[AN ANALYSIS] THE STORY ENTITLED MARIGOLDS BY EUGENIA COLLIER

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Hi future leaders, thank you for clicking this website. Alright, in today’s edition we are going to experience Marigolds story by Eugenia Collier. Mungkin ada beberapa dari teman – teman semua yang udah sempet baca ceritanya tetapi mungkin masih bingung menentukan apa sih sebenernya the big idea of the story itself. Terkait dengan itu yuk kita simak pembahasannya!!

AN ANALYSIS THE STORY ENTITLED MARIGOLDS BY EUGENIA COLLIER

Well, this short story was talked about a girl named Elizabeth and her family struggle through living in the time of the Great Depression. Elizabeth is an African American girl that is on the threshold of womanhood. Elizabeth’s family is very poor and is forced to live in a shantytown. Elizabeth and her family have to live through the struggle of poverty, poignant and meaningful arguments in the family, and Elizabeth is caught between the chaotic emotions of a child and a woman.

Elizabeth and her family are struggling through the poverty. Elizabeth’s difficulty coping with her poverty is mainly what influences her to destroy the marigolds in Miss. Lottie’s yard. In the beginning of the story Collier expresses an image which resembles the town where Elizabeth is forced to live an unprivileged life. Elizabeth emphasizes that the marigolds are too beautiful to be in a place full of ugly and ragged things. After seeing everything around her in this ugly, poor fashion, the marigolds confuse her and are almost too much for her to handle. Her incapability to comprehend the abstract beauty of the marigolds drives her impulse to destroy and get rid of the confusion.

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Elizabeth constantly has to face problems in her family, and this leads to tension which eventually leads to the final destruction of the marigolds. Elizabeth’s hope dramatically lessens when she listens in on her parents talking one night. When Elizabeth hears her father complain to her mother, “It ain’t right. Ain’t no man ought to eat his woman’s food year in and year out.” Elizabeth feels that before her father was strong like a rock and her mom was fragile, now everything has changed and her dad is broken into pieces. Elizabeth’s mother tries to relieve her father: “Look, we ain’t starving. I git paid every week, and Mrs Ellis is real nice about giving me things.” Eventually, Elizabeth’s father broke down even farther and he “sobbed, loudly and painfully, and cried helplessly.” The man of the household is breaking down, and does not know where he stands anymore nor does Elizabeth. 

When Elizabeth realizes that her father cannot support her family devastates her and Elizabeth is broken by that realization. She does not have a stable set of parents who can even rely on each other or themselves, leaving her to feel lost and hopeless. Elizabeth becomes insecure by the fact of her father crying. When she realizes she cannot stand anymore confusion in her family, she goes to wake her brother up and then vents out her angst on the marigolds and this also shows some immatureness in Elizabeth.

In the beginning, the author explains how this young girl, Lizabeth, lived in the culturally deprived neighborhood during the depression.  Lizabeth is at the age where she is just beginning to become a young woman and is almost ready to give up her childish ways.  Through this time period she was confused and could not quite understand what was happening to her.  In the end she rips Miss Lottie’s marigolds among the ugly place in which she lived.  

The marigolds were the only things that make the place a bit beautiful to the eye.  In this scene the marigolds represent the only hope the people had for themselves in this time of depression.  This could reveal how the author has experienced a loss of hope in times of need.  In her explanation of how Lizabeth had torn up the flowers and destroyed all hope in that time of depression, might explain that she has also destroyed hope in a time of pain and grief.  

Later she writes, “And I too have planted marigolds.”  This could mean she has learned from her experiences and that she has finally found hope and always tries to seek the good within the bad and the ugly. In the sentence “…all I seem to remember is dust—the brown, crumbly dust of late summer—arid, sterile dust that gets in to the eyes and makes them water, gets into the throat and between the toes of the bare brown feet.” In this phrase the words give a harsh, cruel feeling of how the depression was, which could then explain how she remembers the depression and that it was a hard time for her. Most likely it was a significantly hopeless moment in her life.

Nah itulah pembahasan mimin mengenai Marigolds Short Story by Eugenia Collier. Jangan lupa untuk di like atau komen jika ada pertanyaannya ya..

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