I have to analyze the short story "The Flowers" by Alice Walker into a literary essay. I am returning back to school after 20 years and I need some help and guidance. Please let me know if the paragraphs need more detail.

Alice Walker, who was born in Eatonton, Georgia in 1944, is a Pulitzer Prize winning author. Walker's creative vision is taken from her past experiences and she uses them in her novels. "The Flowers," a short story from the collection titled In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women, was written about Myop a ten year old African American girl who's parents were poor sharecroppers in rural Georgia during a heightened time of racial violence.

The story is about a young girl's sudden fall from innocence. Myop is happy and carefree as she skips around her family's cabin playing with the animals. She does not look beyond the splendor of her free and comfortable childhood. On this day she decides to explore the woods as she had done many times with her mother in late autumn while gathering nuts. 

Myop then leaves the safety and peacefulness of her family's sharecropper cabin to search for new and wonderful flowers. This summer morning she makes her own path and finds herself about a mile from home in unfamiliar surroundings. The cove she had come upon was gloomy, damp and had a mysterious silence.

In her quest to recapture the happiness of the morning, and find her way back to her cabin, she stumbles onto the remains of a man who had clearly been killed in a lynching. She sees the brittleness of his death when she discovered his "large white teeth, all of them cracked or broken" showing that might have been beaten before his murder. She then looks up at a tree and sees the rotted remains of a noose. "Myop laid down her flowers" was a sign of releasing her youthfulness, as she was forced to face one of the most violent forms of racism. The destruction of her childhood innocence was recognized at the end of the story with the statement "And the summer was over." 

Alice Walker dramatically shows what impact it is on a child and how quickly she can loose her childhood innocence with the realization of how prominent racial violence was in rural Georgia during segregation.

how does alice walker create imagery in the short story 'the flowers'? The first is through her use of nature. The setting of the story is in natural, outdoor surroundings, which are described in great detail. Walker uses color, sound and feelings to help the reader identify with Myop. She also uses nature to signify a change coming in the story. For example, she writes "the air was damp, the silence close and deep." This creates the idea of the calm before the storm, signalling to the reader that something unexpected, and probably negative, is about to occur. It is also interesting to notice that Myop unknowingly collects flowers to lay at the resting place of a dead man throughout the story. When she lays them down at the end, it seems she also lays down something of herself, her childhood and her innocence.

Secondly, Walker also uses the passing of time in the story to mirror the passing of Myop's innocence. Walker mentions that "by twelve o'clock" Myop had reached the furthest place she had ever been before. The intensity and height of the summer sun parallels the climax in the story which is about to occur. The final sentence in the story is also extremely poignant. The summer is over, as is Myop's previously carefree existance. Her innocence, like the summer, is now gone.

 

Plot Summary

Alice Walker's modern classic "Everyday Use" tells the story of a mother and her two daughters' conflicting ideas about their identities and ancestry. The mother narrates the story of the day one daughter, Dee, visits from college and clashes with the other daughter, Maggie, over the possession of some heirloom quilts.

Alice Walker

The story begins with the narrator, a "big-boned woman with rough, man-working hands" awaiting the homecoming of her daughter Dee, an educated woman who now lives in the city. Accompanying her is her younger daughter, Maggie, a shy girl who regards her sister with a "mixture of envy and awe." As they wait, the narrator reveals details of the family history, specifically the relationship between her two girls. A fire when they were children destroyed their first house and left Maggie badly.....

This is a   free excerpt of 135 words . This section contains   62

In Alice Walker's "Everyday Use", the three main characters are necessary in revealing

the underlying concepts of the story. The critic Timothy Sexton asserts that the older

daughter, Dee, is the

  "embodiment of the struggle for a unifying identity" (par. 4). In contrast with Dee, the

critics Houston A Baker, Jr. and Charlotte Pierce-Baker consider Maggie to be a

guardian of history, or "griot" (164). On the other hand, David White describes Mama

as having an "inherent understanding of heritage," something less apparent among the

two children (par. 3). Dee, Maggie, and Mama serve as artistic representations of the

various aspects of African Americans culture and heritage. In addition, they are our

creative guide to understanding the identity struggles that African Americans faced

during that time period.

