Weekly Reflection on Alice Walker's "The Flowers"

• noose (noun): 1. a loop with a running knot, as in a snare, lasso, or hangman's halter, that tightens as the rope is pulled. 2. a tie or bond; snare.
• benign (adjective):  1. having a kindly disposition; gracious: a benign king. 2. showing or expressive of gentleness or kindness: a benign smile. 3. favorable; propitious: a series of benign omens and configurations in the heavens. 4. (of weather) salubrious; healthful; pleasant or beneficial. 5. Pathology . not malignant; self-limiting.

"The Flowers" starts out to be a whimsical, happy, positive mood story. Describing a little girl adventuring out on her family's land. The little girls name was Myop and the narrator portrays her image as, "She was ten, and nothing existed for her but her song, the stick clutched in her dark brown hand, and the tat-de-ta-ta-ta of accompaniment." Perhaps the accompaniment of the stick shows that Myop was lonely and played by herself, using the stick as a "friend" or "companion". Myop seemed very interested in nature, "She had explored the woods behind the house many times," and what it had to offer. 

Ironically, on the day that she made herself a new, different, path than the one she usually takes, Myop found, "an armful of strange blue flowers with velvety ridges and a sweet suds bush full of the brown, fragrant buds." The narrator uses a lot of detail here, describing the flowers as not only blue, but strange. To me, there was a shift in the story at this point. Previously in the story, the narrator used all positive context clues such as, "..made each day a golden surprise that caused excited little tremors to run up her jaws." But now the narrator has shifted to using the word "strange" to describe a flower in the woods. The narrator also goes on to describe the unpleasant feeling Myop had from this new "strange" land Myop has discovered.

After the narrator sets a "strange" tone to the story, Myop discovers a man that has been hanged. In the midst of her discovery, she managed to find a wild pink rose. It seems as if the flowers follow Myop throughout the story and serve as the positive, lively aspect even though she has just found a dead man in the cave she discovered on her journey through the woods. Or did it serve as a symbol of life and death? "As she picked it to add to her bundle she noticed a raised mound, a ring, around the rose's root." Myop discovered that even though the wild rose represents life, it came from death- it in fact was growing from the noose, or knot the man used to hang himself. After realizing the wild rose was not such a beautiful thing after all, "Myop laid down her flowers."

To me, "The Flowers" has a much deeper meaning than the actual story tells itself. The entire story represents a comparison between life and death. Life is represented through the flowers in the woods, the little girl, the harvest season, the warm sun, the stream, etc. Death is represented by Autumn, because in Autumn the leaves die and fall to the ground, the gloomy little cove, the dead, hanged man, rotted clothes, and ironically the wild pink rose. People may portray the wild pink rose negatively or positively but I believe that the wild pink rose represents the death of the man and as a token of respect, Myop left her bundle of flowers that will soon wilt and die too. One could also compare the man to a flower, the man was hanged and his clothes rotted away just like a flower when taken off of its stem wilts, dies, and rots. Overall, I found many comparisons to life and death in the poem both obvious and hidden.