Analyse af The Flowers

The act of growing up is usually a time period expanding over multiple years. A time period where you’re supposed to live a life with eagerness, positivity, and desire to explore. The act of progressing from childhood to adulthood and becoming mature, not only physically – but also mentally. So, what happens when you grow up from one day to another, without experiencing all those things at first? How long can your parents and your innocence keep you from the barbarity of the world? For example: Walking into the woods and accidentally stepping on a decomposing body… In Alice Walker’s short story “The Flowers” (1973), a young girl named Myop sets out on an Adventure but returns with a loss of innocence and a new view of the world. As she finds a dead man in the forest, she can no longer reject the cruelty of racism, and her childhood, like summer, is now over. For now, she realizes that murder can happen, and death is an important fact to face in human nature. The author accomplishes to create an astounding and beaming world: “She felt light and good in the warm sun” (L.8), Myop lives in beautiful scenery with a glow of happiness. The short story takes place outdoors in the summertime. “The harvesting of the corn and cotton, peanuts and squash, made each day a golden surprise” (L.4-5). The quote suggests that the story takes place on a farm with a lot of harvesting going on. The fact that Myop is playing with her chicken also suggests that she and her family live on a farm. The mentioning of her family’s sharecropper cabin, tells us they were doing a lot of harvesting, and implies they are a black family, probably living among other black families. With this in mind and the mentioning of cotton harvesting, we can assume that the story takes place around 1860 in the Southern states of USA. By the time of the 1860´s in the Southern states cotton paid more than half of the nation’s imports. Later on, she finds a noose and a man with big bones (in what is left over from some blue rotten overalls) we can almost make the conclusion that the man was a black sharecropper, and had been hung in the forest on the act of racism.