payment page
As narrator and protagonist of “Marigolds,” Lizabeth provides adult and adolescent perspectives on the story. Mature Lizabeth maintains an engaged, reflective tone as she recalls her transition to adulthood. She does not excuse or rationalize the terrible actions of the day she recalls, but as she seeks to understand them more fully, she reveals the painful costs of poverty in her community to the adults who grasp its impact and to the children who are unaware that they lack opportunity and freedom.
Lizabeth has sympathy for her younger self. Her tone becomes rueful in the story’s closing paragraphs, which suggest that life’s troubles have led her to follow Miss Lottie’s example of creating beauty and hope in the midst of despair. The story’s great mystery is who the “you” that Lizabeth addresses might be. She waits for this person, but without hope that he or she will come. This hopeless waiting may be one reason the narrator had the need to “plant marigolds” of her own.
In fourteen-year-old Lizabeth, readers see hints of the reflective adult who recalls the story. Her sensitive nature especially contrasts with her brother’s loud and sometimes irritating “exuberance.” Lizabeth pulls away from Joey to spend time with her thoughts, and they argue after harassing Miss Lottie. Yet when she wakes so lonely in the early morning, she turns to Joey for comfort.
Lizabeth’s feelings about her parents also hint at the woman she is becoming. She loves her mother’s soothing voice and admires her father’s cheerful strength. When she overhears their distressed conversation, she faces for the first time her parents’ humanity and limits. Her awareness of the burdens they carry and the failures they fear drives Lizabeth to the panicked destruction of Miss Lottie’s marigolds and ends her childhood innocence. Yet this painful awareness also awakens her compassion for suffering adults.
