Flowers By Alice Walker

Alice Walker’s sociological criticism is broad in the short text “The Flowers”. The story, and most of Walker’s other short stories, rely on setting and symbolism to help further the main idea or theme of loss of innocence. More specifically, young innocence in this text. Walker uses limited 3rd person narration to help the reader/s develop an understanding of the main character’s (Myop’s) thoughts, feelings, knowledge, personality and the situations she experiences. The story focuses on this naive ten year old African American girl we know as Myop, who loves to explore the land where she lives. One day, Myop chooses to explore further into woodland, unknown to her, quite far away from her families ‘Sharecropper Cabin’. She then discovers ‘strange blue flowers with velvety
The words the writer chose carefully to use throughout the text helps us get a better understanding of the setting, characteristics and theme. Walker continues to illustrate the symbolism of the flowers which is strongly used in this text, the setting of where Myop lives which helps us understand further of what the time and place is and also where Myop decides to travel. The connections we can make to other short stories we’ve read could be; The Hills - where both Myop from ‘The Flowers’ and the ‘narrator’, who we don’t know or aren’t given the name of, from ‘The Hills’ by Patricia Grace are involved in their own traumatising, unlawful and prejudice act which have been brought upon both of them. Either of these events result in both of these characters effectively losing their innocence. This short story can also be connected through the ideas of ‘racism’ and ‘slavery’ to Desiree’s Baby’ by Kate Chopin, which can furthermore be related to ‘the powerful and powerless’ and ‘cultural and social injustice’ which can be connected to ‘The Red Sari’ by Apirana