28 pages • 56 minutes read
Eugenia CollierMarigolds
Fiction | Short Story | YA | Published in 1969A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Marigolds
Marigolds symbolize hope, love, resilience, and beauty within the text. Miss Lottie’s marigolds are described as “the strangest part of the picture. Certainly, they did not fit in with the crumbling decay of the rest of the yard” (5). Though they are things of beauty in dreary surroundings, the children hate the marigolds. Despite Miss Lottie’s poverty and hopeless circumstances, she has a stubborn resilience that makes her plant and tend her marigolds fastidiously.
The marigolds are examples of beauty and love in an otherwise barren environment, and that seems to earn the hatred of the children. Growing marigolds in the face of hopeless circumstances is defiant, and the final destruction of them by Lizabeth seems to have destroyed Miss Lottie’s hope. Despite Lizabeth’s apologies to Miss Lottie, she never grows marigolds again. The story does not end at that hopeless point, though, because the narrator states, “I too have planted marigolds” (13), hinting that, like Miss Lottie, Lizabeth’s life also needed tangible symbols of hope, love, and beauty.
The Cage of Poverty
The motif of poverty as a cage is used to show the bleakness and sterility of the lives of the people in Lizabeth’s community, as well as the impossibility of escape. Poverty has decimated Lizabeth’s own family, scattering her siblings and sending her mother and father away from home for most of the day and into the night. Poverty is described as the “cage in which we were all trapped, and our hatred of it was still the vague, undirected restlessness of the zoo-bred flamingo who knows instinctually that nature created it to be free” (2). Later, the narrator reflects that as children, none knew how thick were the “bars of our cage.”
The cage motif is employed to emphasize the loss of control and agency that comes from poverty and the difficulty—perhaps impossibility—of freeing oneself. The loss of freedom and dignity is both explicitly and implicitly stated within the text; in particular, it is shown through Lizabeth’s father, who has lost his identity as a provider and his self-esteem because he cannot provide for his family. In juxtaposition to Lizabeth’s father, her mother is trapped in domestic servitude to a white family from morning until late at night to ensure her family survives. Both characters illustrate the cage of poverty and its painful impact. Lizabeth’s actions also show the ripple effect of being trapped in the cage of poverty as she struggles to reconcile the circumstances of her life, which leads her to destroy the marigolds, an inexplicable bit of beauty amid much hardship.
Dust
Dust symbolizes the barrenness of Lizabeth’s childhood, and it is introduced in the very first paragraph. The text says:
When I think of the home town 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 (1).
The dust is pervasive, draping Lizabeth’s community in a pall that is both physically and emotionally painful. As such, it represents more than just a physical barrenness but also a bleakness that eradicates hope for the future. In the context of the Great Depression, dust has connotations of the Dust Bowl in the Great Plains region, long a symbol of America’s despair and suffering during the period.
Just as the story opens with dust, it also closes with dust in the final lines: “For one doesn’t have to be ignorant and poor to find that life is barren as the dusty roads of our town. And I too have planted marigolds” (13). While dust symbolizes barrenness and a loss of hope, the remedy seems to be the resilience that comes from cultivating beauty in that barrenness.
