Analysis
Eugenia Collier’s short story “Marigolds” is about Lizabeth, a girl of fourteen who is growing up in a very poor Black community in rural Maryland during the Great Depression.
Lizabeth is struggling with her burgeoning adulthood, her own place in the world, and her community’s difficult economic circumstances. When these feelings coalesce and Lizabeth lashes out at an elderly woman in her community by destroying her prized marigolds, she feels her childhood recede as she is overtaken by the remorse, understanding, and compassion of adulthood.
Collier uses a number of stylistic choices to convey Lizabeth’s coming-of-age journey. Because the story is presented as a recollection narrated by a present-day version of Lizabeth, the narrator is able to provide a broad view of the protagonist’s emotional development. In the penultimate paragraph, Lizabeth acknowledges the role her adult vocabulary plays in her interpretation of the story’s events: “the years have put words to the things I knew in that moment.” In some sense, this pivotal coming-of-age moment has two distinct phases. First, she experiences the moment, intuitively sensing that a shift is occurring within her. Second, years later, she reflects back on that moment from a mature perspective, articulating its nature and significance. These two phases are formally embodied by the story’s protagonist and narrator, respectively.
At the sentence level, Collier’s word choice contributes heavily to her world-building. In the story’s first sentences, she sets the scene by describing the dust using evocative, highly sensory imagery:
When I think of the hometown of my youth, all that I seem to remember is dust—the brown, crumbly dust of late summer—arid, sterile dust that gets into the eyes and makes them water, gets into the throat and between the toes of bare brown feet. I don’t know why I should remember only the dust. Surely there must have been lush green lawns and paved streets under leafy shade trees somewhere in town; but memory is an abstract painting—it does not present things as they are, but rather as they feel.
In this passage, Collier’s imagery evokes sight, taste, and touch. The description of the pervasive dust is symbolic in at least two ways. The haziness of Lizabeth’s environment reflects the ambiguous border she occupies between the worlds of childhood and adulthood. From another perspective, the dryness and dustiness is symbolic of the town’s impoverished state. Against this arid, lifeless context, Miss Lottie’s marigolds stand out all the more as a symbol of beauty and hope.
In the above quotation, Collier’s metaphor of memory as an abstract painting is an example of another tool she employs in “Marigolds.” The story is replete with visual metaphors, which the author uses to add conceptual depth to the story without resorting to abstract language. One notable example likens the chaos of adolescence to a skein of variegated yarn. “Joy and rage and wild animal gladness and shame become tangled together in the multicolored skein of fourteen-going-on-fifteen,” Lizabeth muses.
What makes this metaphor especially interesting is how it contrasts with the story’s arc. Lizabeth, struggling to make sense of this figurative tangle, turns to destruction. A skein of yarn, by contrast, is a tool of construction. To highlight the chaos, discomfort, conflict, and promise of adolescence, Collier deftly allows Lizabeth to occupy both constructive and destructive elements simultaneously. The potential of a skein of yarn, however tangled it may be, is that it will ultimately be knit into something orderly and complete. This resembles the promise of adolescence: one might ultimately grow into a state of orderly maturity, despite the chaos and disorder of youth.
One of Collier’s...
(This entire section contains 847 words.)
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central concerns in the story is the nature of innocence. This concern comes to the fore in the story’s climax, when Lizabeth’s episode of destruction gives way to a widened consciousness. In the aftermath of Lizabeth’s outburst, she is overcome with remorse and shame at her own cruelty. When Miss Lottie finds her crying in the marigold patch, Lizabeth finally sees Miss Lottie clearly for the first time—she is no longer the imposing villain she has appeared to be throughout the narrator’s childhood. She is just a woman who is living in difficult circumstances and trying her hardest to cultivate some beauty for herself.
In this moment, Lizabeth senses the loss of her innocence and begins to better understand her transition to womanhood. In one sense, innocence can be equated to naivety. As Lizabeth has now grown enough to understand the emotional burdens of adulthood—which include remorse but also compassion—she is no longer free to act with the thoughtlessness of a child. In a related sense, innocence means the absence of culpability in a situation with tangible consequences. Because Lizabeth has just perpetrated an act of intentional cruelty, the “end of innocence” amounts to the guilt and shame associated with inflicting deliberate harm on others. Thus, the story suggests that maturity means facing—and feeling—the emotional consequences of one’s actions.
