temporal and spiritual relevance that relationship held for her.

In the movie Lily carries a picture of Black Mary that she found while rummaging through her mother’s belongings. To Lily the picture of Black Madonna symbolized her late mother and it is this picture that eventually leads her to August, a black woman who takes her in and acts as a surrogate mother to Lily. It is August that introduces Lily to the spiritual relevance and meaning of Black Madonna, whom she considers to be the divine mother to all of the humanity. Thereby, if on the one side the picture of Black Madonna connotes spiritual and temporal maternal love and support to Lily, in the larger sense the statue of Black Madonna in this movie does convey a sentiment of love, hope and human brotherhood to a racially divided South.

In a symbolic context, the statue of Black Madonna which the Daughters of Mary worship every night does convey the meaning and relevance of having faith and believing in something that transcends beyond one’s innate believes and yearnings. Thereby, in the movie, the statue of Black Madonna does act as a symbol of hope and reconciliation for the individual characters living in times marked by deep seated racial divide and social tensions in the American South.