The Secret Life Of Bees By Sue Monk Kidd

“Oftentimes. when people are miserable, they will want to make other people miserable, too. But it never helps.” (Snicket). When someone is struggling or feeling distress, that person will most likely make another person feel the same way. In the book The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd, a main theme is how a character transfers their misery to another character or object.(ADD EXAMPLE FOR ALL BOOKS? Or no cuz its a short intro?) This theme is shared in the books Beowulf by Burton Raffel and Romeo and Juliet written by William Shakespeare. The Secret Life of Bees shows many ways people transfer their pain into another person or object.(use another word) In May’s case, she goes to her wailing wall she has created, in order to give “all the heavy feelings she carries around” to the wall (Kidd 98). May goes to the wall for comfort; however, T. Ray takes out his hidden pain on Lily. When his wife, Deborah, died, T. Ray was torn apart and this causes him to treat Lily poorly because of his grief.

Ray’s “mind had snapped back ten years” to the time Deborah had left him and “he wouldn’t let go” of Lily’s hair because he thought it was Deborah (Kidd 295). He was abusing Lily so that he could take out his misery that Deborah gave him, onto Lily. In Beowulf, Grendel, the creature that enjoys eating humans, has a lot of grief starting from the formation of the world and because of that, “the monster relished his savage war/ On the Danes, keeping the bloody feud” and he “stalked Hrothgar's warriors" (Raffel 152, 160). Grendel transfers his misery to others, by making them miserable as well. In addition, Grendel’s mother does the same thing and makes other people feel the way she does. When she finds out that her son died, Grendel’s mother is in agony and so she takes revenge because she wants people to feel the torment she does. In