Identity in Sue Monk Kidd’s The Secret Life of Bees and Hisaye Yamamoto’s “Seventeen Syllables” is profoundly affected by the roles of the protagonists’ respective mothers in their lives.  Lily, in The Secret Life of Bees, is affected by her mother’s presence only vicariously, through stories and artifacts from her life.  Throughout the novel, she places a great emphasis on knowing her mother’s history but, because she has no living mother figure, Lily is forced to find mother figures in others.  The combined influence of the varied collection of surrogate mothers Lily obtains influences Lily’s identity as the story progresses.  In “Seventeen Syllables”, the character of Rosie is influenced by a dual persona in her mother’s behaviour.  Rosie describes her mother as two people, the mother figure who keeps house and Ume, the distant woman obsessed with crafting haiku. The dual mother figure creates a communication barrier between mother and daughter.  Rosie is presented with another negative model of motherhood in her parents’ friend Mrs. Hayano, who mothered children despite crippling illness.  Rosie emulates her mother in a slightly distorted, Americanized manner.  In the somewhat violent confrontation in the conclusion of the story, Rosie is forced to examine her own life in comparison with her mother’s shifting her sense of self and motherhood. 

Because Lily does not have a mother, she is constantly forming new relationships with women and concepts whose influence can be seen to have a surrogate motherhood in Lily’s life.  Examples of this role include Our Lady of Chains, Rosaleen, the bees and August.  August uses a parable about a nun who has run away from her convent to explain the situation of substitution mothering she is proposing to Lily.  The story follows a nun named Beatrix who tires of the monastic life and decides to leave.  When she returns she asks another nun if she remembers her.  The nun laughs and tells her that the nun Beatrix has never left.  When Beatrix looks, she discovers that the virgin Mary has filled in for her in her absence.  The significance of this passage is evident.  The point being made here is that though Lily does not have a mother, the Lady of Chains is able to substitute and support Lily in her mother’s absence.  The sisters use the Black Madonna as a means of representing the motherhood that is inside their hearts.  This is the comfort Lily needs to survive in the world alone.  In this way, August Boatright can be seen as a form of mother character because of the useful wisdom she imparts on Lily.  Rosaleen is also represented as a mother figure in the story; even in the language used to describe her.  When Rosaleen is bathing in the river after their escape from the hospital, Lily describes the scene:

Water beaded across her shoulders, shining like drops of milk, and her breasts swayed in the currents. It was the kind of vision you never really get over. I couldn’t help it, I wanted to go and lick the milk beads from her shoulders. I opened my mouth. I wanted something. Something, I didn’t know what. Mother, forgive.

With allusions to milk and breast-feeding in the character of Rosaleen, this scene is ripe with images of motherhood.  However, what’s even more interesting is the reaction that Lily has.  She feels the sense of motherhood in Rosaleen and yet constantly desires her own, perfect idealization of a mother.  She even asks her mother’s permission for feeling such thoughts towards Rosaleen.  In a sense, the guilt that Lily feels prevents her from having meaningful mother figure relationships until that guilt is resolved. 

Lily begins the novel with a desire to know her mother’s history because her situation is so severe.  She faintly remembers her mother before her death and idolizes the few possessions of hers she owns.  Lily is consumed with guilt over her mother’s death and dreams of her forgiveness.  Her hope of the afterlife is one where Lily says her mother “would kiss my skin till it grew chapped and tell me I was not to blame.  She would tell me this for the first ten thousand years.  The next ten thousand years she would fix my hair” (Monk Kidd 3).  There is a desire expressed here to have the archetypal mother figure help her with her appearance.  She explains later that “you can tell which girls lack mothers by the look of their hair” (Monk Kidd 3).  Thus a mother for Lily is a way of belonging among others.  This explains her urge to explore the places her mother has been in an attempt to discover and secure her own place in the world.  However, what she seeks is an idealization of a mother that doesn’t exist.  She becomes so desperate to find this character that she tries to explain away her mother’s death stating “How do you know she isn’t alive right in this very town? T. Ray could’ve lied about her being dead, just like he lied about her leaving me” (Monk Kidd 100).  Lily is rejecting reality in pursuit of the perfect mother, one who hasn’t died and who exists ethereally.  When she does learn that her mother abandoned her briefly before returning for her, she realizes that her mother was not the ideal mother she imagined.  She learns, also, that she was an unexpected pregnancy and the reason her mother was with T. Ray.  These new revelations of guilt plague Lily.  She feels “unlovable” and the implications of her guilt in her mother’s death are renewed in her.  However, a photograph of her mother feeding her and evidently loving her.  She ultimately accepts the ambiguity of her mother as both the woman who abandoned her and the woman who loved her.  At the end of the novel, Lily expresses her difficulty in shedding the guilt of her mother’s death stating “I guess I have forgiven us both, although sometimes in the night my dreams will take me back to the sadness, and I have to wake up and forgive us again” (Monk Kidd 301). 

