“Marigolds” (1969) (Eugenia Collier)
Reading Response Questions
Pre-reading
• “…she to her domestic job”—A domestic is a maid.
• “Miss Lottie’s house was the most ramshackle or all our
ramshackle homes” (2)—ramshackle: rickety, shaky
NOTE THESE QUESTIONS, BUT DO NOT ANSWER IN WRITING:
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What does the narrator, Lizabeth, say about memory in the opening paragraph of the story?
The third paragraph introduces the setting of the story: What is the time and place of the story that the adult
narrator is recalling?
Describe Lottie’s home—and her son, John Burke.
Near the bottom of the second column on page 3, the Lizabeth says, “Suddenly I was ashamed” (3). Why?
TO ANSWER:
1. Explain the narrator’s meaning in “We children, of course, were only vaguely aware of the extent of
our poverty” (1)? Why of course?
2. Symbol/Motif. What is the significance of the season’s change to the story—“the tag end of
summer…and the imminence of the cold”? Combine this idea with the following statement at the
bottom of page 1: “…a feeling that something old and familiar was ending, and something unknown
and therefore terrifying was beginning” (1).
3. Theme. “For some perverse reason, we children hated those marigolds” (3). What is it that the
children “could not name” (3)?
4. Theme. Explain the conversation that Lizabeth hears between her father and mother on the first
column of page 4. Explain “The world had lost its boundary lines” (4).
5. Lizabeth’s “one great impulse toward destruction” (bottom, 4) is followed by her recognition that the
“witch was no longer a witch but only a broken old woman who had dared to create beauty in the
midst of ugliness and sterility” (5). Comment on this climax and denouement in the story.
Critical Thinking
ANALYZING/ORGANIZING (Separating or breaking a whole into parts to discover their nature, functional and
Respond freely to the quotation below, from the penultimate (second-tolast) paragraph of the story. Is it true that compassion and innocence cannot exist
together?
relationships).
LINE/PASSAGE:
“In that humiliating moment I looked beyond myself and into
the depths of another person.
This was the beginning of compassion, and
one cannot have both compassion and innocence.”
RESPONSE: