The Fiction Story Marigolds

In “Marigolds,” Eugenia W. Collier describes a young girl that came to understand the dire financial situation her family was in to illustrate the loss of innocence. Lizabeth thinks that she was living a perfect life, but she soon finds that it was just a fantasy that she herself concocted. Collier uses ordinary symbols, a simple title, and a descriptive style to get across her message that everyone needs to have hope despite how powerless they are.

Eugenia Collier uses diction and imagery to create the voice of her narrator, Lizabeth, in her short story “Marigolds.” Lizabeth has a negative tone in the beginning of the story. The imagery she stated, “When I think of my hometown, 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 (Collier)...” proves that she is unhappy to be in that place. There are a lot of reasons why she is unhappy in that place and one of them is poverty. Lizabeth hinted that one of their struggles was poverty when she said “Poverty is a cage in which we all are trapped, and our hatred of it was still the vague, undirected restlessness of the zoo-bred flamingo who knows that nature created him to fly flee (Collier).” Lizabeth established the juxtaposition when she said, “And one other thing I remember, another incongruency of memory-a brilliant splash of sunny yellow against the dust-Miss Lottie’s marigolds (Collier).” She is stating that Miss Lottie’s marigolds were the only beautiful thing in that unsightly place. Those marigolds did not give her a pleasant feeling because she thought that they were too beautiful to exist in that kind of place. Miss Lottie was believed to be a witch when Lizabeth was young but she knows she is mature enough not believe in those things anymore. Their first encounter resulted in Lizabeth and her company destroying some of Miss Lottie’s marigolds and they left Miss Lottie and John Burke, her son, enraged. When she got home and went to her room hoping to rest after a long day, she overheard her parents talking. She heard her dad say, “ Twenty two years, Maybelle, twenty two years…and I got nothing for you, nothing, nothing (Collier).” She then realized that her father got fired from his job and was not taking it too well after what they have been through. Maybelle, Lizabeth’s mother, attempted to comfort her husband by saying, “Honey, you took good care of us when you had it. Ain’t nobody got nothing nowadays (Collier).” After a while of discussion Lizabeth’s father began to sob, loudly and painfully. At this point, LIzabeth is confused because she never heard a man cry before. She did not even know that men cry.

Eugenia Collier, the author of the short story Marigolds makes great use of literary devices such as imagery, diction, flashback, and juxtaposition in a way that creates a voice for the narrator that conveys both the regret over, and possibly the longing for her childhood. The diction, that is, the vocabulary choice is expertly combined with imagery, or the unique descriptions and sensory details, in order to allow the reader to formulate the experiences and the surroundings of the narrator's childhood in their imaginations. Flashback is used to allow the narrator to not only explain how she viewed the events of her past as a child, but to compare these views with her adult feelings of the same events. Juxtaposition aids in further explaining the connection between the setting and emotions of the main character, creating a better picture of the narrator’s life. These elements all combine to construct a narrative that effectively conveys the coming of age theme.

Living in poverty and having to face one’s crumbling society is extremely stressful. In Eugenia Collier’s short story, “Marigolds,” the main character, Lizabeth, and the other citizens of the town she lives in, including her parents, her friends, and Miss Lottie, must learn to cope with that stress, and in Lizabeth’s case, learn how to deal with the effects of maturation. The different types of conflict within “Marigolds” are man versus man, man versus society, and man versus self because Lizabeth has to face peer pressure, the living conditions brought by the Great Depression, as well as the development of her own emotions.

I really liked it when someone connected “Marigolds” with “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings”. They said that the simile with the old, inedible biscuit also referred to Miss Lottie. I had never realized how similar Miss Lottie and Marguerite were. Miss Lottie really was unwanted and unappreciated like an old biscuit. But, the difference between her and Marguerite was that Miss Lottie actually tried to make something out of her unwanted and unappreciated life. She made her marigolds in hopes that she could stop being unwanted and unappreciated, and become a happy, wanted person, but the theme of this story was to look beneath the surface in people, so, of course, Elizabeth saw that she looked the same, and so did her house, so she still treated

