Bee

The Bee appears only a handful of times in the narrator's account, yet each appearance carries a distinct charge. It is never a single, named individual like the dog Bloody or the stag with its golden eye, but rather a type, a recurring presence in the rural landscape that the narrator inhabits. In a novel where animals constantly blur the line between companion and prey, the bee occupies a curious middle ground: it is something to be killed without much thought, and something whose company the narrator and her son briefly share in the woods. Its scattered appearances trace the narrator's shifting relationship to the natural world around her, from the domestic rituals of destruction to the wild, almost feral intimacy of motherhood.

Casual Killing and Domestic Violence

The most striking appearance of the bee comes in a passage where the narrator reflects on the casual violence of country life. Sitting on a swing, she electrocutes bees and teaches a wasp that wants a piece of her a lesson. The act is presented as routine, almost recreational, part of a litany of small killings that punctuate her days: spiders drowned in the sink, flies trapped in the quince jelly jar, ants stuffed into matchboxes and set on fire, worms and grasshoppers stamped on, and slugs lured into little cups of beer on the terrace. The bee is folded into this catalogue of destruction without any special emphasis, one more creature whose death is a matter of idle amusement. The narrator notes that she used to hate this aspect of country living but now relishes it, a reversal that speaks to her growing estrangement from conventional domesticity and her embrace of a more predatory, animalistic mode of being. The bee's death is not mourned or even remarked upon; it is simply part of the texture of a life spent killing things.

The Christmas Eve Escape and the Woods

The bee also appears in a more charged context, during the narrator's escape into the woods on the afternoon before Christmas. Pregnant and exhausted from contractions, she flees the house where her father-in-law has spent the day going over receipts with a firearm under his pillow and her mother-in-law has been offering Prozac to a mother-to-be. In the forested fields, she sees a small group of gypsies camping near the snow-covered pond in a ramshackle caravan, smoking and laughing in another language. Beyond them are the bee hives with wild honey and the path that leads to the main road. Here the bee is not a victim but part of the landscape of escape, a marker of the wild, untamed world that lies beyond the suffocating domesticity of the in-laws' house. The hives with their wild honey suggest a sweetness that is not cultivated or controlled, in contrast to the proper, neat, fifty-year marriage of her in-laws. The narrator's hope that her son's first word will be something beautiful like magnolia or compassion or dalliance, rather than Mum or Dad or water, aligns her with this wilder world, where bees make honey without anyone's permission.

The Kangaroo Game and Maternal Play

The bee's final appearance comes in a scene of maternal play that is both tender and disturbing. The narrator ties her baby to her body and hops around the field of thorns, bees and wildflowers, imagining the two of them as a kangaroo and her joey. They trample the mounds of earth left by subterranean intruders, and the narrator jumps on a huge deposit of hundreds, thousands of worms, squishing them with her baby kangaroo. The bees here are part of the thick greenery they move through, along with nettles and ticks, part of the wild, overgrown world the narrator is drawn to. When she reaches the woods, she unties her baby and lets him walk on the downhill slope, only to lose sight of him and search for him with a mother's desperate, non-physical looking. She finds him lying on branches higher than she would have climbed, already a little savage. The scene culminates in an accidental baptism, as she dunks her son in the icy water of the pond, and the two of them mimic the calls of the animals around them, becoming part of them. The bee is a minor element in this scene, but its presence alongside the thorns and wildflowers marks the space as one of wild, untamed life, where the narrator and her son can be animals together.

The Bee and the Novel's Animal World

Taken together, the bee's appearances sketch a pattern. It is a creature that is killed casually in the domestic sphere, part of the narrator's relish for destruction, and a creature that thrives in the wild spaces where she seeks refuge and communion with her son. The bee is never granted the symbolic weight of the stag, whose golden eye saves the narrator at night, or the emotional charge of Bloody, the dog she refuses to name. But it is part of the novel's broader meditation on animality, on the porous boundary between human and animal life, and on the narrator's own ambivalent position within that boundary. She kills bees without compunction, yet she also becomes a kangaroo with her joey, hopping through a field of bees and wildflowers. The bee is both prey and companion, a small, flickering presence in a world where the living and the dead are always threatening to become indistinguishable.