The American deep south serves as the backdrop for "The Flowers." The protagonist of the tale is Myop, a ten-year-old girl who loses her purity. She makes the decision to go for a stroll in order to get to know her neighborhood. Myop collects blossoms while taking in the summertime morning. She discovers a man's decomposing corpse as she is gathering the flowers. She notices a wild pink rose close to the place where she almost steps into the decomposing man's head. She contemplates adding the rose to the other flowers that she has gathered, but eventually she lays down all her flowers. The short story by Alice Walker has a lot of symbolism, and the vivid description used to bring out the character and the places cannot go unnoticed.
Bloom (2007) suggests that the story is about how a child loses her childhood innocence. By coming across the decaying dead body as she gathers flowers, Myop is hit with the harsh reality of the traumatic events that led to the death of this man. She is faced with the reality of violence caused by racism which eventually leads to loss of lives. Alice Walker uses her words carefully to symbolize real events and situations. Her last sentence “And the summer is over” means that after her encounter, Myop’s childhood is over too.
In the first two paragraphs of “The Flowers”, Walker uses some phrases to show the childlike nature and innocence that Myop had. She uses phrases like “days have never been beautiful as these”, “she skipped lightly” “golden silence” among others to show that Myop was just an innocent child. The words show that the character was in the stage of childhood and growth. Writing from a third person perspective, Walker shows how happy Myop is using the phrase “She skipped lightly from the hen house to the pigpen”. This tells us that the girl is in a happy and light mood. We also know that the girl feels safe and comfortable in the place she is from the phrase “She felt light and good in the warm sun”. The lines from the story also emphasize on the fact that Myop is young and very innocent.
We can tell that Myop is a ten-year-old African American girl. Despite the fact that Walker does not tell this to the readers in clear facts, she puts it in a way that the detail can be revealed to them. The phrase “The stick clutched in her dark brown hand” gives us an imagery that tells us that most likely Myop was a child with mixed blood and dark brown was representative of the African American community. Walker gives a vivid description of water from the stream. The water is used in the story to present the white community that was thriving at the time. The description also shows the ratio of members of the black community in comparison to the members of the white community.
In the story, Walker says that “Myop watched the tiny white bubbles disrupt the thin black scale of soil and the water that silently rose and slid away down the stream.” The way that the soil is eroded by the water is representative of how the white community treated the members of the white community. The same way that the water erodes the black soil is the same way that the whites drove the blacks away from most of the areas. At some point, Walker changes the approach of the readers towards the story. She introduces a dark setting to the innocence of Myop which is still represented. She shows us that Myop was familiar with the surrounding when she says that “she had explored the woods behind her house many times.” We, however, see that she is looking out for danger (a sign of security) which creates some suspense and tension for anyone reading the story. The author creates another dark atmosphere which she describes in the line “The air was damp, the silence close and deep” at the end of the fifth paragraph.
Walker’s reference to the racial issue using the story clearly sheds some light to the readers. She says that “…the tiny white bubbles disrupt the thin black scale of soil…” This is representative of the divide that existed between the members of the white community and those of the black community during the time that “The Flowers” was written. The thin soil which is representative of the black community is used to symbolize how during the time, they were just a small minority of the entire population. Throughout the plot of the story, the author brings out the reactions of the girl when she is faced with different situations. She is happy and feels light at first when she is skipping from the hen house to the pigpen to the smokehouse. Further on during her exploration, she keeps an eye out for danger even though she is passing through a place she has been before. Myop is surprised when she sees the naked grin of a dead man who she steps on with her heel.
The title itself “The flowers” has a lot of symbolism that carries the message that Alice Walker wants to bring across to the readers of the story (Bloom, 2007). When a reader sees the word “flowers”, the first thing that comes to their mind is beauty, nice colors or liveliness. Walker uses flowers to represent the innocence of Myop. When a flower is picked, it withers and dries up. The picking up of flowers represented the little girl’s innocence being lost. The same way a flower withers, when it is picked, is the same way her innocence was lost. One can say that the title of the story pretty much had a symbolism of the transition in the life of the character used by Walker in the story.
Walker decided to name the character Myop according to the first line of the story which says “It seemed to Myop as she skipped lightly from hen house to pigpen to smokehouse that the days had never been as beautiful as these”. The name is a short form for myopia which is a medical condition that makes one unable to see things closely. It is not just a mere coincidence that Walker decides to use the name strategically in the story. According to the story, myopia can represent the inability to understand the deeper meaning of a situation or occurrence. This still emphasizes on the innocence of the girl because she could not understand things deeply.
The author uses change in the atmosphere to give the readers an intuition that something is likely to happen. In the second line, she describes an atmosphere that is lively using the line “The air held a keenness that made her nose twitch”. Later on, she describes a gloomy atmosphere when she says that “The air was damp, the silence close and deep”. This change shows the reader that things are not as they were before. Something unexpected is likely to happen. Walker brings out the urgency that Myop had to go back to her initial mood when she writes “she began to circle back to the house- back to the peacefulness of the morning rather than that of the cold and gloomy”.
As Myop is trying to go back to where she came from, she steps into the face of a dead man at the moment when she is trying to get away from the place that she did not want any more. At first, she does not show any signs of fear, but when she sees his teeth, she becomes surprised. The author brings her out as fearless because her reaction on seeing the teeth is a little yelp. Considering that she is just a ten-year-old girl, one would expect that encountering a dead body while gathering flowers would scare her to death. But her reaction is quite different and would surprise a reader. Given the picture of innocence painted by the author of her, one would expect that she is not used to seeing something of this sort so she would react in a more intense way.
The act of Myop picks up the pink flower; this is the symbol of how her innocence has been lost. As readers, we can see the changes and how different things are when the author talks about “an armful of strange, blue flowers with velvety ridges. The flowers are described as strange showing that they are different from the ones that she is accustomed to seeing on normal days. When she lays down her flowers towards the end of the story, this shows that she is mature and understands that one should pay respect to the dead. One can conclude that Walker uses the entire plot quite artistically to get her message across to the readers.
Reference
Bloom, H. (2007). Alice Walker. New York: Bloom's Literary Criticism.
