The Flowers Essay - Alice Walker (1973)

The Flowers

Alice Walker (1973)

The story is written in 1973, which was a time where racism was a huge problem in the United States. Many people were fighting for an equal society and I think one of the themes in this story is the African American fight for an equal society. The author, Alice Walker, is also African American and it therefore makes sense for her to write about such a relevant topic. The narrator is omniscient, as she has access to Myop’s mind.

Myop is a 10-year-old dark-skinned girl, who lives in a rusty sharecropper cabin. She is completely engulfed in her own peaceful world, she doesn’t see anything but good in the world, “She was ten, and nothing existed for her but her song, the stick clutched in her dark brown hand, and the tat-de-ta-ta-ta of accompaniment.” Her family is very poor as their house is described as having rusty boards, and the family gets their water from a spring, and not from a faucet. The narrator doesn’t mention Myop having any friends or going to school, so perhaps she doesn’t go to school.

The name ‘Myop’ sounds a lot like myopic, which means to be shortsighted. I’m guessing that this is because until she finds the body in the woods, she is innocent and she loses that innocence when she sees the corpse. She also explores the woods to look for flowers, and therefore only sees the good things in life, and has never experienced how terrible the world can be. The story ends with “And the summer was over” which I see as a way for the narrator to tell us that Myop has lost her childish innocence, and has now experienced how harsh the world can be.