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Figurative Language In Marigolds By Eugenia Collier

499 Words2 Pages

Jacob Herrera
Ms. Ahn
English 1 Honors period 1
30/1/2023 Title of Your Essay

Empathy is seeing with the eyes of another, listening with the ears of another and feeling with the heart of another.” – Alfred Adler. This illustrated well In the story “Marigolds” by Eugenia Collier, tells the story of Lizabeth, a 14 year old girl who attacks an old lady named Miss Lottie with a group of kids which causes an inner conflict which leads to her gaining empathy for Miss Lottie. To make us feel empathy, Eugenia Collier uses many forms of figurative language like similes, metaphors and most importantly, many symbols that give the story much more meaning. Miss Lottie is a great example of this. In the text, Miss Lottie has a deeper meaning and symbolizes compassion. In paragraph 63, Lizabeth explains that after she destroyed the marigolds and saw Miss Lottie “[That] was the beginning of compassion”.Using that evidence, the audience can see that seeing Miss Lottie made Lizabeth feel compassion as instead of a witch, Lizabeth now saw hopeless and broken old lady.Lizabeth …show more content…

Throughout the story, Eugenia Collier uses figurative language to show the emotion that we should have towards these two symbols.She uses words like “warm”(Collier 8), “passionate”(Collier 8), and “sun golden”(Collier 8) to describe the marigolds like the hope people have in life, while she uses words like “haunted”(Collier 12), and a “ramshackle”(Collier 7) are used to describe Miss Lottie's house. The audience can then interpret how the marigolds stand for the warm, passionate hope people have in life. Therefore, the place where these marigolds are found, stands for the hopelessness that many characters in the story and in real life go through. This can obviously create empathy in the reader by showing how beautiful, warm and passionate hope can still bloom in

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In the story "Marigolds" by Eugenia Collier there are several figurative language sentences and symbols that have meaning to the overall theme of the story. "Everything was suddenly out of tune, like a broken accordion." (Collier 11) This means that Lizabeth is explaining everything she is going through and how her life and emotions are. She uses an accordion to describe this because an accordion is a fun and upbeat instrument and a "broken accordion" is the complete opposite.

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In the story "Marigolds" by Eugenia Collier, the main character Lizabeth reveals the lesson of the story is that she learns from her mistakes when she decided to destroy Mrs. Lottie's flowers, this has changed her life because she now has respect for people and their property. The theme of this is that the marigolds represent that she has hope, happiness, and beauty and that these aspects could come back to the world. We know that she has learned from her mistakes because she stated that this act of violence would be her last act of violence. She later plants her own geraniums once she is older to symbolize the same thing as the marigolds ment to Mrs. Lottie had and that was that there is hope, happiness, and beauty in the world. The mistakes

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In the story, “Marigolds”, the author, Eugenia Collier uses imagery, diction and connotation in deep way. One example is of connotation is “... how thick were the bars of our cage”. This gives a negative connotation because it's pointing out how big their poverty is. An example for imagery is “running together and combining like fresh water color painting in the rain”. This shows how she and her friends would run around and play together.

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To release all the emotions Lizabeth was feeling she ran to Miss Lottie’s shack and “leaped into the mounds of marigolds and pulled madly…” ruining the flowers (Collier 12). Lizabeth was overwhelmed and had to take out her anger somewhere and she chose the marigolds because they were the only things that were perfect. Lizabeth’s life was out of order and she had no one to comfort her though when Miss Lottie came out, she finally understood what those marigolds meant and what her actions had caused. The marigolds symbolize hope and as Lizabeth destroyed them, she was destroying Miss Lottie’s hope and her own.

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Collier kindles empathy by structuring conflicts, figurative language, and symbols that provide the reader with a literary experience of her characters’ lives. The author utilizes Lizabeth's shame and regret to evoke empathetic feelings within the reader. After destroying Miss Lottie’s marigolds Lizabeth is “ashamed”, “the child in [her] sulked and said it was all in fun”, but “the woman in [her]” reproached the human she had become (Collier 10). As a young black woman during a dusty Depression era, Lizabeth experiences conflict with life. Lizabeth’s rage, shame, chagrin, and fear originate from a joyful

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The marigolds symbolized her childhood and innocence, which were deeply treasured. Once Lizabeth destroyed the marigolds, she was no longer a child. In lines 134-137, she remarked, “For as I gazed at the immobile face with the sad, weary eyes, I gazed upon a kind of reality that is hidden to childhood. The witch was no longer a witch but only a broken old woman who had dared to create beauty in the midst of ugliness and sterility.” As a child, Lizabeth had childishly saw her as a witch who strangely wanted to grow beautiful marigolds during a terrible time, but she realized that Miss Lottie just wanted to create happiness for herself and anyone that happened to pass by and look at her marigolds.

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