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Innocence In Alice Walker's The Flowers

Decent Essays

In the short story The Flowers by Alice Walker, a young girl named Myop sets out into the woods and discovers something horrifying, developing the theme that children can lose their innocence after facing the obstacles of life. In the beginning of the text, Myop’s innocence as a child is highlighted, as she is characterized as curious, high-spirited, and innocent. “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...She was ten, and nothing existed for her but her song, the stick clutched in her dark brown hand...” (Walker 1). Myop, living on a sharecropper’s cabin in the summertime, is carefree and sheltered in her surroundings. This setting is significant because it creates a sweet, childlike mood where Myop is only set out to enjoy her …show more content…

Tension begins to rise as Myop sets out to explore the woods behind her house, therefore leaving her sheltered space and entering the reality of life. “By twelve o'clock, her arms were laden with sprigs of her findings, she was a mile or more from home. She had often been as far before, but the strangeness of the land made it not as pleasant as her usual haunts” (1). Here, the setting shifts to the gloomy, damp, quiet woods a mile away from her home; Myop begins to feel uncomfortable with her surroundings. This creates a dark, tense mood, contrasting the previous dreamlike state back at the sharecropper’s cabin. As she attempts to escape the haunts of the woods, Myop stumbles across an unkempt man lying down in debris, and she soon realizes that he is dead. “When she pushed back the leaves and layers of earth and debris Myop saw that he'd had large white teeth, all of them cracked or broken, long fingers, and very big bones” (1). In an attempt to free herself from her growing awareness of the world, Myop “noticed a raised mound, a ring, around the rose’s

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