Violence through the Lens of Innocence: Reflections on Alice Walker’s “The Flowers”

Abstract

We live in a world in which both virtual and actual violence are capitalized on as sources of entertainment, in which the media is so saturate d with violence that we need it to offer us ever-increasing doses of the latter so that we can exit our state of moral numbness and react, in which even the most horrific acts of violence leave most of us passive, since we regard them as nothing more than signs of our troubled times. Consequently, both recognizing and taking a stand against the subtle forms in which violence manifests itself have, unfortunately, become real challenges. As a result, I chose as starting-point for the present paper Alice Walker’s “The Flowers”, a literary piece in which violence is not presented overtly, but only suggested, and not experienced, but witnessed, and only through its unfortunate outcome – death. The present paper follows Myop’s transition from the state of innocence to that of awareness, dwelling on the powerful imagery of the story, and discusses the effects of witnessing violence or its outcomes upon young minds.