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Miss Lottie says only a handful of words in “Marigolds,” and most of them she yells at the children to threaten them as they harass her. Readers can only guess her motivations and must infer what they can of her character from Lizabeth’s descriptions. Even so, while Lizabeth is the story’s protagonist, Miss Lottie is its hero.
Miss Lottie has almost nothing in life—certainly not the privilege and advantages that people assume lead to success and happiness. She sees almost no one other than her son John, whom the narrator describes as “the mindless son of her passion.” The children wonder how she gets food and muse that perhaps she does not eat. Her house is decaying and her yard is bare. It is clear from her battered body—the creaking knees, swollen ankles, and heavy body—that life has been hard. Lizabeth mocks the way Miss Lottie’s buttocks stick up in the air as she weeds and prunes, and the children call her a witch.
But other details suggest that Lizabeth has begun to find something intriguing in Miss Lottie. She can imagine the “tall, powerful woman” this old lady once was, and she is impressed by Miss Lottie’s “stoic” demeanor, disturbed only by harm to her marigolds. Miss Lottie is persistent, working the flower bed summer after summer, pouring her love into flowers that bloom “warm and passionate and sun-golden.” Perhaps most remarkable, Miss Lottie does not retaliate when Lizabeth destroys the flowers. Her stoic face is “immobile,” her eyes sorrowful and tired. It is possible that she has compassion first for the desperate, sobbing girl in front of her, and that this compassion calls forth Lizabeth’s. She is, Lizabeth says, a woman who, despite everything against her, dared to hope and to create beauty in despair.
