In the short story “The Flowers,” the author, Alice Walker, uses nature symbols, revealing diction and imagery to criticize the way difficult history has been addressed. This combined with Myop’s revelation at the end of the story, conveys the theme that history remains an underlying force and drive in everyday life and cannot be escaped or forgotten.
Throughout the story, Walker skillfully conveys her message about history, specifically slavery, through the use of nature symbols that Myop comes across on her transforming walk through the forest. For example, after Myop unknowingly steps on a skeleton, in order to see the skeleton she must push “back the leaves and layers of earth and debris” to expose the hidden skeleton (1). The “earth and debris” are significant, for they symbolize mankind’s tendency to cover up their mistakes rather than confront them and learn from them. Specifically, this story refers to slavery, for one can infer from the language that the man was a slave who was unjustly lynched due to his skin color and white supremacist’s feelings of false superiority. Additionally, after Myop steps on the skeleton, she looks around the area curiously before stumbling upon the “remains of a noose” (1). The noose symbolizes the
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Walker also shows the direct effect of this tendency through Myop’s character, who goes through an enriching transformation on her own, at the young age of ten years old. Walker further shows the readers that history remains an elemental part of daily life and cannot be escaped or forgotten. To conclude, Walker’s universal message can be applied to any scarring historical events from colonization of weaker tribes to the