The Flowers And Désirée's Baby Analysis

“The Flowers” by Alice Walker and “Désirée’s Baby” by Kate Chopin are both about race. Alice Walker exposed the world’s evil, racism, through the transition of Myop’s innocence to the acknowledgement of cruelty and made a statement that when we discover more about the world, the more injustices we are going to acknowledge; Kate Chopin revealed the class-based and racial prejudice that pervaded the attitudes of Southerners and the message of the story is that race and prejudice should not separate two people who truly loved each other. The Flowers was written in the third-person point of view. Walker is able to show the world to the readers through the innocent eyes of a ten-year-old black girl, Myop. The story took place outside a cabin on …show more content…
First, according to the narrator’s descriptions “…as she skipped lightly from hen house to smokehouse that days had never been as beautiful as these” and “The harvesting…made each day a golden surprise that caused excited little tremors to run up her jaws,” suggested that Myop was a carefree and innocent child who was excited by harvest time in the beginning of the story, and “golden surprise” was referring to among all the harvest times, this is the best one. Then, the narrator used “sunshine warms her” and her “tat-de-ta-ta-ta” song to show Myop’s delightful mood. Walker focused on the descriptions of Myop’s innocence in the beginning, she even used warm words such as “warm,” “sun” and “good” to emphasize it. Suddenly, there was an unexpected shift when she found the “strange,” “damp,” and “gloomy” corpse whose white teeth …show more content…
The background of Désirée’s Baby is the era of slavery in the nineteenth century, which put race into the story as the key point to be noticed and be cognizant of. During that period of time, racial prejudice played a major part in people’s lives. Relationships between two people of different races is forbidden. The quadroon children often ended up as slaves because of the theory that even one drop of African blood made a person black rather than white. Armand was proud of his family’s name and he would do anything to protect it, so when Armand found out their baby was of mixed racial heritage, he quickly assumed Désirée was black and asked her and her baby to leave. He felt like “…he no longer loved her, because of the unconscious injury she had brought upon his home and his name” because of the shame Désirée had brought to his family. He refers “unconscious injury” to the lost of his wife’s ethnicity. All shows that Armand’s pride overcame the love he has for Désirée and therefore he abandoned her and their son for the sake of his family’s