The Significance Of Flowers In Alice Walker's The Flower

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The Significance of Flowers in Alice Walker’s “The Flower” For most people flowers represent love, beauty, and innocence; however Alice Walker wants the audience to establish a new perspective. The short story “The Flowers”, by Alice Walker is a story about the loss of innocence with the main character being a ten year old girl named Myop. Myop is gathering flowers in the woods behind her families home when her shoe become lodged in the broken skull of a man. Myop continues to gather flowers when she notices the culprit of the mans death. Myop realizing the impact of this discover lays her flowers down never able to be picked up again (Walker 193-194). Alice Walker establishes the theme of coming of age through the use of setting, personification, and tone. Walker establishes the theme of coming of age by first showing the innocence of the main character Myop, through the setting of the story. The story take place in the summer on the property of her families sharecrop. The narrator describes how Myop “skipped lightly” around her families property as “[she] felt light and good in the warm sun” (Walker 193-194). Summer is a time to be carefree and wild as Myop shows, …show more content…
The tone of upbeat and innocence at the beginning works with the setting of summer in the south to establish the innocence of Myop. Myop is characterized as naive and carefree in the way she wondered around with only her song in search of a little independence. Whereas the shift in tone to knowledgeable and final at the end of the story works with the personification of the noose and the evil that surrounds innocence essentially to show the loss of innocence which establishes the overall theme of coming of age. The shift in tone from upbeat and innocence to knowledgeable and final also shows that independence is sometimes found with the knowledge of