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Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas explored in a literary work.
Nostalgia and Memory
The narrator begins the story by remarking on the nature of looking back. Memory can be incomplete and inaccurate, and nostalgia often entails a painful or unpleasant yearning for the past. Lizabeth reports feeling a “strange nostalgia” when the memories of the marigolds occur, conforming to this definition. Memories of the marigolds are linked, for the narrator, to waiting, another state that produces yearning and discomfort. Because memory leads to memory, the marigolds lead the narrator think about the unnamed person for whom she waits, likely in vain, and then to the “futile” waiting that she calls the “sorrowful background music” of the dusty community of her childhood. Yearning for what cannot be had, waiting in futility, and recalling painful memories are all common human experiences, and they underlie the story’s tone of melancholy and loss.
Even scenes that have humorous potential are overcast with the shadow of painful memories. The narrator says that the sight of Miss Lottie, with her creaking, aged body, working in her flowerbed “should have been a comical sight” but instead was “something we could not name.” In retrospect, the narrator ventures to try to name it: the children were “reveling in [their] youth” while “mocking her age.” Facing the painful truth of this memory allows Lizabeth to name what she felt at the time. Bearing with the “strange nostalgia” of imperfect pasts, the narrator suggests, yields insights and fosters growth—but it certainly can sting.
The Transition Out of Childhood
In “Marigolds,” the narrator’s recollections of her memories create a coming-of-age story, a recounting of the transition from childhood, with its freedoms and naïve stances, to the obligations and often harsh realizations of adulthood. Lizabeth must face the reality that the “cage” of poverty traps not just the children, who are too young to understand what poverty means but nevertheless feel its effects, but also the adults she trusts to help her shape her world.
As fourteen-year-old Lizabeth approaches young adulthood, she is aware that she is changing in some way that she cannot yet understand. She recalls feeling “a strange restlessness of body and spirit” and a suspicion that an unknown change is coming. The shift, whether gradual or sharp, from sheltered childhood to young adulthood involves a willingness to understand how the adult world works, or, as in Lizabeth’s case, to have truths about the reality of the adult world thrust upon her. She does not seek the painful knowledge about her parents’ inability to shelter their children from poverty. Instead, she stumbles onto it, tries to escape it, and then begins to reconcile herself to it. The protagonist of any coming-of-age story must begin to chart a path into the adult world or figure out how to live in it. For Lizabeth, painful signposts of shame and remorse mark this path forward, but she learns to exercise compassion for Miss Lottie and, later, for herself. She realizes that creating beautiful things—such as marigolds—offsets some of life’s harshness. The first steps on this path allow her to leave childhood behind and find a way to live in the adult world.
Innocence and Compassion
Perhaps the boldest claim in “Marigolds” is that “one cannot have both compassion and innocence.” Lizabeth draws this conclusion from the humiliation she experiences when facing Miss Lottie, the torn flowers at their feet. Even though she could not explain the change—the words, she says, came with the years—she knew in the moment that her innocence had ended.
The events before this moment prepare readers for the contrast between the innocent girl that Lizabeth is as “Marigolds” begins and the compassionate woman she begins to become by the story’s end. Her summer is full of days of “formlessness”: other than a few chores, nothing is required of her. She and Joey experience these aimless days differently. She reports drawing pictures in the dust—a creative act—that Joey “gleefully” destroys. She recalls feeling sad that she cannot catch minnows, but Joey laughs “uproariously.” Childish games that still amuse Joey now feel silly to Lizabeth.
Readers also see this shift in perspective when Lizabeth no longer enjoys taunting Miss Lottie. The innocent child may still see the fun in throwing pebbles, yet Lizabeth “flinched” when she thinks about her actions. When Lizabeth, in her anger and pain, returns to destroy the marigolds, “all the smoldering emotions” of the summer explode to destroy what was left of her childhood confidence in the world the younger children still inhabit. When this storm of emotion passes, Lizabeth is ready to take in the sight of Miss Lottie with her swollen feet and too-tight nightgown and to look “into the depths” of her elderly neighbor. She can leave the blissful ignorance of childhood behind and feel for Miss Lottie’s losses. She never forgets that feeling, and is grateful, as she looks back, for what was so painful when it happened.