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Dee is a selfish and egotistical character with a superficial understanding of her

inheritance. She characterizes the confusion and misguidance of young African

Americans in the late 60s and 70s. This is apparent in her

  interactions with her mother and sister. As Sexton notes, Dee "considers herself as

cultured, and beyond the abased quality of the lives lived by her mother and sister"

(par. 3). She makes her feelings clear when she attempts to "take" the quilts Mama

had promised to Maggie: "Maggie can't appreciate these quilts... she'd probably be

backward enough to put them to everyday use" (Walker, 103). By using the quilts for

purposes other than their original intent she believes that she is respecting her

heritage, but this is not the case: her desire to put them on display is "really not quite

so different from the white capitalist cashing in on ethnic artworks" (Sexton, par. 4)

Not only is she conforming to the worst of American ideals, but she is rejecting and

disrespecting her own cultural heritage-- all under the pretenses of preserving it. It is

in this sense that she is the "embodiment of the struggle for a unifying identity,"

because she has not yet come to understand her place in society as both an African

and an American.

In great contrast with Dee, Maggie is a simplistic and good-hearted person. These

characteristics add dimension to the story, and make her a "more likely bearer of

sacredness, tradition, and true value than her "brighter" sister" (163). She understands

the true meaning of heritage. Just as her sister asserts, Maggie is "backward enough"

to put the quilts to everyday use. But what Dee fails to recognize is that in doing so

Maggie is preserving the ancestral importance of the quilts-- that is, utilitarian

necessity. Walker reinforces the cultural significance of Maggie's character when

Mama refuses to allow Dee to have her way: "I did something that I never had done

before: hugged Maggie to me, then dragger her on into the room, snatched the quilts

out of Miss Wangero's [Dee's] hands and dumped them into Maggie's lap" (104) This is,

as Baker and Pierce-Baker indicated, her mother's "conferral of an ancestral blessing"

(164). Maggie wants to maintain a lasting connection with her heritage, and both

Mama and the reader recognize this. She represents those among the African-

American community that seek to pass on their heritage without diminution between

generations.

Mama is an uneducated, yet practical character. As White demonstrates, Mama "takes

pride in the practical aspects of her nature and that she has not spent a great deal of

time contemplating abstract concepts such

  as heritage... [but her lack of education] does not prevent her from having an inherent understanding of heritage" (par. 3). Mama loves and respects her ancestors, as is understood in her description and treatment of the quilts: "They had been pieced together by Grandma Dee and then Big Dee and me had hung them on the quilt frames on the front porch and quilted them... in both of them were Grandpa Jarrell's paisley shirts. And one teeny faded blue piece... that was from Great Grandpa Ezra's uniform that he wore in the Civil War" (103). The quilts are important to Mama as a direct

connection between herself and those before her. Walker also uses the butterchurn as a source for Mama's inherent understanding of heritage: "I took it for a moment in my hands... you could see where thumbs and gingers had sunk into the wood. It was beautiful light yellow wood, from a tree that grew in the yard where Big Dee and Stash had lived" (102, 103). As White explains, "When Mama takes the dasher handle in her hands, she is symbolically touching the hands of all those who used it before her." Her practical nature and appreciation for heritage distinguishes her from her two daughters, and represents the complex, historical importance of the African-American culture.

There are many more things that could be said about Alice Walker's "Everyday Use." It is a compelling story, full of symbolism and meaning. However, it is the unique and contrasting personalities of the three main characters that give the story its power. Without Dee, we would not be able to address the misguidance and identity struggles of the time period-- and without Maggie and Mama, we would not be able to fully comprehend the importance placed upon preserving their culture. As White points out, Walker wrote the story with the intentions of challenging African Americans "to acknowledge and respect their American heritage" (par. 23) Yet she did more than that: she challenged us all to acknowledge and respect the heritage of others, and gave us insight into a few of the unique circumstances that surrounded their live

How does the story "The Flowers" by Alice Walker relate to society?

How does Alice Walker establish the setting and atmosphere in the first two

paragraphs of "The Flowers"?