Hughes 1

Mel Hughes LITR320 Critical Response 2 March 12, 2012

Deflowering the Innocent: The Chrysanthemums, Deconstructed

The Chrysanthemums is a short story by John Steinbeck, written in 1937 during the Great Depression. The story tells of a ranch wife, Elisa Allen, who is to all appearances a happily married woman doing what she loves best: working in her garden. In the space of less than three hours, though, all her fundamental discontents will surface and her internal misery willfor however brief a periodbecome external. The catalyst for this emotional upheaval is a tinkera traveling fix-it man with a talent for pinging people at the gut level. This narrative will examine the repressed sexual energy and unconscious desires of Elisa using psychoanalytic theory, while at the same time questioning whether the feminist criticism of misogyny in the story rings true. Elisa is described as a strong womaneven the strength of her fingers receives special notice. However, like the time she lives in, which is described as a time of waiting, Elisa is waiting for something as well. Her face was eager and mature and handsome; even her work with the scissors was over-eager, over-powerful. The chrysanthemum stems seemed too small and easy for her energy (Steinbeck 654). Her tremendous energy must be taken out on something. She has no children, so her flowers receive all her attentions. These attentions are both nurturing and protective: No aphids were there, no sowbugs or snails or cutworms. Her terrier fingers destroyed such pests before they could get started (655). She relentlessly goes

Hughes 2

after anything that could hurt her babies, and kills all threats immediately. It is not enough to simply remove the threatsshe must eradicate them violently with her terrier fingers. Clearly Elisa has a great deal of energy, more than is required for the simple act of maintaining a small garden. She has too much energy for her house itself: it was a hard-swept looking little house, with hard-polished windows (655). Even the mud mat is clean. Since the entire purpose of a mud mat is to absorb and contain mud and dirt, Elisas energy must be overpowering indeed. This energy must seethe at the boundaries placed upon it. The little ranch is apparently isolated by mountains and distance from town; at the beginning of the story there is even a fog hemming in the sky and increasing the isolation of the environment. Elisa is isolated from almost everything, so she must have a way of containing herself. Her apron is her containment field. Her apron seems to hold everything she needs for gardening (seeds, knives, gloves) or anything else. If she has something in hand that she doesnt need, into her apron it goes. Batman has his utility belt; the tinker has a wagon that he lives in, sleeps in, eats in, travels in. Elisa has her apron. Of all the things Elisa has in her apron, however, there are no friends to be found. She has no friends out of the apron, either. She has only competitors. But of course Elisa wins. I raise them [chrysanthemums] every year, bigger than anybody around here (657). Even Elisas husband is not a friend. While Elisa and Henry, her husband, seem initially to have a happy marriage, there are depths of unexplored tensions. They are a polite couple, speaking in friendly tones to each other, but their relationship is only a surface one. Henry knows nothing of the confinement Elisa feels. He has his own concerns, like the backbreaking work each day. Ranch work is demanding and physically telling. It is somewhat remarkable that he thinks of his wife at all. At the end of a long day on horseback, working with recalcitrant steers, it is far easier to collapse into a chair or bed

Hughes 3

than to hold aesthetic conversations with a wife. Running a ranch is an exercise in function, not form, so Henry concerns himself with functionality. He raises cows and sells them for food, and the workings of his ranch are set up around that. His compliments to Elisas gardening prowess are laced with the wish that she would put her energy into something more functional, like tending the orchard (655). When he tries to compliment her looks near the end of the story, after she has vigorously scrubbed herself clean and put on her best dress, he tells her she looks nice, and when she questions him on his terminology, he supplements it with strong and happy (661). Even that comes out sounding lame, but he continues digging his grave by further declaiming, strong enough to break a calf over your knee, happy enough to eat it like a watermelon (661). On what planet this could be construed as a compliment, one does not know, but while the reader must accept that he meant it that way, Elisa does not. This is not, however, any cruelty on Henrys part. He is only breaking emotions into actions that make sense to him: strength enough to deal with a calf, for example, would be an important thing in his functional world. Just as he meant this as a compliment, so was his comment on the orchard intended as such. He compliments her in his own mind by offering her the chance to supply something functional. Apples are food. Apples can be sold for a good price at the farmers market or fed to the cattle and hogs, not to mention people. Apples perform a function. The only purpose of a chrysanthemum, as far as Henry or Elisa would know, is to be decorative. They probably would not know that it could be used to make teas or medicines, so as far as they are concerned, the flower is inedible and nonfunctional. Elisa sees it as beautiful, and to her that is enough. Henry sees it as useless. Useless the flowers may be, but they still provide the only release Elisa has from her unconscious confinement. Elisa yearns for beauty. More than that, she yearns for adventure. Her

