English essay

”The Flowers”
By Alice Walker

The afro-american writer Alice Walker has written a short story named the flowers from 1988. The main character in the story is a little girl named Myop. Myop is a 10-year old black girl growing up in poverty, because she is a child of a sharecropper-family, (which was not unusual at that time). She is a really curious girl that loves to explore new things. She likes to play by herself in the woods and look after findings and flowers to pick. One day in the late summer, Myop is taking a walk in the woods. She walks a bit from where she lives to explore a new area where she has never been. The landscape is a bit different from what she is used to, there is a different atmosphere, there is more silent and there are different flowers growing. Suddenly when she is starting to retire home, she steps on a dead black man that had been hung and then laying on the ground. The meeting with the dead man is overwhelming and surprising for Myop.

An important theme in the text is racism, because the story takes place in a time where segregation was extremely active and there was a lot of discrimination of black people. The story takes place in a child’s thoughts, so all the events are written from a child’s view. It’s 3rd person omniscient, the narrator has access to Myops mind, so the reader knows about her feelings, and thoughts, as seen in the following quotes: “She felt light and good in the warm sun” “…and she reached down quickly, unafraid, to free herself” The title the flowers, The setting is really a natural environment and there is a huge social-realistic problem in the text, it’s a credible picture of a child’s thoughts and experiences of growing older. The setting in the story is in the summertime, but there are also described seasons like spring, and autumn: “Around the spring, where the family got drinking water” “Often, in late autumn, her mother took her to gather nuts among the fallen leaves.” So the short story’s time span is probably about a year.

A child at that age doesn’t know about the cruelty and evil in the world yet, so for Myop finding the dead man is a symbol for her, growing up. Myop now have to face the harsh world and deal with all the injustice that is waiting for her in her adult life. She is not safe and isolated in her own little world anymore; she figures out what happens to humans with her race, they get murdered because of their skin-color. A strong symbol that characterizes Myop is that she is the summer, the happiness and warmth. A new chapter is starting in her life and she is going into puberty, because her childhood, “her summer”, is over when she finds the dead man. He symbolizes the winter, the coldness, and the doubt of humanity. She lost her childhood, innocence and freedom, and the flowers she “lays down” where the dead man has been hung, is the symbol of her innocence that is no longer there like before. She can no longer be innocent given the circumstances, because the flowers is her “innocence” and the beautiful things in her life, that she have to give up on. The flower is also a sign of the respect for death, like bringing flowers to a funeral. Right before Myop’s clash with the dead man, there are some symbols and signs in the text that lead to what was going to happen to her. “Today she made her own path, bouncing this way and that way, vaguely keeping an eye out for snakes. She found, in addition to various common but pretty ferns and leaves, an armful of strange blue flowers with velvety ridges and a sweet suds bush full of the brown, fragrant buds.” The color blue is a cold color, and that can symbolize that she is going into colder and darker times, but it can also mean “peace” and “heaven”. Blue can also be the term “to feel blue” and that is associated to “ if you feel blue, you are feeling unwell, mainly with depression or unhappiness” . In the biblical sin myth the snake appears as a temptress that tempts Adam and Eve into losing their innocence. For Myop, the snake is linked to something dangerous and she is trying to avoid the snake, but the snake lead her on a track to find the dead man the woods, and therefore she also lost her innocence.