What symbolism is present in John Steinbeck's "The Chrysanthemums"?

Elisa Allen’s frustrations about her life dominate “The Chrysanthemums” by John Steinbeck. As the protagonist, Elisa wants more from life. She has a good husband who works hard to provide a good life. As in many marriages, the communication falls short between husband and wife,

Symbols

Chrysanthemums and her children

Throughout the story, Steinbeck uses the chrysanthemums as a symbol. Elisa and Henry have no children. The beautiful flowers that she grows with tenderness and love have become her children. She shields them by placing a fence around them. Part of her care includes protecting them from insects:

No aphids, no sow bugs or snails or cutworms…her terrier fingers destroyed such pests before they could get started.

These vermin represent natural harm to the flowers; and, just as any good mother, she removes them before they can harm her children. 

Elisa longs for more in her life. She is sexually and emotionally unfulfilled. The chrysanthemums represent her desire for more. Her link to life has become her garden rather than her husband.

Her husband tries to communicate his feelings to Elisa but falls short.

“At it again,” he said…”I wish that you’d work out in the orchard and raise some apples that big.”

Although her husband tries to compliment her work, Henry does not see the frustration that Eliza feels about her life and her need for intimacy.

The repairman and Elisa’s awakening

When the tinker comes in his wagon, Elisa does not want to talk to him. Cleverly, he sees her interest in the flowers and builds a rapport with Elisa in that way. As the man talks to Elisa, the repairman suggests that he take some of her seeds to one of his customers. She is delighted to provide the seeds in a red pot. Instantly, Elisa begins to feel excited and eager.

Her explanation to the repairman about growing the flowers has a sexual connotation.

"It’s when you’re picking off the buds you don’t want. Everything goes right down to your fingertips. You can feel it. When you’re like that you can’t do anything wrong. Do you see that? Can you understand that?"

As she describes her planting hands to the repairman, Elisa kneels on the ground looking up at him. Sexual feelings rise in her breasts. Everything about the man draws Elisa to him. His lifestyle, his body (she almost touches his torn trousers). This passionate connection stimulates Elisa to try to relate to her husband on their date that night.

The red pot and Elisa’s loss

Elisa delights in providing the seeds in the red pot for the repairman’s customer. She provides rigid instructions about the care for the precious cargo in the pot. All of her senses are aroused as she talks to him.

Readying herself for the night out becomes a slow, sensual experience. She is rewarded by her husband’s surprise at how pretty she looks. He uses the word "strong" to describe the change in her, and Elisa agrees with him.

As they go into town for the date, Elisa notices a "dark speck" on the road ahead. Immediately, she knows what it is. The repairman dumped out the seeds and flowers and kept her red pot. Elisa feels defeated. In her anger and hurt, she suggests that she might like to go to the boxing matches and see the violence.

The red pot was kept by the repairman, but the important flowers were dumped. To Elisa, this meant that they (the repairman and Elisa) had no connection but what was in her own mind. Symbolically, his dishonesty cancels the strength that she gained from their encounter. As the car goes down the road, Emily turns her face away from Henry and begins to cry because now she feels “like an old woman.”

Describe the main symbols and how do their meanings change in "The Chrysanthemums" by John Steinbeck?"

In John Steinbeck's "The Chrsanthemums," chief among the  symbols are the chrsanthemums, of course, pots, the fence, and the tinker man, but there are others, as well.  In the exposition, Steinbeck's initial description of the Salinas Valley as a "closed pot" establishes the mood as a stultifying one. In the first paragraph, there are three mentions of yellow, a color associated with death:

the yellow stubble fields seemed to be bathed in pale cold sunshine...The thick willow scrub along the river flamed with sharp and positive yellow leaves.

The "closed pot" symbolizes the limited existence of the attrative young wife of Henry Allen, Elisa.  While she and her husband seem to get along well, their conversations with one another are not in the familiar tone of lovers.  Clearly, there is no passion in Elisa's life, an unfulfillment.  Like her chrsanthemums, she has the flowering of her womanhood cut and the blooms do not come when they should naturally.  The symbolism here relates to Elisa's being childless and without fruition to her love.

When the tinker comes along with his mismatched horse and donkey and a "rangy" dog, symbolic of an unordered life, Elisa falls prey to his insincere pretense of interest in the chrysanthemums.  Having been deprived of socialization, Elisa falls prey to his lures when he feigns interest in her flowers as he leans over the fence to her.  She invites him into her yard on the other side of the barrier between them.  Having removed her hat and her gloves, symbolic of freeing herself from formality, she describes the care of the flowers in a most sensual manner:

She was kneeling on the ground looking up at him.  Her breast swelled passionately....Elisa's voice grew husky...

