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Marigolds
Themes and Colors
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Marigolds, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Coming of Age
When Lizabeth, the narrator of “Marigolds,” thinks back to the summer when she was fourteen, she recalls the devastating moment when she suddenly became more woman than child: she, her brother Joey, and their friends destroyed the beloved marigolds of their elderly neighbor, Miss Lottie. This marked the end of Lizabeth’s childhood, because her compassion for Miss Lottie in the aftermath was her first experience of seeing the world as complex—a defining…
read analysis of Coming of Age
The Importance of Beauty
When Lizabeth thinks about the shantytown where she grew up, what she remembers most is dust. She doesn’t recall any green lawns or leafy trees—just brown, crumbly dust. Miss Lottie’s sunny yellow marigolds provide the only splash of beauty and color in town, but Lizabeth and the other children hate those flowers. While the children don’t understand why they hate the marigolds, the story suggests a reason: they find the flowers too beautiful—the marigolds…
read analysis of The Importance of Beauty
Poverty
Lizabeth is a young African-American girl growing up during the Great Depression, and at the beginning of the story, she’s ignorant of the extent of her poverty. She and her friends have no way of comparing themselves to others—they’re too poor to have radios or magazines—so they don’t see themselves as particularly poor. Nonetheless, they feel poverty’s effects: Lizabeth feels as if she’s in a cage, but her anger is vague and undirected, because she…
read analysis of Poverty
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