She can’t fully comprehend why she detests these flowers, and so all she knows is that they “did not make sense to her.” The child in her only has insight into her own world, and not into the worlds of others around her. Despite the marigolds being too troublesome for her to understand, she remains ignorant and does not try to seek any further meaning behind them. With Lizabeth in this naïve state, she has not yet felt the conflict between the child and the woman in her; she’s too ignorant at this point to attempt to develop an understanding for Miss Lottie and her flowers. After Lizabeth and the other kids launch the first attack on the marigolds, invoking great rage in Miss Lottie, Lizabeth feels a sudden urge to antagonize the old woman even further. Chanting vicious phrases at her, Lizabeth feels that she, “lost [her] head entirely, mad with the power of inciting such rage [in Miss Lottie].” Lizabeth has been taken over by a childish sense of pride after provoking Miss Lottie, showing her selfishness and lack of compassion. Being the child that she is, Lizabeth decides to further irritate Miss Lottie, only thinking about herself and how to ease her boredom. She is only concerned about her own little world. This sudden act of cruelty to Miss Lottie reveals

A child holds innocence from a young age and does not understand the importance of having compassion. As a child's innocence gradually fades away due to maturity, he or she transforms into a compassionate person. In a coming of age short story called, “Marigolds,” the author Eugenia Collier writes about a series of events about a young girl, named Lizabeth, develops into a compassionate person. Lizabeth narrates these events in a flashback that involves the marigolds of her neighbor, Miss Lottie. Miss Lottie's marigolds represented the essence of hope in the midst of the town, filled with dust and dirt. Despite the dirt and dusty roads that were accompanied by the house, Miss Lottie decided to plant her marigolds. The effect of economic struggles the townspeople go through causes Lizabeth to destroy Miss Lottie's marigolds. Throughout the short story,

The symbol of marigolds represent the innocence that a child has, specifically how that innocence can be ripped apart and how empathy can replace innocence. The symbol of a potted geranium represents the complex emotions that replace innocence after a person becomes an adult. Collier shows the reader that this transition is tough and will come with many challenges, ultimately resulting in a loss of innocence that will shape the readers whole life. These ideas are very relatable to many teenagers, as they see old friends drift away because they “just aren’t the same person anymore” and depression in teenagers due to severe challenges is becoming increasingly common. For many, the loss of innocence is full of fear and confusion, but the resulting gain of empathy is

The transformations in people are caused by a variety of circumstances. Within the variety of these circumstances, stress is the most influential one. In Eugenia Collier’s short story Marigolds, it tells the narrative of a young African-American girl living in rural Maryland. Due to her frustration with life, she destroys Miss Lottie’s marigolds. In the story Marigolds, the author uses the narrator’s transformation and characterization to convey that identity is only found in times of crisis.

The 1st and most imporant theme in the story was when the kids went to pick on ms.lottie cause she stayed in a old beat-up dull brown house but she had a small beautify garden. In the garden there was freash planted pretty orange, red, and yellow flowers. These flowers was called marigolds.some evidence show that they kids threw rocks at ms.lottie and

“The Flowers” by Alice Walker is a short story written in the 1970’s. The story focuses on Myop, a ten year old African American girl who loves to explore the land in which she lives. Carefree and naïve, Myop decides to travel further away from her ‘Sharecropper cabin’ and travels deep inside the woods to unfamiliar land where she discovers the decomposed body of an African American man. It is then Myop quickly grows up and suddenly becomes aware of the world in which she lives. The story relies on setting and symbolism to convey the theme of departing innocence.

Most of the time there is a moment in life where one realizes they have lost all innocence and gained some compassion.  “Marigolds” shows how one young girl transferred from a child to young adult through her life experiences.  Throughout this story another young, but at the same time old in her prime, lady’s experiences are revealed:  the author’s.  In this short story, “Marigolds,” Eugenia Collier’s subconscious is unmasked through symbolism, diction, and Lizabeth’s actions.

She does this when she writes about the marigolds not being able to grow, other flowers only growing in certain neighborhoods, and how Mrs. MacTeer gardening kept her from knowing that her own daughter was touched. Morrison uses the symbol of marigolds and other flowers to convey oppression causing the destruction of one’s innocence by writing about how the

Sometimes one has to go through alienation and isolation to reach a transformation. In both “Marigolds” by Eugenia W. Collier and “Miss Brill” by Katherine Mansfield, the characters transform majorly due to their feelings of isolation. Marigolds is about a woman called Lizabeth recalling her coming of age experience and Miss Brill is about a lonely woman living in a fantasy life that she has created for herself. The theme of alienation and a definitive transformation is evident in both stories.

In “Marigolds”, when Lizabeth recounts her story about damaging Miss Lottie’s garden, she says: “Perhaps we had some dim notion of what we were, and how little chance we had of being anything else. Otherwise, why would we have