Symbolism In John Steinbeck's 'The Chrysanthemums'

Elisa felt special, her husband still ignored her. Chrysanthemums are beautiful flowers that symbolize happiness and well-being, signaling the arrival of fall. They can embody someone's beauty, intelligence, and strength, and play a big role in John Steinbeck's short story, "The Chrysanthemums," to deliver the message that women can be dissatisfied with their lives due to a lack of womanhood and attention. The flowers are planted by a proud, strong woman named Elisa Allen, who has frustration about her present life with no children and no romantic admiration from her rancher husband. Despite this, she is a strong, lovely woman who plants and nurtures her flowers with care, as if they were her children. While the flowers are beautiful and natural

Later in the story, the husband comments on Elisa looking "nice" and "strong," but when she asks him what he meant by those words, he starts to believe that she is "playing some kind of a game." These moments show the husband's ignorance of her beauty and strength, two elements that the flowers hold that Elisa has, which is why she has a love for the flowers. The gloves she wears to garden the flowers can be her protection from disappointment, like how boxing gloves are protection from the opponent. During her conversation with the Tinker, Elisa “took off her gloves and stuffed them in the apron pocket with the scissors,” subjecting herself to disappointment. Even when the flowers sparked interest in the Tinker, which made Elisa happy, she still feels such disappointment in her life as the wife of a rancher. In the end, she is teary that her life of sadness will continue as her husband still hasn’t noticed her as a

The theme is developed through one rifle and a sibling, showing that a man can’t be a kid anymore once they're a certain age. For the boy, however, that stage came to him as fast as a bullet. In the story, the rifle that Kenneth cleaned early in the story would act as the manhood that the young boy wanted to show off and prove. Early in the story, Kenneth “worked slowly, pausing often to listen for Douglas’s Car, because he wanted to be cleaning the rifle when Douglas came”. He would use this rifle to initially protect his sister from an intruder. In fact, he loves and looks up to her older sister, who can be a good representation of what an adult would be like. When they are alone in the house, the sister, being in charge of the house, bosses her little brother to make sure he goes to bed at a specific time at night since she is “a little older” than him. The boy refuses to listen to her, not noticing that his sister is acting somewhat responsible for being in charge of the house which is what adults do as they grow older to have families of their own. In fact, she mirrors the male authority that he’d hoped to reach in the future. When Kennth shot and killed the intruder, who turns out to be his sister’s boyfriend Douglas, he is traumatized from the ordeal, losing his innocence entirely. The young boy using the rifle to protect his sister from an intruder shows that