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Similes
Situational Irony
Explanation and Analysis—Hating the Marigolds:
The situational irony at the heart of “Marigolds” is the fact that Lizabeth, along with her brother and other children in her community, hate Miss Lottie’s beautiful marigolds and seek to destroy them. The following passage captures the irony of the children’s dislike:
For some perverse reason, we children hated those marigolds. They interfered with the perfect ugliness of the place; they were too beautiful; they said too much that we could not understand; they did not make sense.
By having the older Lizabeth (who is narrating the story from many years in the future) note that the children’s reasoning for hating the marigold was “perverse,” Collier hints to readers that she is aware of the irony of the children hating these beautiful flowers. Most people would assume that the children, who live in this dry, dusty, and destitute community, would love the flowers, given the beauty that they bring to the neighborhood.
The reason the children hate them, as Lizabeth notes with somewhat paradoxical language, is because they “interfered with the perfect ugliness of the place” and were “too beautiful.” In other words, young Lizabeth and her peers hate the marigolds because the flowers' beauty makes them aware of the lack of beauty in every other aspect of their impoverished lives. When Lizabeth the narrator notes that the flowers “did not make sense” to the children, she means that they did not yet have words for their anger about the conditions in which they lived or their desperate longing for more beauty and joy in their lives.
Related Themes:
