Comparative Analysis of Marigolds and The Picture of Florence Thompson

Eugenia Collier is a magnificent author that wrote with perfect accuracy. The events of the story though some fictional have a truth that all history books share in common; the hunger, emotional burdens, dust bowl, poverty, etc. were all real consequences due to the Great Depression. The Great Depression gravely affected thousands of people since no one had jobs and people were going hungry, like the case of a Migrant mother named Florence Thompson. Florence needed to take care of 5 children and had no husband, as seen in the picture. Both the story and the picture depict the scarring effects of the Great Depression in an exaggerated scale of facts. In the short story marigolds, we can clearly see all the positive and negative aspects of the Great Depression through the author’s point of view. The author gives a lot of emphasis to her young days and describes all of the feelings and emotions she had experienced at that time, an example is when she clearly stated “Whenever the memory of those marigolds flashes across my mind, a strange nostalgia comes with it and remains long after the picture has faded.” Eugenia uses throughout the whole story a lot of comparisons in a form of similes, metaphors, etc to describe the sadness, confusion and joy she may have felt while she was still young and experiencing a whole new set of emotions which was either there but unknown or confusing. For example: “I feel again the chaotic emotions of adolescence, illusive as smoke, yet as real as the potted geranium before me now.” Here the author uses a simile to describe her “chaotic emotions” which we all experience at some point in our lives by saying it is “illusive as smoke” meaning that she experiences emotions that “mock” her and are a mere illusion like smoke which eventually fades away.

The picture of Florence Thompson is sad, meaningful and enraging due to the dreadful circumstances she had to face alone along with her five children. The picture itself shows a worried mother with two of her children. If the physical apparel is analyzed Florence is really skinny, her clothes are ragged and dirty, she has dirt spots through some parts of her body, and it looks like she has a disease, which is resembled in the lower right side of her lip. Her children cling to their mother maybe because they don’t want her to leave to work or maybe because they missed her after a long day’s work. If we look closely the house they live in is small and in poor conditions, the children are also dressed poorly and are dirty. The author of Marigolds and the picture of Florence have particularities that they share in common. Eugenia mentions, “We children, of course, were only vaguely aware of the extent of our poverty. Having no radios, few newspapers, and no magazines.” If we look at the picture of Florence, both of her sons have no comfort inside their home; they have no kind of technology to keep them entertained and nothing to read to spend their time away on. Eugenia also states “In those days everybody we knew was just as hungry and ill clad as we were. Poverty was the cage in which we all were trapped...” if we look at the picture, Florence and her children are suffering from hunger because Florence herself is very skinny as well as her children, you can even see Florence’s chest bones if you look closely. Eugenia takes all the aspects of depression and turned it into an accurate historical story. Something which I find interesting is that Eugenia stated that she “came reluctantly from her private world” such expression can again remind us of the photograph of Florence with her two sons; Florence in the photo though she is directly looking into the camera you can see that she has other things running through her mind, she has other worries that bother and torment her. You can tell because she is ignoring the fact that there is a camera placed in front of her and she is letting the photographer take a shot of her and her children, and all of them are in poor conditions.