[In the following essay, Owens correlates Elisa Allen's desire for rain with her need for personal fulfillment.]

Of the first story in The Long Valley, “The Chrysanthemums,” Steinbeck wrote: “It is entirely different and is designed to strike without the reader's knowledge. I mean he reads it casually and after it is finished feels that something profound has happened to him although he does not know what nor how” (Life in Letters, p. 91). In light of the eagerness with which critics have rushed to praise this story, calling it “Steinbeck's most artistically successful story,” and “one of the world's great short stories,”¹ it seems that most critics would agree that “something profound” happens in “The Chrysanthemums.” And the great difficulty critics have encountered when trying to explain the “what” and “how” of this story suggests that Steinbeck's design has been very effective, has led, in fact, to what Roy Simmonds refers to as “a small critical industry” grown up around this story.

Like each of the stories in The Long Valley actually set in the valley, “The Chrysanthemums” is about the repression of powerful human impulses, the repression that would be necessary in any would-be Eden set in the fallen world of the valley. And like the subterranean current of the Salinas River that Steinbeck describes in East of Eden, these human urges throb just below the surface of everyday life and occasionally burst through to the surface in sudden floods. This theme of repression (which French labels “frustration”) is introduced in the opening imagery of “The Chrysanthemums” when we are told that “the high grey-flannel fog of winter closed off the Salinas Valley from the sky and from all the rest of the world. On every side it sat like a lid on the mountains and made of the great valley a closed pot” (p. 9). In this fog-lidded valley, it is “a time of quiet and of waiting” (p. 9). We enter here the lifeless winter of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, and the fertilizing rain is not likely to come soon, for, as we are told, “fog and rain do not go together” (p. 9). Like the plowed earth which waits “to receive the rain deeply when it should come,” Elisa Allen cultivates her flower garden in a kind of suspended life, awaiting the fertilizing imagination of the tinker.

The difficulty posed by the “what” and “how” of this story is indicated in the fact that most Steinbeck criticism has tended to touch only briefly upon the story in passing. French is satisfied to call Elisa Allen “the victim of an unscrupulous confidence man,” but he fails to shed any significant light on the story. More recent and comprehensive studies have been achieved in Mordecai Marcus's essay “The Lost Dream of Sex and Childbirth in ‘The Chrysanthemums,’” Elizabeth McMahan's “‘The Chrysanthemums’: Study of a Woman's Sexuality,” and William V. Miller's “Sexuality and Spiritual Ambiguity in ‘The Chrysanthemums.’” As the titles suggest, each of these essays stresses the unmistakable significance in the story of Elisa's sexual frustration. The essays differ, however, about the importance of Elisa's frustrated maternal instinct. In a still more recent article, “The Original Manuscripts of Steinbeck's ‘The Chrysanthemums,’” Roy Simmonds argues against the popular interpretation of Elisa's character, suggesting that “there is a case for suspecting that Elisa is the one who is unable or unwilling to satisfy her partner sexually.”²

According to Marcus's reading of the story, Elisa's unfulfilled yearning for children gives birth to the tremendous current of frustration running through the story. Marcus argues that when the tinker coldly discards the flowers, “her feminine self, her capacity for fructification and childrearing, the very offspring and representative of her body, have been thoughtlessly tossed aside.” McMahan, arguing correctly that no critic “has yet adequately explained the emotional reasons underlying [Elisa's] frustration,” contends that “Elisa's need is definitely sexual, but it does not necessarily have anything to do with a longing for children”; instead, McMahan proposes that Elisa is discontented: “She is a woman bored by her husband, bored by her isolated life on the farm.” Miller, in a more comprehensive and persuasive approach, locates Elisa's dream of fulfillment on three levels: “the conventional, the sexual, and the ‘romantic,’”³ Miller's reading would thus include the possibilities of sexual and maternal frustration (though Miller chooses to stress the former and to downplay the latter), while also accommodating McMahan's theory of “boredom.” There is yet, however, a still more comprehensive basis for the tension and frustration which permeates this story, a basis involving once again the theme of commitment that runs in a steady current through Steinbeck's fiction.