Communication between Rosie Hayashi and her mother in “Seventeen Syllables” is strained for a variety of reasons.  Firstly, there is an actual language barrier between the two.  Rosie has been sent to Japanese school her entire life but she finds English easier and more available when she wanted to speak.  Rosie finds herself unable to express her true opinions about some English haiku she has read because her mother would be unable to understand it, just as she is unable to understand her mother’s work.  One discovers that she is often complaisant to her mother’s work only because she is afraid of being misunderstood if she attempts to speak Japanese.  She states “It was so much easier to say yes, yes, even when one meant no, no” (Yamamoto 299).  Thus the communication between Rosie and her mother is clearly often a lie for convenience sake.  Tome is not necessarily convinced by this agreeable attitude and is described on hearing it as “either satisfied or seeing through the deception and resigned” (Yamamoto 299).  The point evident here is that Rosie’s mother has resigned from imparting herself on her daughter in a meaningful way.  Rosie describes her mother as two women: Tome Hayashi, her mother, and Ume Hanazono, her mother’s pen name.  Her mother is described as being actively engaged in all the ‘duties’ of motherhood but Ume is described as an “earnest, muttering stranger who often neglected speaking when spoken to and stayed busy at the parlor table as late as midnight” (Yamamoto 300).  The lack of communication between mother and daughter is stressed here.  To Rosie, her mother’s work transforms her into an entirely different person who is unable to meaningfully connect and engage with her daughter and is, essentially, absent.  Thus the character of the perfect mother/housewife who fulfills her duties by daylight is the only part of her mother with which Rosie is able to interact.  

  When her mother shows her the haiku she is working on and describes its complexity, Rosie is not able to understand it fully and simply compliments her mother due to a lack of comprehension.  However, the reader is informed that what Rosie wanted to tell her mother about was an English haiku she had found in a magazine and liked.  The haiku reads “It is morning, and lo! / I lie awake, comme il faut, / sighing for some dough” (Yamamoto 299).  This haiku is important because it contrasts so harshly with her mother’s haiku.  Tome’s haiku “had tried to capture the charm of a kitten, as well as comment on the superstition that owning a cat of three colors meant good luck” (Yamamoto 299).  Her haiku was also written in proper haiku form of three lines of five, seven, and five syllables.  The haiku that Rosie has taken a liking to is imperfect, consisting of 18 syllables.  The subject of the haiku is also not nearly as complex as her mother’s and is presented more as a humorous rhyme than a haiku.  In this instance, it is noteworthy that Rosie’s form of haiku is an Anglicized parody of her mother’s.  Similarly, Rosie attempts to copy her mother’s acting.  During the visit to the Hayano’s house, Rosie’s mother assumes a role on a number of occasions.  She pretends to be envious when Haru shows off her new coat and apologetic when her husband storms out of the house rudely.  She transforms her speech when the editor of the Mainichi Shinbun comes to present her with her prize.  This is evidence of Tome slipping back and forth between the various roles of what is expected of her.  Rosie does a parody of her mother’s acting ability when she impersonates film and radio stars for her friend Chizuko.  Again, the act of emulation is evident but the form is slanted and anglicized.    Later in the field, Rosie says she separates her patterns of thought; “with one part of her mind listening in to the parental murmuring about the heat and the tomatoes and with another part planning the exact words she would say to Jesus when he drove up with the first load” (Yamamoto 304).  Thus, Rosie even begins to emulate the double persona with which Tome Hayano separates her writing self from her motherly self.  It can be inferred, then, that Rosie develops an identity based on her mother but often with English implications. 

The night Rosie sneaks out of the house to meet with Jesus in the packing shed, she learns much about the ambiguity of love and patriarchal relationships.  Rosie’s perception of marriage and motherhood has been questioned at this point with the figure of Mrs. Hayano about whom “she could not come to any decision about” (Yamamoto 300).  However, the relationship between Jesus and Rosie is expressed in a way that establishes clearly Jesus’ superiority over Rosie.  He wins in races, plays tricks on her and teases her.  Significantly, he also calls Rosie “You funny thing” (Yamamoto 303) before kissing her, subjecting her to an object with his language.  The relationship between Rosie and Jesus can be seen to parallel, on a smaller scale, the relationship between Tome and her former lover with whom she became impregnated with an illegitimate child.  Jesus is described as being slightly better off financially than the Hayashi’s when Rose makes the passing statement “Just because you have a bathroom inside” (Yamamoto 303).  Tome’s lover was similarly financially endowed. During Rosie’s romantic foray, her mother is busy entertaining guests with conversation of haiku.  This significant because the reader has been told that this is a separate woman, Ume Hanazono.  Rosie’s mother is essentially absent for Rosie and her father, upset with her Tome, fails to notice Rosie’s absence also.  Finally, when Rosie’s mother has been insulted and embarrassed by her father, her mother demands that she never marry.  When she tells her story, Rosie decides it sounds like 

a story out of one of the magazines illustrated in sepia, which she had consumed so greedily for a period until the information reached her that those wretchedly unhappy autobiographies, offered to her as the testimonials of living men and women, were largely inventions.

 Rosie’s mother’s own story is accepted as a fiction, specifically one in sepia.  It is noteworthy that Rosie reconciles the troubles of her mother by making this allusion to the pop culture of America at the time.  When Tome makes the demand that Rosie never marry, Rosie states that she is “shocked more by the request than the revelation” (Yamamoto 307).  Thus, she is not surprised that her mother is unhappy, merely unwilling to accept that the situation applies to her.  This idea is solidified in her accepting answer to her mother, which is a lie and is recognized as such. 

In conclusion, the influence of motherhood on identity in both works presented is enormous.  The character of Lily in The Secret Life of Bees is affected by her mother’s death and is obsessed with artifacts of her life.  She is forced to make a decision about her mother and forgive both her mother and herself for their guilt.  Lily learns to accept the ambiguity of the imperfect mother in her acceptance of other motherly figures and the ambiguity of the Daughters of Mary.  Similarly, in “Seventeen Syllables,” through her mother’s absence, the character of Rosie Hayano attempts to the emulate the mother figure which is missing from her life.  Her mother’s absence and dual representation lead her to imitate her mother in an Americanized parody.  She is carving an identity for herself which is based on her mother but contains new nuances.  Ultimately, the lack of mother figure leads to a situation in which she is forced to accept the similarities between her mother and herself and attempt to reconcile the differences.