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Irony
Definition of Metaphor
A metaphor is a figure of speech that compares two different things by saying that one thing is the other. The comparison in a metaphor can be stated explicitly, as... read full definition
A metaphor is a figure of speech that compares two different things by saying that one thing is the other. The comparison in a metaphor... read full definition
A metaphor is a figure of speech that compares two different things by saying that one thing is the other... read full definition
Metaphors
Explanation and Analysis—Abstract Memories:
When setting the scene at the beginning of the story, Lizabeth—the woman narrating the story from decades in the future—describes the town in which she grew up using both imagery and a metaphor, as seen in the following passage:
When I think of the home town of my youth, all that I seem to remember is dust—the brown, crumbly dust of late summer—arid, sterile dust that gets into the eyes and makes them water, gets into the throat and between the toes of bare brown feet. I don’t know why I should remember only the dust. Surely there must have been lush green lawns and paved streets under leafy shade trees somewhere in town; but memory is an abstract painting—it does not present things as they are but rather as they feel.
Lizabeth uses imagery in this passage when describing the “brown, crumbly dust of late summer” that gets “between the toes of bare brown feet” and “into the eyes and makes them water” (as well as when describing the “lush green lawns” and “leafy shade trees” that she does not remember from her childhood but assumes were part of the town). Imagery brings readers more fully into a scene by engaging their senses, and Lizabeth’s descriptions here help readers to both see and feel the experience of growing up in this rural town in Maryland.
The metaphor that Lizabeth uses comes at the end of the passage when she notes that “memory is an abstract painting” that “does not present things as they are but rather as they feel.” This is Lizabeth’s way of noting that while it’s possible that her community had more lushness and vibrancy than she remembers (as seen in her description of the hypothetical lawns and trees in her town), the fact that she only remembers the dust signifies that her impoverished childhood, was largely defined by dryness, destitution, and lack.
Related Themes:
Explanation and Analysis—Lizabeth’s Memories:
Near the beginning of the story, Lizabeth (who is narrating the story from many years in the future) describes her relationship to her memories of childhood using an implied metaphor and a simile, as seen in the following passage:
Whenever the memory of those marigolds flashes across my mind, a strange nostalgia comes with it and remains long after the picture has faded. I feel again the chaotic emotions of adolescence, elusive as smoke, yet as real as the potted geranium before me now.
In the first sentence of this passage, Lizabeth metaphorically refers to her memory of destroying Miss Lottie’s marigolds to a picture that “flashes across” her mind before fading again. In the second sentence, she uses a simile when describing how her “chaotic emotions of adolescence” are “elusive as smoke.”
These two uses of figurative language help readers to understand that it has been a long time since the events of the story took place (most likely Lizabeth is now in old age), but that, no matter how “elusive” her memories are, this particular memory of the marigolds has stayed with her all of this time and still evokes strong emotions. This lets readers know early in the story that her experience with the marigolds was deeply impactful, preparing them for the coming-of-age story to come.
Related Themes:
Explanation and Analysis—Lizabeth Coming of Age:
On the first page of “Marigolds,” Lizabeth foreshadows her big coming-of-age moment at the end of the story, as seen in the following passage:
Joy and rage and wild animal gladness and shame become tangled together in the multicolored skein of 14-going-on 15, as I recall that devastating moment when I was suddenly more woman than child, years ago in Miss Lottie’s yard.
In this passage, Lizabeth—an older woman narrating an experience she had in her childhood—foreshadows the fact that she will, by the end of the story, describe “that devastating moment when [she] was suddenly more woman than child." By highlighting it here, she is hinting to readers that this will be a significant scene in the story, which proves to be true.
This passage also prepares readers for Collier’s frequent use of metaphors throughout the story. Here, she metaphorically compares memories to a skein of yarn when she writes, “Joy and rage and wild animal gladness and shame become tangled together in the multicolored skein of 14-going-on 15.” In this metaphor, Lizabeth’s memories from when she was 14 years old are like a tangled ball of yarn with different colors of yarn representing different emotions and experiences she had that year (such as joy, rage, gladness, and shame).
Collier foreshadows here that readers will move through all of these different experiences alongside Lizabeth as she transforms from a joyful child to a rageful one (as she destroys Miss Lottie’s marigolds). Ultimately, she will mature into a young adult capable of feeling shame and regret over the harm that she caused her elderly neighbor.
Related Themes:
Explanation and Analysis—The Cage of Poverty:
When reflecting on the Black working-class community in which she grew up, Lizabeth (who is narrating the story from decades in the future) uses a metaphor, as seen in the following passage:
In those days everybody we knew was just as hungry and ill-clad as we were. Poverty was the cage in which we all were trapped, and our hatred of it was still the vague, undirected restlessness of the zoo-bred flamingo who knows instinctively that nature created it to be free.
The metaphor here—in which Lizabeth describes poverty as being like “a cage in which [they] were all trapped”—communicates the way in which working-class Black people in the 1930s were, due to a combination of racism and the Great Depression, unable to change their class position. Just like animals unable to free themselves from their cage, Lizabeth implies, poor Black Americans had no hope of getting out of poverty.
Lizabeth builds on the initial metaphor by comparing the children in the community to “zoo-bred flamingo[es]” who know “that nature wanted [them] to be free” but who, because of their age, do not have the language to understand exactly what it is they are trapped in. As the story goes on, Lizabeth—who is 14 years old—has a coming-of-age experience by waking up to the reality of her family's class position after hearing her parents argue about finances.
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