It is obvious that these critics would all agree that “something profound has happened” in “The Chrysanthemums,” and just as obviously they would not agree precisely about what has happened or how it happened. To argue as McMahan and Miller do that Elisa's frustrated yearning for “fructification” does not play a very central role in this story is to ignore the full meaning and impact of the imagery of the story, imagery that introduces and reinforces the theme of procreation in the form of the ploughed land waiting for rain. Elisa, in middle age, is implicitly compared to the plowed furrows in winter, and to say that Elisa is simply bored with her life is to miss the force with which the opening paragraphs establish this parallel and the note of nearly hopeless expectancy dominating the story's atmosphere. At the same time, the theme of repression is very pronounced in the opening imagery and in Steinbeck's description of Elisa's “hard-swept looking little house” and her “over-eager, over-powerful” trimming of last year's flowers. Elisa's response to the tinker is violently sexual once he has made a connection between himself and the chrysanthemums, but only after he has made this vital link between himself and Elisa's “flower-children.” The sexuality of Elisa's response to the tinker becomes unmistakable when she intones, “When the night is dark—why, the stars are sharp-pointed, and there's quiet. Why you rise up and up! Every pointed star gets driven into your body. It's like that. Hot and sharp and—lovely” (p. 18). Finally, Steinbeck has forced the sexual tension of the scene to such a pitch that Elisa becomes a parody of a bitch in heat: “She crouched low like a fawning dog” (p. 18).

While critics have been unanimous in recognizing the theme of repressed sexuality in this story, it is a mistake to attempt, as McMahan does, to limit the story's thematic significance to this alone. In Elisa the sexual and maternal impulses are blended into a single, frustrated urge, a longing for deep fulfillment. It is difficult not to see the “strong new crop” of flowers Elisa nurtures as surrogate children in her barren world. At the same time, the tinker's exotic life does symbolize a kind of escape for Elisa from the barrenness of the farm, an appeal to what Miller terms Elisa's “romantic” dream of fulfillment. All of these needs and urges come together, however, in the single powerful and unfulfilled yearning for the fertilizing potential inherent in deep human contact and commitment, the most significant symbols of which are sex, childbearing, and sacrifice. While the themes of sex and procreation are strong throughout the story, the theme of sacrifice is introduced in the story's conclusion.

After Elisa has seen the discarded flowers—evidence of the tinker's broken faith—she asks her husband, Henry, about the fights he has mentioned earlier. “I've read how they break noses,” she says, “and blood runs down their chests. I've read how the fighting gloves get heavy and soggy with blood” (p. 23). Elisa's sudden interest in the fights which seemed to repulse her earlier has been seen as a rising desire for “vicarious vengeance” upon men, or simple “vindictiveness.”⁴ Such readings seriously undervalue the complexity of the story, however, and of Elisa's emotional response to what has taken place. Although Elisa does ask, “Do the men hurt each other much?” the emphasis here is not upon simple vengeance upon mankind or vicariously upon the tinker; nor does it necessarily indicate Elisa's need for a “sense of dominance over the male” as Roy Simmonds suggests.⁵ Elisa's primary interest is in the blood. Coupled with her strong desire for wine at dinner, this imagery suggests another theme—that of commitment through sacrifice. Blood, as Mac knows well in In Dubious Battle and Joseph Wayne discovers in To a God Unknown, is the supreme symbol of commitment, and wine, of course, calls to mind the supreme Christian sacrifice. Elisa yearns here, in the wake of her abrupt awakening and disappointment, for a kind of futile sacrament—reacting to the arousal and frustration of her deepest needs, Elisa is seeking symbols of commitment in a world of physical, spiritual, and emotional isolation and sterility. Like so many of Steinbeck's characters, she is acting out of a profound loneliness.

“The Chrysanthemums” is Steinbeck's finest story precisely because he does not tell us the “what” or “how” and because the powerful imagery of the story is woven brilliantly into a single fabric with theme and character. Elisa, on her isolated ranch in winter, waiting for the fructifying rain which is not likely to come, matched with a capable but not deeply sensitive husband, is cut off from fulfillment. In this story, the theme of human isolation and commitment central to Of Mice and Men is imbued with a strong current of repressed sexuality and maternity, and the result is the most emotionally forceful and subtly crafted of Steinbeck's stories.

Notes

1. Barbour, “Steinbeck as a Short Story Writer,” p. 112; Mordecai Marcus, “The Lost Dream of Sex and Childbirth in ‘The Chrysanthemums,’” Modern Fiction Studies 11 (Spring 1965): 54.

2. French, John Steinbeck, 1st ed., p. 83; Elizabeth E. McMahan, “‘The Chrysanthemums’: Study of a Woman's Sexuality,” Modern Fiction Studies 14 (1968): 453–58; William V. Miller, “Sexual and Spiritual Ambiguity in ‘The Chrysanthemums,’” in A Study Guide to Steinbeck's “The Long Valley,” ed. Hayashi; Roy S. Simmonds, “The Original Manuscripts of Steinbeck's ‘The Chrysanthemums,’” Steinbeck Quarterly 7 (Summer-Fall 1974): 107.

3. Marcus, “Lost Dream,” p. 57; McMahan, “‘The Chrysanthemums,’” pp. 453–55; Miller, “Sexual and Spiritual Ambiguity,” p. 72.

4. McMahan, “‘The Chrysanthemums,’” p. 458; Marcus, “Lost Dream,” p. 57.

5. Simmonds, “Original Manuscripts,” p. 108.