Marigolds

Marigolds symbolize hope, love, resilience, and beauty within the text. Miss Lottie’s marigolds are described as “the strangest part of the picture. Certainly, they did not fit in with the crumbling decay of the rest of the yard” (5). Though they are things of beauty in dreary surroundings, the children hate the marigolds. Despite Miss Lottie’s poverty and hopeless circumstances, she has a stubborn resilience that makes her plant and tend her marigolds fastidiously.

The marigolds are examples of beauty and love in an otherwise barren environment, and that seems to earn the hatred of the children. Growing marigolds in the face of hopeless circumstances is defiant, and the final destruction of them by Lizabeth seems to have destroyed Miss Lottie’s hope. Despite Lizabeth’s apologies to Miss Lottie, she never grows marigolds again. The story does not end at that hopeless point, though, because the narrator states, “I too have planted marigolds” (13), hinting that, like Miss Lottie, Lizabeth’s life also needed tangible symbols of hope, love, and beauty.

The motif of poverty as a cage is used to show the bleakness and sterility of the lives of the people in Lizabeth’s community, as well as the impossibility of escape.