28 pages • 56 minutes read
Eugenia CollierMarigolds
Fiction | Short Story | YA | Published in 1969A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Essay Topics
The first-person narrator is a much older Lizabeth reflecting on a formative day in her childhood. Why do you believe the author chose this narration style?
The narrator states that “[t]he Depression that gripped the nation was no new thing to us, for the black workers of rural Maryland had always been depressed” (2). Despite this sentence, the Great Depression had impacted Lizabeth’s family in many ways, and their lives were even more challenging. How does the Great Depression create a cascading effect in Lizabeth’s family that pushes her to an emotional breaking point? Use evidence from the text to reinforce your response.
Discuss how the older narrator’s reflections affect the reader’s understanding of the story. Choose a quote, such as this one on Page 2—“Nowadays we would be called ‘culturally deprived,’ and white people would write books and hold conferences about us. In those days everybody we knew was just as hungry and ill-clad as we were”—and discuss how the adult Lizabeth’s views provide context for Lizabeth’s actions as well as for the experience of Black people during the Great Depression and the decades following it.
Is there an antagonist in “Marigolds”? If so, who or what is the antagonist?
Why do the children hate the marigolds? Use evidence from the text to reinforce your response.
How does the story reflect societal expectations and norms of American life in the early 20th century? What does it say about the roles of fathers and mothers in the 1930s? Could the same story have taken place in the 1950s or the 1970s? Why or why not?
At several points in the text, the narrator points out how preoccupied the children and Lizabeth are with destruction. What is the relationship in the text between destruction and poverty?
After Lizabeth leads the children in calling Miss Lottie an “old lady witch,” she feels regretful and ashamed. How does this moment relate to her later destruction of the marigolds? Why does the author pinpoint the marigolds incident as the moment she became a woman rather than the earlier incident?
The narrator says that “one cannot have both compassion and innocence” (13). How does the author put those two ideas in opposition?
The final line in the story is “And I too have planted marigolds” (13). What does ending with this line do for the story? Are Lizabeth’s marigolds real or metaphorical?
