Where Are You Going Where Have You Been Comparison

In “The Flowers”, Alice Walker explores the woods through the eyes of a little girl named Myop, but she soon realizes the world isn’t as nice as flowers. In “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been”, Joyce Carol Oates follows a young girl named Connie who is focused on others and her own appearance, until she is introduced to the world in a unexpected way. Both Walker and Oates use young girls to show the harsher sides of the world and how their childhood changes to adulthood in different ways.
The main thing that Myop and Connie have in common is that they are both females, but their looks and the way the live are totally different. Myop is a ten-year-old African American girl who lives in a sharecropper cabin, which shows that she is in

Myops theme is the loss of innocence, which she loses at the end when she leaves her flowers with the dead man. She lost her innocence because she was ten-years-old and came across a harsh death, which her flowers could represent. She lays down the flowers, her innocence, and leaves it behind in the gloomy area that she came upon. Connies theme on the other hand is being taken from childhood to adulthood. She is taken from a place that she knows and introduced to a more harsher reality. She is taken by Arnold Friend and most likely raped. She leaves behind everything and goes with this strange man who does not seem human. Both Myop and Connie leave known places to unknown places. It is also unknown what actually happens to both the ending have cliffhangers for us to assume what happened. “And the summer was over” (Walker), and “…so much land that Connie had never seen before and did not recognize except to know that she was going to it” (Oates).
Regardless of the many differences between Myop and Connie they could not be protected from the harsh things in the world. They each left something behind that was so familiar to them. They may have gone through different situations, but they each lost something within