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The Chrysanthemums Explication

Women have always been viewed to be inferior in everyday society. Because of this stereotyping, women have been given limits and boundaries to what they are able to do. Married women especially have these issues to which they are confined within the gender roles they must play. This, however, has not prevented women from attempting to step past and overcome these boundaries and stereotypes. John Steinbeck uses symbolism, characterization, and conflict in his work “The Chrysanthemums” to support the controlling idea of the limitations of a married woman.
To endorse this theme of the limitations of married women, Steinbeck uses symbolism. The idea that Elisa is confined can be found in the opening of the story: “The high gray-flannel fog of winter closed off the Salinas Valley from the sky and from all the rest of the world. On every side it sat like a lid on the mountains and made of the great valley a closed pot" (Short 62). The closed lid to the pot represents Elisa’s limits of her life in great valley where she lives, unable to exceed past the farm’s boundaries. Also, her house shared with her husband Henry in the valley is surrounded "with red geraniums close-banked around it as high as the windows" and again with a wired fence (Steinbeck 1233). Behind this fence is where Elisa remains throughout the story, observing Henry sell cattle to the men with their Ford coupe and the tinker with his wagon. This symbolizes how she is limited to her gift with flowers and as a wife. Elisa’s flowers themselves are symbols for what Elisa doesn’t have in her life. Elisa is childless and lacks the boldness and color which the flowers have. Marcus supports this by saying “her devotion to her chrysanthemum bed is at least partly an attempt to make flowers take the place of a child…Denied a child, a wider world of experience, and that projection of oneself into the world of fresh and broad experiences…she finds a substitute in her flowers” (67). The closed pot, wired fence, and...