As she describes the night, there is a climactic passion to her words and the sexual overtones cannot be missed:

When the night is dark--why, the stars are sharp-pointed,...Why you rise up and up!  Every pointed star gets driven into your body.  It's like that.  Hot and sharp and--lovely.

Still kneeling, Elisa's hand go toward the leg of the man's trouser's, but she drops it to the ground in her frustration.  When she stands, she is ashamed at her display of sexually-charged emotion.  Then, she goes into the house to find a pot for the man to repair, closing herself to her life of routine again.  While he repairs the pot, Elisa tells him she can do the same job, hoping to reestablish her position as an equal after her having looked like "a fawning dog."

After the tinker departs with the chrysanthemums, the woman scrubs herself until her skin is scratched and red, as though to rid her thoughts of what has transpired.  She puts on "the dress which was the symbol of her prettiness," Steinbeck writes.  She is yet a woman, a woman who, waiting on her husband, looks out over the willow-line that is still

yellow with frosted leaves so that under the high grey fog....This was the only color in the grey afternoon.

Like the "closed pot," the fog does not permit any extension. For, in fog, one's view is myopic.  And, it is this myopia that her husband possesses.  When Elisa "looks different" to him, he cannot understand why.  He does not know how to react to her.  As they drive to town, Elisa spots another symbol:  the tossed chrysanthemums on the road that the tinker travels.  Symbolic of her unfulfilled passion, they are cast aside.  She turns away from the tinker as they pass him. Realizing that her life is reduced to "petty pace of day to day," she tells her husband, "It will be enough if we can have wine.  It will be plenty."  The wine is symbolic of a softening of the edges of reality, if only briefly.  Yet, she turns up her collar and cries, hiding her emotion from the man who would not understand.

What effects do the symbols have in "The Chrysanthemums"?

Steinbeck structures the meaning of the story through symbols, so that their combined effect is to understand Elisa Allen as a woman who is frustrated and unhappy, unappreciated as a sexual being by her husband, and losing understanding of her own self worth. The Salinas Valley is described as isolated, just as Elisa feels isolated.  She wears “heavy leather gloves” because she is no longer understood as a sensual person, now digging in the earth and growing flowers as a way to express a femininity otherwise lost. Giving the tinker man the chrysanthemums becomes, symbolically, a very sexual act. The appearance of the flowers, a golden center surrounded by pointy petals, resembles the description she provides of a starry night, which is very sexual in its detail:  “When the sky 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…Hot and sharp and—lovely.”  When she finds he has tossed the pot of chrysanthemums away, she returns to her old self, only feeling even worse, “crying weakly—like an old woman.”

What are the "yonic symbols" in "The Chrysanthemums"?

Huh!  Well, I learned something myself today!  I had never heard this word, ever,  but I think the explanations are probably right.  At the time Steinbeck was writing this, he was spending a good deal of time with Joseph Campbell, who was then writing his own book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces.  Steinbeck, Campbell, and Ed Ricketts (John's marine biologist friend, and inspiration for Doc in Cannery Row) spent long hours discussing myth and sybolism.

There is not much Steinbeck more than myths of the world.  It makes perfect sense to me that he would have absorded this idea into The Chrysanthemums. 

What are the "yonic symbols" in "The Chrysanthemums"?

I really like this question!

As "mejwestut" explained, yonic symbols pertain to femininity and can be shown in literature as containers of some kind. This symbolism is first seen when the story opens: "The high gray-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." By comparing the valley where Elisa lives to a "closed pot", it suggests that Elisa's life is one of confinement. Elisa must exist within the narrow limits of her world on the ranch.

Another example of this type of symbolism would be the flower pot that Elisa uses for the chrysanthemums she gives the tinker. Elisa notices later that the tinker kept the pot but threw away the flowers. The flower pot represents the practical view the men have versus the aesthetic view Elisa has. Beauty is important to Elisa, so the flowers would have been what she valued. The flower pot is what the tinker values (representing practicality), so he tosses the flowers and keeps the pot so he can sell it to someone else. Elisa knows she has no one in her life who shares her feelings, making her feel even lonelier.

What are the "yonic symbols" in "The Chrysanthemums"?

This is a Sanskrit word. A yonic symbol is a representation of feminitity and reproductive power.  Represented in literature by cups, cauldrons, chalices, goblets, wells, circles, hoops, and other containers.