Marigolds By Eugenia W. Collier

The short story ‘Marigolds’ by Eugenia W. Collier is a coming-of-age narrative that focuses on the differences between innocence and compassion and focuses on themes of poverty and maturity as well. This story was written in 1969 and was set in a rural area of Maryland. Marigolds has fictional characters but derives from Collier’s life as a child during the Great Depression. This story is told from the perspective of a fourteen-year-old girl named Lizabeth. She was a bright young girl, however, she was sheltered and had the misconception that everyone lived in the same type of poverty as her, because that was all that she had been exposed to. She describes, “We children, of course, were only vaguely aware of the extent of our poverty. Having

Since the story is told from the perspective of Lizabeth, she narrates the conflict and blames Miss Lottie and her flowers. She describes the inexplicable hatred she feels towards the flowers and Miss Lottie’s tenderness towards them. Lizabeth narrates, “For some perverse reason, we children hated those marigolds. They interfered with the perfect ugliness of the place; they were too beautiful; they said too much that we could not understand; they did not make sense. There was something in the vigor with which the old woman destroyed the weeds that intimidated us”. Lizabeth felt confused and angry with the beauty of the flowers because they were a beacon of beauty and hope. Miss Lottie’s ugly house and mean demeanor are a symbol of the ugliness of poverty and the world Lizabeth lived in. Subconsciously, Lizabeth did not want the flowers there because they showed joy and happiness in the mean old woman and Lizabeth’s world of hardship and poverty. Without the flowers, without knowing about the world she was missing out on, Lizabeth felt that she could be happier. So, she sought to destroy that beauty so that she could go back to her own life of innocence. Later in the story, Lizabeth discovers that the flowers were not the problem, she

Collier uses figurative language in a poetic, abstract style to convey this tone. She uses this in the opening few paragraphs, using elaborate, detailed words to describe the memories of her youth. She describes, “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” (1). This quote illustrates the story-telling tone that Collier uses and hints at the poverty that Lizabeth grew up in, setting the scene. Collier is incredibly talented with her words. Her tone throughout the novella was able to capture all the intimate emotions of Lizabeth through her writing, touching on all the realistic thoughts warring in the head of a guilt-ridden person. Reading this narrative, the reader can make a connection to the emotions that Lizabeth experiences, thus providing a relationship between the main character and the reader. The tone of this novella helps illuminate the bigger message by adding a melancholic and wistful addition to the story. In the beginning, Collier starts the story by talking about what she “remembers from her youth”. This makes it seem like more of a lesson rather than just a story. The tone is also somber and reflective, hinting that the story has an ending that the narrator