“The Chrysanthemum’s” John Steinbeck’s Proletarian Is that a symbol
“The Chrysanthemum’s” John Steinbeck’s Proletarian Is that a symbol
“He had come near a softly, and he leaned over the wire fencing that protects Elisa’s flower garden from cowss and Canis familiariss and chickens” , writes John Steinbeck’s nameless storyteller in his short narrative “The Chrysanthemums” ( 2 ) .” The fencing that stands between Elisa and her hubby is a boundary that can non be crossed, fundamentally like masculine vs. feminine. Elisa dresses really masculine and she feels as if Henry doesn’t appreciate her muliebrity. The fencing and the flowers are a really powerful symbol in the narrative. It represents the power and masculine vs. feminine that Elisa goes though.
Thomas Foster points out inHow to Read Literature like a Professor, the linguistic communication of “symbol” doesn’t merely leap out at you. In its simplest literary look, “symbol” is merely a significance of things that appear within the narrative. Elisa meets with the tinker which renews her feelings of muliebrity and gender as a adult females. Her opposition to his mundane affairs disappears after the tinker romantically describes the chrysanthemums as a “quick whiff of coloured smoke” . By look up toing the chrysanthemums, he figuratively admires her. The chrysanthemums symbolize her gender. With a few well-placed words from the tinker, her masculine image has been replaced with a feminine 1. By giving him the ruddy flower pot with the chrysanthemums, she gives him a symbol of her interior ego.
Thomas Foster points out inHow to Read Literature like a Professor, that, while the linguistic communication of “symbol” is frequently “not merely something, but something in particular” ( 97 ) . Elisa has a brotherhood of strength and beauty in her conversation with her hubby, “you’ve got a strong new harvest coming” ( 2 ) . “Yes. They’ll be strong this coming year” ( 2 ) .The chrysanthemums she tends, she is “dormant” and non yet in emotional bloom. In the beginning of the narrative the storyteller describes Elisa, her face was thin and strong and her figure looked blocked and heavy in her horticulture outfit, which was a man’s black chapeau and brogan places. Elisa is a strong masculine adult female, she doesn’t allow her feminine side truly demo. The tinker makes Elisa’s brotherhood of strength and beauty start to bloom. “He leaned confidentially over the fence” ( 5 ) . The fencing is a boundary that the tinker crosses, He ask Elisa about “whats’s them workss ma’am” ( 6 ) . The tinker gets Elisa started speaking about something she loves, and the tinker shows involvement. In “The Chrysanthemums, ” Steinbeck presents a carefully structured about a power scene to propose that show strength between a adult male and a adult female. He keeps on and on about the chrysanthemums boulder clay Elisa has shed her heavy adult male vesture and her feminine side is glowing now. Steinbeck uses its symbol you have to get down interrupting them down to calculate out the true significance of the symbol.
“I mean you look different, strong and happy” ( 11 ) . Henry could see a alteration in Elisa since earlier that twenty-four hours. The tinker had given Elisa the strength and made her feminine side reappear. She felt complete once more because Henry saw the difference in her, Elisa ne’er knew how strong she was. Henry is blossoming every bit good, we can see it when he compliments his married woman before they head to dinner. On the manner to dinner Elisa sees a pinpoint in front in the route, she knew it was the chrysanthemums she had given the tinker. When she sees the flowers on the route it makes Elisa experience sad and she loses her strength that she had merely gained. “It will be a good, tonight, a good dinner” ( 12 ) . After Elisa makes the remark Henry tell her you have changed once more, intending she wasn’t her happy, strong ego any longer.
The subject of “The Chrysanthemums” is a simple but pointed analysis of a society that has no topographic point for smart adult females. Elisa is smart, lively, beautiful, and determined, but all these traits go to waste. The two cardinal work forces in the narrative are less interesting and gifted than she, their lives are far more busy so Elisa’s. Henry isn’t every bit smart as Elisa, but he runs the farm, supports them. All Elisa can make is watch him from afar as he works. Whatever info she gets about the direction of the spread comes circuitously from Henry, who speaks merely in vague, condescending footings alternatively of handling his married woman as an equal spouse. The tinker seems smarter than Henry but doesn’t have Elisa’s spirit, passion, or thirst for escapade. Harmonizing to Elisa, he may non even fit her accomplishment as a tinker. However, it is he who gets to sit about the state, populating an adventuresome life that he believes is unfit for adult females. Steinbeck uses Henry and the tinker as substitutes for the control of male societies in general: merely as they overlook women’s potency, society does every bit good.
Steinbeck states that the demand for sexual fulfilment is highly powerful and that the quest of it can do people to move in foolish ways. Elisa and Henry have a practical but degage matrimony and seem to handle each other more as brother and sister than hubby and married woman or friends than partners. Elisa is a strong adult female connected with copiousness and gender but has no kids, connoting the asexual nature between her and Henry. Regardless of the fact that her matrimony doesn’t meet her demands, Elisa remains a sexual individual, a value that Steinbeck shows as ordinary and wanted. For illustration a consequence of her unrealized demands, Elisa’s attractive force to the tinker is powerful and uncontrollable. When she speaks to him about looking at the stars at dark, her linguistic communication is frontward. She kneels down earlier him in a position of sexual entry, making out toward him and looking, as the storyteller puts it, “like a fawning dog” ( 8 ) . She puts herself at the commiseration of a alien. The result of Elisa’s powerful attractive force is possibly even more detrimental than the appeal itself. Her gender, forced to non be shown for so long, overcomes her and fondnesss her psyche after jumping to life so rapidly.
As Foster notes inHow to Read like a Professor, a symbol is more than merely something you see, it’s something you break down and insight approximately. In “The Chrysanthemums” , Steinbeck uses symbols to the flowers and the tinker to do the reader travel beyond what they are reading. The flowers symbolism more than merely a flower, it symbolizes both Elisa and the limited chance of her life. Like Elisa, the chrysanthemums are strong, and beautiful. The garden, like Elisa and Henry’s house, is orderly and ordered. Elisa clearly finds herself with the flowers, even stating that she becomes one with the workss when she tends to them. When the tinker notices the chrysanthemums, Elisa clearly brightens, as if he had merely seen her. She offers the chrysanthemums to him at the same clip she offers herself, he ignores both Elisa and the flowers. His denial of the flowers besides shows the manner society has excluded adult females as nil more than female parents and housekeepers. Merely like her, the flowers are unoffending and non of import.
The short narrative “The Chrysanthemums” shows power and inequality between work forces and adult females. Henry treats Elisa as if she is merely his sister instead than his married woman. Once the tinker appears Elisa has a whole new side to her, she shows us her feminine side. Elisa’s hubby notices the alteration in her and tells her how strong and happy she looks and it makes Elisa experience good about herself. Well once they are headed to dinner her spirit is broken one time once more, because the tinker didn’t attention anything about the flowers he merely wanted her pot. Elisa loses her power and she feels trapped one time once more in her unhappy life, but she still has hope for her life.
Plants Cited
Foster, Thomas C.How to Read Literature Like a Professor. New York: Harper, 2003.
Print.
Steinbeck, John. “The Chrysanthemums”The Long Valley.1938 Ed. John Timmerman. New York: Penguin, 1995.1-13 Print
