Marigolds Symbol Analysis

Miss Lottie’s marigolds represent the possibility of a happy, beautiful life—even amid the dreariness of poverty. Lizabeth describes the shantytown where she lives as grim, dusty, and colorless. Since she’s a child, she’s not consciously aware of how poor she is, but she does see how miserable her surroundings are. At first, she despises the marigolds for reasons that she can’t articulate, but the story implies that their beauty is offensive to Lizabeth because it makes her circumstances look all the more drab by comparison. In other words, the beauty of the marigolds calls attention to Lizabeth’s poverty, reminding her of a fact she usually doesn’t have to acknowledge. If she didn’t have to see the marigolds, her life would feel more straightforward and simple.

Lizabeth destroys the marigolds in a moment of losing her innocence: she has been presented with an uncomfortable truth about her life (that her father is struggling to provide for the family and is so sad about it that he sometimes cries). In order to make things seem simple again, she wrecks the flower patch. Perhaps she thought that by destroying the flowers, she could go back to a world where she didn’t have to hold two complex ideas in her mind at once: that beauty can exist alongside poverty, or that her father can be both strong and weak. But after Lizabeth destroys the marigolds, she feels instant regret, and for the first time she sees that Miss Lottie isn’t an old witch, but a courageous woman who has cultivated beauty in the midst of a difficult life. This marks Lizabeth’s transition to adulthood, because she’s finally able to see the complexity of the world.