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The Marigolds Reflection

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Recommended: Literary elements of the story the marigold

The story, "Marigolds", has a beautiful message within the sad story that some may see it as. But if you look beyond the fact that it takes place in a barren town of poverty, you can see the beauty within the Marigolds, which represent much more than one may assume. When I read this story, I looked at it in a couple different ways and found a few different ways that the theme could be understood, still adding up to one theme. I also found a couple different ways that the marigolds could be represented. For example, there is beauty everywhere, everyone must learn to grow up, and one cannot have compassion and innocence. This goes into the one theme of, when someone grows up, they learn to look into things deeper and see the beauty …show more content…

This one is in fact not about the marigolds, but about growing up. Lizabeth and her friends enjoyed wrecking Miss Lottie's flowers because they thought it was fun and comical to see the look on her face when she was mad at them. Lizabeth started to think that maybe doing so was silly and childish, but tried to convince herself that it was all in good fun. When her parents got into a big fight over their lack of money, it really sparked something in Lizabeth. She started to think deeply about her situation and how poor she and her family were. This was simply a harsh reminder of the happiness that Miss Lottie had learned to find, even in the toughest of conditions. This happiness was the marigolds that Miss Lottie had planted in her yard. Lizabeth lashed out on the only thing left in her life that was not demolished and blighted. This happened in a different story as well. In, “The Fault in our Stars”, the blind guy was mad that his girlfriend broke up with him so he started smashing Gus's trophies to get his anger out. Everyone in the real world knows that bottling up anger inside of you can stress you out even more than if you were to break something unintentionally. Anyways, when she saw Miss Lottie's reaction to her destroyed flowers, Lizabeth realized that her impatience with the kids destroying her flowers was not because her flowers were ruined. It was rather that the kids were picking on her. Miss Lottie wasn't mad at Lizabeth for stomping on her flowers, just sad that her little sliver of happiness was gone. This made Lizabeth see that it was very childish to do what she had done. She needed to grow up and learn to deal with her problems in an adult and sophisticated way. Lines 356-358 are a perfect example of the way Lizabeth saw Miss Lottie's sadness. “The witch was no longer a witch but only a broken old woman who had dared to create beauty in the midst of ugliness

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In the short story “ Harrison Bergeron” written by Kurt Vonnegut the solemn, melancholy and nightmarish moods are expressed by the theme and figurative language, and it helps the reader understand better the story. Vonnegut used simile to describe when the buzzer went off in George's head(22). Also, when Harrison showed how easy it was to take off the handicaps showing that it was as fragile as tissue paper(25). People were impressed on how easy it was to take the handicap off. Vonnegut used hyperbole to describe events that were exaggerated.

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Both stories revolve around a flower that is loved by Sally and Miss Lottie. In marigolds, the story's setting takes place in a hard time during the Great Depression. But the main conflict of the story is flowers called Marigolds. They were a flower that Miss Lottie has planted and is her only bright thing in her world, but Lizibeth and her friends don't appreciate nice beautiful flowers in a rugged, ugly, trashed environment, so they end up destroying them. In It’s the Small Things, Charlie Brown the film is also based on a flower.

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Marigolds by Eugenia W. Collier and To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee are very similar in their settings and moods. For example, in Marigolds the narrator indicates that all she can remember from her hometown is dust and poverty, which shows this was during the Great Depression. This is similar to, To Kill a Mockingbird, because it also takes place during the Great Depression, this displays they have similar settings. Another example is, the mood in Marigolds is very depressing, you get this mood because the narrator says things like, “I suppose the futile waiting was the sorrowful background music of our impoverished little community.” The mood is like this in To Kill a Mockingbird as well.

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It made it clear to people that something was not right when the pickle dish was brought down from the shelf. In a way Mattie symbolized the cat when the pickle dish was destroyed. The cat knocked over the pickle dish, which symbolised the destruction of their marriage. This shows that when the cat destroyed the pickle dish, Mattie also destroyed Ethan and Zeena’s

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“ She saw a dust-bearing bee sink into the sanctum of a bloom; the thousand sister-calyxes arch to meet the love embrace and the ecstatic shiver of the tree from root to tiniest branch creaming in every blossom and frothing with delight,” (Hurston, 1937, p. 11). The bee gathering pollen became a reference for Janie throughout the rest of the story. “He could be a bee to a blossom—a pear tree blossom in the spring,” (Hurston, 1937, p. 106). After seeing the bee and the blossom, Janie wanted to find a connection like that in her life. She

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There is beauty in life for those who choose to see it. The Marigold is a story that is about the time of the Great Depression and how people were growing up in poverty with no shoes, little to no clothing, and barely a roof over their heads literally. The theme is see the good in little things for those that do see it. The marigolds were a symbol of beauty in all of the ugliness that was around them but at the time Elizabeth could not see it until it was too late. The title of the book is Marigolds short story by Eugenia Collier and is historical fiction.

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In the short story, “Marigolds,” the author, Eugenia Collier, acknowledges the universal theme that people can create beauty in even the most dreariest of places. The story takes place in Maryland during the Great Depression. Lizabeth, the main character, is an adult looking back to the time when she had transitioned from childhood to womanhood. Miss Lottie, an old woman who lived in a shabby, broken down house, planted marigolds. As a child, Lizabeth had thought Miss Lottie to be a witch and despised the marigolds because it did not match the poverty and sadness that surrounded her.

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Later in the story, Lizabeth discovers that the flowers were not the problem, she

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The Canary and The Heart A story contains much more than just the words presented on the page. There are deeper meanings, hidden facts and underlying messages. At the heart of this idea is symbolism. Symbolism, as defined by the Oxford English Dictionary, is the practice of representing things by symbols, or of giving a symbolic character to objects.

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In the story “Marigolds” by Eugenia Collier there is a lot of imagery and diction. The imagery was mainly focused on how the town looks and the contrast between the town and Miss Lottie’s house. In the text is states how that the only beautiful part of the house is the marigolds, “Miss Lottie's marigolds were perhaps the strangest part of the picture. Certainly they did not fit in with the crumbling decay of the rest of her yard”(Collier 23). This quote is trying to say that her house was a very old house that no one really cared for but, the marigolds were always taken care of and that was the only beauty in the whole yard.

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“Whatever verve there 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. '' Children see the world far more simplistic than adults. Lizabeth says she no longer saw Miss Lottie as a witch, but just an old woman who tried to cover up the ugliness of her life with the beauty of marigolds. This was the first time she felt compassion and remorse for her actions. Lizabeth then develops the ability to distinguish what is right from wrong, and is able to feel proud when she does the right thing, as well as ashamed when she does not.

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To me the best theme in the story is friendship. I believe that every person needs to show friendship to

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The author uses the marigolds as a symbol but, their meaning varies between each character. To a young Lizabeth , the marigolds symbolise beauty in a place that it doesn't belong. These beautiful flowers anger a young Lizabeth because she thinks they didn’t belong in the old dusty town she grew up in. To an adult Lizabeth these flowers hold a different meaning, they now represent hope to her. These flowers hold a different meaning to Miss Lottie, to her they represented what was left of love, hope, and beauty in her life.

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It is a coming of age story that shows how Lizabeth evolves as a person and as a character. Like any other child, Lizabeth has a definite wild side. In the story, she and her friends circle around Miss Lottie, chanting taunts at her. Lizabeth tells the reader " Then I lost my head entirely, mad with the power of inciting such rage, and ran out of the bushes in the storm of pebbles, straight toward Miss Lottie, chanting madly, "Old witch fell in a ditch, picked up a penny and though she was rich," (3).

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