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The Lion King, “Little Red Riding Hood,” and “Hansel and Gretel” are all mildly disturbing examples of young ones forced to grow up before their time. Whether the conflict involves losing a loved one, realizing your grandmother was eaten by a wolf, or being abandoned in the woods to the hands of a cannibalistic witch with a candy house, authors represent loss of innocence in most of what is read throughout literature. Alice Walker uses events from her childhood to pull together a heartbreaking story of a little girl who unwillingly grows up too soon. Myop, the daughter of Sharecroppers in the post Civil War south, is picking flowers in the woods near her home when she stumbles upon the mangled corpse of a black man. There she finds the reminisce …show more content…
Loeb states, “Walker’s two-page story is clearly divided into two parallel sections, each characterized by its special vocabulary. The first section of the story abounds with positive expression: The air has a certain “keenness,” and the sun is “warm” each day is “beautiful” and experienced as a “golden surprise”” (Loeb 1 par 1). Myop is young, therefore in the beginning everything is bright, the curtain she is hidden behind shows only happiness and youth.Towards the middle of the story, Walker shifts the mood of the story represented by vocabulary that indicates an uneasiness in the story. The “keen” day turns to “damp.” She also uses “strangeness” and “gloom” to represent this shift. (Loeb 1 par 1). Walker uses specific words to indicate Myop’s location to symbolize the time period and how it affects the character. Loeb writes, “We are in a rural setting: there are chickens, a pig pen, a hen-house, fences, a spring, and a smokehouse. Myop’s sharecropper family is living a cabin with “rusty boards” indicating that they are poor. The daughter of a sharecropper from Georgia….Myop’s “dark brown” hand signals her race” (Loeb 1, par 3 and 4). The setting, the mention of their sharecropper house, and Myop’s hand color indicates the time period and location where Myop is from and how it affects the plot of the story (Loeb 1, par 3 and 4). Another device Walker …show more content…
“The summer is drawing to a close, for the harvest is underway. Judging by an inventory of the crops-corn, cotton, peanuts, and squash…” (Loeb 1, par 2) The summer in the beginning represents Myop’s youth and vitality. As the physical summer ends for Myop so begins the decline of her metaphorical summer. Autumn or the harvest season that is beginning represents a reaping of Myop’s innocence. Another symbol Walker uses within “The Flowers” is
Paulo Coelho’s novel The Alchemist and the Disney film The Lion King directed by Allers and Minkoff,
The recall of the memory is with great certainty, giving the tone an air of extreme bliss, the very childlike imagination that Walcott wants to portray. The elevated diction employed, conversely, seeks to remind the reader that it is a flashback from an aged perspective. This, at further lengths, portrays “XIV” as more than just a poem recounting an escapade of two brothers, but that it is the speaker reminiscing, giving it a brooding tone as it explores the process of growing old simultaneously through the lens of the young boy and aged man. The details in the poem,
Autumn is used to depict those who pose a threat towards other people, it is commonly used throughout the novel to describe those associated with the circus. The circus is seen as evil to the boys
Sandra Cisneros writes a memoir through the eyes of an eleven year old. Turning eleven happens to be a tragic day for the main character, Rachel. Through various literary techniques such as hyperbole, simile, and syntax, Rachel is characterized. Rachel is a fresh turning eleven year old who finds herself in an awful situation on her birthday. Forced to wear a raggedy old sweater that doesn’t belong to her, she makes it defiantly clear her feelings towards the clothing item, and we see this through use of hyperboles. Rachel describes the sweater as ugly and too “stretched out like you could use it for a jump rope.” This extreme exaggeration demonstrates the fire within Rachel. She is a defiant and pouty little girl who out of stubbornness has to defy the sweater in her mind. “It’s maybe a thousand years old”, she says to herself in act to degrade the filthy red sweater even more. The sweater to Rachel has become an eternal battle of ages. She is torn on whether or not to stand up and act bigger th...
cold, harsh, wintry days, when my brothers and sister and I trudged home from school burdened down by the silence and frigidity of our long trek from the main road, down the hill to our shabby-looking house. More rundown than any of our classmates’ houses. In winter my mother’s riotous flowers would be absent, and the shack stood revealed for what it was. A gray, decaying...
In the short story, “Marigolds”, by Eugenia Collier a 14 year old girl, named Lizabeth, lives in a shanty-town in rural Maryland during the Great Depression. Because she lives in such poverty, she doesn’t have much to look forward to. Although it may seem a little early, Lizabeth is forced to grow up because she can’t afford to act like a child. Eugenia Collier shows that Lizabeth is forced to grow up because of poverty and racism.
