Chapter 3 begins with an epitaph stating that "New beekeepers are told that the way to find the elusive queen is by first locating her circle of attendants." Lily is about to discover the Boatwright sisters, who will take her in to their home of bees, love, and the Daughters of Mary. All of these will help Lily overcome the feeling of profound loss she experiences as a result of her mother's death and her father's abuse.
Lily identifies Shakespeare and Thoreau as the writers she most admires. Shakespeare is a playwright of imagination and transformation, and Thoreau's Walden also speaks to the need for transformation.
Like Lily, Thoreau journeys away from the society that he finds compromising and corrupting in order to spend time in nature and his own mind. Reading Thoreau in school prompted Lily's fantasies of escape from T. Ray and discovery of a mother figure. In...
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her original fantasies, this figured looked like Eleanor Roosevelt, but we can imagine that she is seeking an archetypal mother to replace the one she has lost. Throughout the novel, Rosaleen, August, and the Black Mary will all take on aspects of thatarchetype, but Lily's desire to find nurture in nature begins in these early episodes.
When she thinks of Thoreau on her first morning of escape with Rosaleen, she thinks, "Day one of my new life . . . That's what this is." Nature is what opens Lily to the therapeutic potential of her adventure, and Thoreau is the writer who gives shape to that imaginative journey.
Lily instinctively harbors an appreciation for the natural world, and in addition to this, it is the peace and solitude Thoreau describes in Walden Pond which appeals to her. Beneath the hand of her domineering father, life at home is unbearable, and Lily longs to escape it. After reading portions of Walden Pond, she has
"fantasies of going to a private garden where T. Ray would never find (her)...(she) started appreciating Mother Nature, what she'd done with the world."
Nature provides solace for the young girl who has grown up in a particularly loveless environment. When she awakens by the water on the first morning of her journey of escape with Rosaleen, she finds that
"a barge of mist floated along the water, and dragonflies, iridescent blue ones, darted back and forth like they were stitching up the air."
The beauty of the scene evokes memories of Thoreau's writings, and, like the famed writer, who wrote of his time of retreat by the pond as it unfolded in a journal, she thinks of the day as
"Day one of (her) new life."