Loss Of Childhood Innocence In The Flowers By Alice Walker

Loss of Childhood Innocence Published in 1988, The Flowers by Alice Walker, a young African American girl named Myop lives in a sharecropper cabin surrounded by flowers. Myop goes about her day wandering around the farm and picking flowers from the nearby woods. While collecting different stems, she discovers a dead body. Myop doesn’t pay much attention to it, until she sees a noose. Myop is oblivious to the harsh reality of the world around her which ultimately demonstrates that childhood innocence blurs the line between peaceful existence and real life. Myop’s childhood innocence slowly disintegrates as she is exposed to a victim of probable lynching. The name Myop is most likely a reference to the word myopia, which means shortsightedness. In the case of The Flowers, this means Myop is a person who doesn’t see the full image, having a blind

In the beginning of this passage, Myop is still full of blissful ignorance, feeling “light and good in the warm sun” (Walker 1). The light and warmth from the sun are symbolism for hope, prosperity, and happiness. Walker illustrates that Myop was living a happy, innocent life interrupted by death and destruction. Foreshadowing the upcoming corpse, “tiny white bubbles disrupt the thin black scale of soil” (Walker 1). The white bubbles symbolize the White race, whereas, the thin black scale of soil represents African American peoples. This furthers the assumption that the man Myop had found was beaten and lynched by a group of white individuals. The word choice of “disrupt” also foreshadows by depicting a situation in which the white people caused the “black” Myop’s loss of innocence. Seen from the changes in word choice made by Walker from words such as “sweet” to words like “gloomy,” there is an blatant tone change between paragraphs 3 and 4 (Walker