Marigolds | 134 plays | Quizizz (2024)

FAQs

Why do the children hate the marigolds at Miss Lottie House? ›

Why do the children hate the marigolds at Miss Lottie's house? The flowers do not fit with their cheerless lives.

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.

Lizabeth's internal conflict seems to be her struggle with her circ*mstances; she and her community are poverty-stricken and feel hopeless under the hardships of the Great Depression. She seems to feel restless, angry, frustrated by the monotony of her life, and not quite able to define or explain these feelings.

The children fling stones at Miss Lottie's flowerbed, hating the dazzling beauty of the marigolds she has tended for many summers. They have vandalized Miss Lottie's home before, and today Lizabeth leads them as they hurl stones and chant taunts until Miss Lottie, enraged, calls her son to chase them away.

Miss Lottie's marigolds were perhaps the strangest part of the picture. Certainly they did not fit in with the crumbling decay of the rest of her yard.

Lizabeth feels “great bewilderment and fear” after she overhears her father crying about his feelings of frustration and powerlessness as he struggles to find work. Overhearing this conversation shakes Lizabeth's understanding of her family and the world.

Final answer: Lizabeth destroys the marigolds because she is angry and confused about her poverty-stricken life. She views the marigolds as a symbol of false hope and beauty and destroying them represents her transition from childhood innocence to harsh adulthood.

Innocence and Compassion

Perhaps the boldest claim in “Marigolds” is that “one cannot have both compassion and innocence.” Lizabeth draws this conclusion from the humiliation she experiences when facing Miss Lottie, the torn flowers at their feet.

Miss Lottie believed in the beauty the marigolds could provide during a dark time, and they were her only comfort. According to the narrator, it seems that seeing those marigolds destroyed killed the sense of hope that Miss Lottie had about her marigolds.

The only splash of color is Miss Lottie's marigolds, which the children hate because they're too beautiful—they stand out against the ugliness of the town. One day, Lizabeth and her friends start decapitating a few of the marigolds, which makes Lizabeth feel ashamed.

Why is Lizabeth a complex character? ›

She feels ashamed of acting childish, and yet she does childish things as if she can't help herself. She realizes that she needs to grow up, but cannot see how to do it. The inner conflicts and outer behaviors, along with her awareness of what is happening to her, show what a complex person she is.

The conflicting feelings Lizabeth is feeling are feelings of being ashamed because of what she has done to Miss Lottie, even though she knows that she shouldn't be doing it, and the feeling of happiness and exuberance of being successful in making her mad.

Anger underlies the children's harassment and vandalism in “Marigolds.” Lizabeth describes the “vague, undirected restlessness” that the impoverished children feel but cannot articulate, and she senses that they hate the flowers because their beauty is so out of keeping with the dust, dirt, hunger, and boredom the ...

After destroying the garden and seeing Miss Lottie's broken spirit, Lizabeth realizes that she has done much more damage than to the marigolds. She understands why the flowers were so important to Miss Lottie, who had nothing else in her life except heartache and poverty.

The marigolds are important to Miss Lottie because they symbolize hope and beauty in the face of adversity. The children hate the marigolds because they feel they don't fit in..... because their beauty only accentuates the ugliness in their lives.

The marigolds' beauty confounds and disturbs the children, out of place as the flowers are in the dust and disrepair of the community. The children, Lizabeth says, hate the flowers intensely.

The kids felt that her flowers were too perfect for their neighborhood, let alone Miss Lottie's shanty old shack of a house. They thought that those marigolds were too beautiful. They couldn't help but destroy what made them feel confused and was so out of place in their dusty barren neighborhood.

Line 141: What is motivating the children to annoy Miss Lottie? The children are bored and they are trying to prove that they are brave motivating the children to annoy Miss.