Why is Lizabeth confused at the end of "Marigolds"?
In Eugenia Collier's short story “Marigolds,” the narrator, Lizabeth, hears her father crying in the night. He cannot take care of his family as he wants. There is simply no work for him, and even though his wife works, he feels helpless and useless. So he weeps. Lizabeth is confused and upset. Her father has always been a strong man, a rock in her life. She feels like her world is flying to pieces, and she is terrified and confused. She has no idea where she fits in, and she is scared about what the present and the future will hold for her and her family.
As a young adolescent, Lizabeth does not know how to channel her feelings, and they turn to anger. In her pain and fear and confusion, she wants to destroy something, and the only thing she can think of is Miss Lottie's marigolds....
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She falls upon the flowers, allowing all her hopelessness, bewilderment, and fear to take full reign as she tramples and uproots the marigolds.
Then Lizabeth catches sight of Miss Lottie's face. The flowers that the old woman has tended with so much care for so long, the only beauty in her wretched life, are gone. Lizabeth knows at that moment what it is like to lose one's innocence. She is ashamed, for she now sees a deeper reality than she did before. She comes to know Miss Lottie and herself on a new level. Her confusion fades into the background and is replaced by grief and compassion.
What can you say about Lizabeth's character at the end of "Marigolds"?
At the end of "Marigolds," Lizabeth grows up. She had been a child earlier in the story, innocent, accepting the world of poverty in the Great Depression that was all she knew. But throughout the story, she is beginning to enter adolescence, occupying the strange place between participating in childhood activities, such as throwing stones at the elderly Miss Lottie and her marigolds, but at the same time finding these antics suddenly strange and silly.
Lizabeth hears her father cry at the end of the story in his bedroom with his wife, her mother, who supports the family. She realizes in a way she hasn't before that her family is poor and that her father is ashamed at not having been able to find work for a long time.
Lizabeth doesn't know what to do with this new knowledge and the feelings whirling inside her. Her anger breaks out recklessly. As she realizes how unfairly her father has been treated and feels rage that her mother, who works all the time, hasn't been there for her, she takes it out on the one piece of beauty she knows, destroying Miss Lottie's brilliant and lovingly tended marigolds. Afterwards, seeing how she has hurt Miss Lottie, she feels remorse.
At the point of remorse, as her older self understands looking back, Lizabeth emerges from her childhood innocence, the older self stating:
Innocence involves an unseeing acceptance of things at face value, an ignorance of the area below the surface. In that humiliating moment I looked beyond myself and into the depths of another person. This was the beginning of compassion, and one cannot have both compassion and innocence.
Lizabeth learns that you have to accept the fact that life is painful, which is a loss of innocence, to be able to understand another person's pain. That is the beginning of compassion, and compassion is the beginning of maturity. We see Lizabeth mature as she accepts the pain of her parents' lives and of what she has done to Miss Lottie.
We can say about Lizabeth that she learns to understand suffering, feels anger and pain, acts out, experiences remorse and compassion for another person, and through this process, begins to become an adult.