Eugenia Collier

Set during the Great Depression, a young girl, caught up in the whirlwind of teenage emotions, learns the meaning of compassion and empathy when she destroys a neighbor’s marigolds. Lizabeth, the main character in “Marigolds” by Eugenia Collier, has enough on her hands being an African-American in the Great Depression, and the constant struggle of trying to fit in with her younger friends while acting her age doesn’t help. One day, Lizabeth and some other children decide to go torment Miss Lottie

adult, children begin to progressively lose their innocence as they become more of a compassionate person because one can not have both innocence and compassion simultaneously. In fact, a coming of age short story called “Marigolds” written by Eugenia Collier, tells about a young girl named Lizabeth who grows up to become a compassionate person. For the most part, Lizabeth tells her childhood experience in a flashback on how she mostly remembers Miss Lottie’s marigolds. Ultimately, Lizabeth decides

In Eugenia Collier’s short story, “Marigolds,” the loss of innocence is described with the protagonist’s claim that “innocence involves an unseeing acceptance of things at face value, an ignorance of the area below the surface” (Collier 6). Similarly, all members of society must eventually make the transition from youthful children to mature adolescents. Recently, however, the rate at which children mature has increased rapidly, due to the increasing influence of the media and society on individual

Baldwin’s first three novels -Go Tell It on the Mountain, Giovanni's Room, and Another Country-boil over with anger, prejudice, and hatred, yet the primary force his characters must contend with is love.  Not meek or mawkish but "...something active, more like fire, like the wind" (qtd. in O'Neale 126), Baldwin's notion of love can conquer the horrors of society and pave the way to "emotional security" (Kinnamon 5).  His recipe calls for a determined identity, a confrontation with and acceptance

Lizabeth Transforms from Child to Woman There comes a point in one’s life when they must recognize the hardships placed upon them, and instead of being ignorant of those hardships, they must confront them head-on. In “Marigolds”, a short story by Eugenia Collier, the main protagonist, Lizabeth, encounters various struggles that come with living in a poor town in rural Maryland during the Depression, allowing her to learn more about growing up and accepting reality with all its flaws. Lizabeth is a 14-year-old

Coming-of-age, the transition between childhood and adulthood, is a confusing and difficult time of discovering oneself. Prejudice from others based on race, gender, or economic status only makes growing up more challenging. Scout in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird and Esperanza in Sandra Cisneros’ The House on Mango Street experience the ideological maturity toward womanhood while encountering problems most do not face until adulthood. Living in conservative Alabama where racial tension is high