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Marigolds Symbolism

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Marigolds by Eugenia Collier is about a woman named Lizabeth looking back on her past, specifically the moment and things leading up to when she became an adult. “Chaotic emotions of youth” as she calls it are what really lead to the main event and are caused from confusion. In the story she as well as other children don’t understand how something like their neighbor, Miss.Lottie’s, marigolds could be so beautiful amid such a poverty-stricken, dilapidated town. She also does not understand where she belongs in her family after witnessing a huge role change between both her mother and father. These along with peer pressure are what made Lizabeth embrace those chaotic emotions and childishly act out in a violent way mutilating and destroying …show more content…

The Marigolds at first are just something pretty amidst an ugly situation. However, later in the story, they become something much more. When Lizabeth finally sees past herself, leaving behind ignorance, she understands what they mean. For Miss.Lottie, they were the good things left in her world of squalor. “ Whatever verve was left in her, whatever was of love and beauty and joy that had not been squeezed out by life, had been there in the Marigolds she had so tenderly cared for” (Lizabeth, Lines Eventually, for Lizabeth, they signified the moment she became a woman. “Whenever the memory of those Marigolds flashes across my mind, a strange nostalgia comes with it and remains long after the picture has faded. I feel again the chaotic emotions of adolescence,illusions as smoke, yet as real as the potted geranium before me now. Joy and rage and wild animal gladness and shame become tangled together in a multicolored skein of 14-going-on-15 as I recall that devastating moment when I was suddenly more women than child, years ago in Miss.Lottie’s yard.” Both of these examples go to show that little things can have much more meaning than what materialistic things seen, but that they can have strong emotional ties to a person who views them in a different way. When Lizabeth comprehends this topic it leads towards her gain in

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