John Steinbeck’s the Chrysanthemums, Essay Example

At first I thought this was just another weak short story, the kind first published in a magazine.[1] Later, if the author becomes famous, it ends up in a book with similar magazine fodder[2] and is marketed to students of literature. And so this Salinas Valley vignette, being by Steinbeck, the author of The Grapes of Wrath, Tortilla Flat, Cannery Row and Of Mice and Men, gets its turn of our brief attention. But this story turns out to be a bit more interesting (if only to me) than it seemed to be at first because of three principal symbolic elements it is based on.

The chrysanthemum is a fairly common flower, one of the first that most of us see and remember from childhood on. Thus it was not unusual when the traveling handyman is able to describe it from memory with a fair amount of confidence as, after being initially rebuffed, he tries to wrangle a bit of paid work from a potential customer. That act deceives that customer, our heroine, Elisa Allen, into trusting him. She is also deceived into feeling sorry for him. At once, Elisa’s work and hopes for her own chrysanthemums is undercut. Without knowing she is doing it, she models that psychological destruction in the real world when she hands the shoots over to the handyman in a new flower pot, that pot putting a price on the education she will have received by the end of the story. Looked at this way, it is fitting that Elisa was initially short and irritated with the handyman. Her attitude presages the devaluation the handyman is about to impose on her and her flowers. But he actually does a devaluation twice. He either lies about the woman he says he plans to give the shoots to (she may not really exist); or the woman is real, and is deceived without her knowing anything about it — a point I will return to later.

The next symbolic element is the chicken-wire fence surrounding her flower plot. It separates Elisa and the handyman both physically and psychologically, as well as its intended work of keeping out the cattle, dogs, and chickens. The physical separation is the least important, since he means Elisa and her flowers no physical harm, and it is easily overcome by walking through the gate. The important role it plays is in symbolizing the vast social and economic gulf between two people. You can see it right away, when the man’s hands are described as resting on the fence, and each of the cracks in his skin are black with dirt. By contrast, Elisa wears gloves, which she was wearing at first but later takes off and puts in her apron. But even before that happened, we knew that Elisa and her husband were not just a pair of depression-era farmers struggling to get by. Henry, her husband, owns a Ford tractor and a car, and has a hired helper named Scotty. The handyman has a wagon with a misspelled sign advertising his services, drawn by a mismatched team of horse and burro. Even their dogs reflect the difference: the handyman has a “lean and rangy mongrel” dog, while Elisa has two “ranch shepherds”.

The third important symbol is the bunch of chrysanthemum shoots discarded in the road by the handyman after he has resumed his journey. Here I want to return to the point I made earlier, about the woman who (supposedly) lives “down the road” being deceived yet wholly unaware of it. She isn’t the only one exposed in that moment. Elisa’s husband is the other victim, only this time, it is Elisa doing the deceiving. It is a silent deception, and basically harmless, but it is deception nevertheless because Elisa says nothing of even meeting the handyman, turning away from his wagon on the road as the car passes it. And the incident might not be over yet. She will have some explaining to do if her husband goes looking for the new red flowerpot, or observes her buying another one to replace the one she gave away and now resides in the wagon of the handyman, empty of its initial contents. But the important question is what the flowers in the road actually represent. To me, they simply represents a lesson learned, the truth that Elisa finally sees, a truth that causes her to deceive her husband yet again, this time by turning her head back towards the road, this time so he won’t see her crying.       

Some flowers in a garden, a fence, and the flowers found in the road; a gift, a barrier overcome, and a barrier re-raised. This deceptively simple story is built around those subtle and powerful symbolic elements. Elisa and her husband will share the same dinner, the same wine and the same movie, but will return home with powerfully different memories of that one very different day in each of their very different lives.

Works Cited

Friedman, M.D., Arnold P. The Headache in History, Literature, and Legend. 1972. Web.

[1] Harper’s, October 1937.

[2] The Long Valley. (1938).