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Foreshadowing
Genre
Explanation and Analysis:
“Marigolds” is a short story in Eugenia Collier’s 1969 story collection Breeder and Other Stories. The story is realist, meaning it tries to capture the external world and characters’ internal worlds in a realistic way rather than a romantic or fanciful way. Collier realistically captures the living conditions of working-class Black people in rural Maryland during the Great Depression. Collier was born decades after the Depression and yet was able to capture the dialect of her characters, the types of jobs (and lack of jobs) that the adult characters would have access to in that time period, and more.
“Marigolds” is also a coming-of-age tale, meaning that it tells the story of a young person maturing into adulthood. Lizabeth starts the story playing childish games with her brother and neighborhood friends—including pestering Miss Lottie—and ends with her feeling regret over her actions and feeling empathy toward Miss Lottie after destroying her marigolds. The following passage captures Lizabeth’s shift from an innocent and ignorant child into a compassionate and self-aware adult:
Innocence involves an unseeing acceptance of things at face value, an ignorance of the area below the surface. In that humiliating moment I looked beyond myself and into the depths of another person. This was the beginning of compassion, and one cannot have both compassion and innocence.
Here, Lizabeth notes how she “looked beyond [herself] and into the depths of another person,” and that this experience of “compassion” replaced her “innocence,” which she defines as “an ignorance of the area below the surface.” This is the climax of the story as well as Collier’s implicit lesson for readers who, she suggests, should embrace compassion by taking seriously the inner experiences of other people (like Lizabeth does).
Related Themes:
