Symbolism in The Flowers by Alice Walker

In Alice Walker’s short story ‘The Flowers,’ the author depicts the story of a ten-year old girl named Myop growing up in a day. The story begins with Myop's feelings of peace and happiness. Walker's descriptions depict Myop skipping happily exploring the forest behind her family’s sharecropper cabin. The sharecropper cabin is a symbol of poverty, subordination, and racism. Yet, Myop, at the start of the story, is apparently oblivious to understanding the extent of her family's suffering. Therefore, the image also foreshadows and symbolizes the suffering and racism she will soon come to understand as she leaves her childhood innocence behind.

Her happiness is further depicted in her venture of picking wildflowers, a venture she becomes so absorbed in that it carries her a 'mile or more from home'. The farther she moves from the peace and security of home, the more she ventures into uncovering the harsh reality of the world. While she went off into the woods and made her own path she stumbles over the body of a dead man, and her life will never be the same. The central theme the author left in this short story is that it is a coming of age story and it expresses how easy our innocence can be lost. The author uses symbols to convey her messages throughout the story.

The first symbol given in this story is the main characters name, Myop, the root of the word “myopic” meaning nearsighted. This just comes to show how small her world is and she can only see and be affected by what is near to her, this has kept her innocent and ignorant of the real world outside of her childhood. Also, the woods symbolize the world surrounding Myop, which can be both violent and beautiful. The forest has compromised her whole world and has made her oblivious to the harsh realities of the real world, where snakes are the least of her worries. On this certain day, Myop decided to “make her own path” and go farther into the forest. Myop had “explored the woods behind the house many times” but, for the most part, she did it with her mother whom was always nearby. That was the main reason why it felt like an adventure. However, on the day she goes alone she makes the terrifying discovery of the dead man, which symbolizes the harsh realities of her own race, which her mother could not shield her from it forever. His death represents the many African-Americans who died due to racial hatred in the time period of this story. Myop has an awakening when she discovers a deceased man. At first, she remains innocent, she even stoops to pick a wild rose growing near the body. However, her innocent gesture of picking the wild rose reveals to her the truth that the man had been hung. Myop notes the remains of the noose used to hang him, and she lays down her flowers on the spot, and the author ends the story with “And the summer was over.” 

The season of summer is used to symbolize Myop's childhood. In spring and summer, she was innocent, happy, and as a result of her inexperience and ignorance of the world. Myop has undergone a tremendous transformation from an innocent child to a more mature person with a clear understanding of the world and its violence. Like the summer, her childhood is over now. Now that she has seen not only seen death but also racist cruelty, both her innocence and her ignorance vanish. She lost her innocence and her childhood, showing us the main theme is loss of innocence. 

Reading this story readers realize we all deserve to live in freedom, just like that man that laid lifeless. The times we live in today makes me appreciative of where we were and how far we’ve come. Living in this era makes us very comfortable speaking our minds. The story was published in the 1970s, just a few years after Dr. Martin Luther King's death. That very year of 1973, a mass racial violence broke out in the United States. The purpose of her writing was meant to touch the hearts of the citizens with events in our history that happened and affected the nation as well. The man found dead by Myop symbolizes many things, but the true reason is that African Americans were victims to slavery, violence, and hatred.

In conclusion, this beautiful story means so much in our history and in our time today as well. Unfortunately many young sharecroppers such Myop experienced maturity at such a young age, in the most inhumane ways known to mankind. The story mentions she was still a young girl in the beginning of her childhood stage, however when the story comes to an end so does her childhood.