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Hope In Eugenia Collier's Marigolds

499 Words2 Pages

How can uncontrollable emotions affect people positively? In the short story “Marigolds” by Eugenia Collier in an impoverished town during The Great Depression, a 14 year old African American girl named Lizabeth finds herself in a tough situation as she hears her father sobbing and can’t control the emotions she is feeling. These uncontrollable emotions lead to Lizabeth completely destroying Miss Lottie’s marigolds that symbolize hope as she feels all hope is gone. Having that uncontrollable emotion that Lizabeth had leads to her maturing and growing up as she realizes what she did was wrong. Using symbols, the author’s emphasis of two characters' losing all hope in their lives and their despair leads to evoking empathy into the audience as they relate to their similar experiences. …show more content…

The kids in Miss Lottie’s neighborhood guess that she is “at least a hundred years old” (Collier 19). Not only that, the kids referred to her as an “old black-witch woman” (Collier 22) Lastly, Lizabeth and her brother Joey inform us that “Miss Lottie’s house was the most ramshackle of all our ramshackle homes.” (Collier 17) All of these reasons not mentioning that she is a black woman during The Great Depression all lead to Miss Lottie losing hope, and eventually losing all hope.

Losing hope in life is also well portrayed through the main character Lizabeth in the short story “Marigolds” by Eugenia Collier. Lizabeth wakes up in the middle of the night and hears her father “sobbing, loudly and painfully, and crying helplessly and hopelessly” (Collier 43). Lizabeth felt “great bewilderment and fear” (Collier 44) after she had heard what had just happened as her father “was the rock on which the family had been built” (Collier 44) This reason alone led to Lizabeth losing all

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