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Miss Maudie And Her Azaleas Quotes

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Miss Maudie is an avid gardener and grows many different types of flowers, but she is best known for her azalea bushes, which she tends to especially carefully. Throughout the book, whenever Scout thinks about Miss Maudie and what she cares about, the phrase "Miss Maudie and her azaleas" comes up as often, if not more, than the phrase "Miss Maudie and her garden". Why is this character so strongly associated with azaleas? It may have to do with the azalea flower's symbolic meanings. According to the flower symbolism page of livingartsoriginals.com, azaleas traditionally symbolize temperance, passion and fragility. While Miss Maudie isn't a particularly fragile character, she is very passionate about her garden and about Jem and Scout. She shows this trait in her response to her house burning down in chapter 9, when she says that she always wanted a smaller house and a bigger yard anyway, and was more interested in whether Jem and Scout were safe and uninjured than her possessions.

Another character that is strongly associated with a specific flower is Mrs. Dubose and her camellias. Jem destroys her camellias when he snapped on her toward the beginning of chapter 11, and receives a single camellia as a sort of final gift from her after s he died. Accord ing to the same source given for the …show more content…

When Jem destroys them in the beginning of the chapter, he is destroying his own perfection by breaking his promise to Atticus not to get mad at anybody for saying something bad about his defense of a black man in court, but when he receives one as a final gift from Mrs. Dubose after she dies, it symbolizes gratitude, because his readings gave her a much needed distraction and helped her quit morphine. The camellias also symbolized Mrs. Dubose's noble reasoning that lead her to make the difficult decision to go through all the pain and suffering it took to quit morphine in the first

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