The Catcher in the Rye is not all horror of this sort. There is a wry humor in this sixteen-year-old's trying to live up to his height, to drink with men, to understand mature sex and why he is still a virgin at his age. His affection for children is spontaneous and delightful. There are few little girls in modern fiction as charming and lovable as his little sister, Phoebe. Altogether this is a book to be read thoughtfully and more than once. It is about an unusually sensitive and intelligent boy; but, then, are not all boys unusual and worthy of understanding? If they are bewildered at the complexity of modern life, unsure of themselves, shocked by the spectacle of perversity and evil around them - are not adults equally shocked by the knowledge that even children cannot escape this contact and awareness?
The end of child innocence is a significant part of transitioning into young adulthood. This is illustrated in “Marigolds,” a short story written by Eugenia Collier, that takes place in a small town trapped in poverty during the Great Depression. The main character Lizabeth is a fourteen-year-old girl who is playing with her brother and neighborhood friends and just being kids when she simultaneously encounters an experience that teach about compassion, which eventually helps her step into adulthood. Through Lizabeth’s childhood experience, Collier portrays that maturity is based on compassion and overcoming the innocence of childhood.
Children have often been viewed as innocent and innocent may be a nicer way to call children naive. Since children’s lives are so worry free they lack the knowledge of how to transition from being a child to becoming an adolescent. Their lack of knowledge may be a large part of their difficulties growing up, which could be a few rough years for many. In books like the boy in the striped pajamas the story is told from the point of view of a little boy, this way we get a full view of how innocent he is. In this book the writer shows the reader first hand how a child viewed the holocaust and how his innocence cost him his life. Then in books like the perks of being a wallflower Charlie is a teen whom is struggling with the transition from being a child to becoming an adolescent. In this book the writer gives a first hand look at how difficult it can be to transition into an adolescent. Charlie has many difficulties in this book; he is in search of his identity and how to fit in.
"To Autumn." Brooklyn College English Department. Brooklyn College, 19 Feb. 2009. Web. 18 Dec. 2013. .
Although imagery and symbolism does little to help prepare an expected ending in “The Flowers” by Alice Walker, setting is the singular element that clearly reasons out an ending that correlates with the predominant theme of how innocence disappears as a result of facing a grim realism from the cruel world. Despite the joyous atmosphere of an apparently beautiful world of abundant corn and cotton, death and hatred lies on in the woods just beyond the sharecropper cabin. Myop’s flowers are laid down as she blooms into maturity in the face of her fallen kinsman, and the life of summer dies along with her innocence. Grim realism has never been so cruel to the innocent children.
It is amazing how a seemingly educated woman that has won Oscar awards for her documentaries, could possibly be so far off base in her review of the Disney movie “The Lion King”. Margaret Lazarus has taken a movie made for the entertainment of children and turned it into something that is racist, sexist and stereotypes gender roles. She uses many personal arguments to review the movie but offers few solutions. The author is well organized but she lacks alternate points of view and does not use adequate sources. Lazarus utilizes the statement at the end of her review that “the Disney Magic entranced her children, but they and millions of other children were given hidden messages that could only do them and us harm” (118). She makes her point by saying that “the Disney Magic reinforces and reproduces bigoted and stereotyped views of minorities and women in our society” (Lazarus 117). She makes comparisons such as elephant graveyards are like ghettos (Lazarus 118). Other lines of reasoning Lazarus gives us are about Whoopie Goldberg using inner city dialect, the villain Scar being gay, and only those born to privilege can bring about change (118).
"She skipped lightly from hen house to pigpen". This shows how happy Myop is in this setting, we know she feels safe here, "She felt light and good in the warm sun" Her innocence produces an excitement to the reader as it gives the character and the text somewhere to go. We learn that Myop is ten and is African American, however Walker does not present the reader with clear facts but instead reveals it to us. " The stick clutched in her dark brown hand", from the information given she allows the reader to form a visual image of Myop. Walker also highlights the setting around Myop, playing on the character's senses.
In the short story “The Flowers” by Alice Walker, she uses the motif of figurative blindness to dramatize Myop’s loss of innocence. Myop’s name is short for “Myopia,” which is the inability to see things closely, and in Myop’s case, the inability to grasp the deeper meaning of something. This metaphor is brought into play to show Myop’s naivety and innocence in the beginning of the story. For example, when Myop “skipped lightly” and “nothing existed for her but her song,” Alice Walker is emphasizing Myop’s naivety because she has no idea what horrors are going on around her. Instead, Myop is only focused on her happy outing.
In this Alice Walker story, the reader meets a girl named Celie. In this novel, Walker takes the reader on a journey through much of Celie’s life. While taking the reader through this tale, Walker draws attention to a number of social aspects during this time period. Through Cilie’s life, Walker brings to light the abuse and mistreatment of African American women from 1910 through the 1940’s. “Women were also regarded as less important than men – both Black and white Black women double disadvantage.