Hughes 4

conversation with the itinerant tinker is scattered with references to her desire for freedom. That sounds like a nice kind of way to live, she responds, hearing of the tinkers out-and-about travels and living out of the back of a wagon (657). More than simple adventure, however, she seems to be filled with a desire that her sex life is not satisfying. When she compares notes with the tinker on creativity, she tells him, When the night is darkwhy, the stars are sharp-pointed, and theres quiet. Why, you rise up and up! Every pointed star gets driven into your body. Its like that. Hot and sharp andlovely (659). She is kneeling at his feet, touching his greasy trousers with her fingertips as she makes this declaration, with her breast swelling passionately (659). The tinker turns away self-consciously at this moment, unable to deal with her emotion. Of course, it is also possible that the tinker cannot deal with her simply because he shares none of her passion. He knows how to talk a good game, and he does it, convincing her he shares her feelings and even using a bit of poetry of his own to make his argument, but all he says and does is simply aimed at opening the door to her heart so she will give him some work and he can earn the money to buy dinner. Making up a fictitious customer somewhere down the road, he tells Elisa that this customer wants chrysanthemums, and Elisa sees a way to live vicariously through her flowers. She can send cuttings of her flowers away with the tinker, and they will bloom in some other environment; a little bit of her will have broken free of the confinement of the ranch and had an adventure. A little bit of herself will live on. Not only that, but there is a strange sort of sexual freedom as well, since according to Freud, flowers represent womens genitals (Freud 119). All her thoughts of vicarious living and sexual freedom fly out the window, however, when Elisa later sees her flowers tossed in the middle of the road. The vile tinker had tapped into her innermost passions and then dumped her flowers once they were no longer of use to him. A

Hughes 5

true utilitarian like her husband, though, the tinker had kept the pot in which the flowers had been planted. In essence, Elisa had been deflowered, for all her innocence was gone when she realized what the tinker had been about. Feminist criticism, however, would make the claim that Elisa lived in a misogynistic world which kept women down, and the treatment of Henry and the unnamed tinker was simply to keep her in subjugation. While it is true that women in that time had fewer opportunities than today, neither the text nor the subtext of Steinbecks story offers any evidence of Elisa deliberately being held back. She is basically confined to the ranch, but no more than her husband is: it is their home and their workplace. When he can afford to, Henry takes her into town for mutual enjoyment. He foregoes his own preference for going to boxing matches because she has no taste for them, and instead he takes her to dinner and a movie. He does not leave her behind so he can go to town alone. Feminist criticism would also point out the tinkers discouragement of Elisas desire to travel as more oppression of women, but the story text merely shows that the way the tinker lives is probably not a great deal of fun. True, he lives on the road and probably sees an occasional adventure, but as he points out, he contends with animals creeping under the wagon all night (660). This could include anything from bugs to wild animals, ranging from simple vermin, such as rats, to more dangerous coyotes, wolves, and bears. He cannot afford a hotel for himself or a stable for his animalsin fact, he cannot even afford a matched set of horses, contending instead with a mismatched horse and donkey. He lives an uncertain existence, not knowing from day to day whether or not he will be able to afford to buy dinner each night, much less deal with feeding his horse, donkey, and dog. This is the kind of life a man in the 1930s would choose only if his alternatives were even less appealing, and it is little wonder that he could not recommend his

Hughes 6

lifestyle to someonemale or femaleused to sleeping with a roof over their head, with a knowledge that there would be food on the table at the end of the day. The tinker never called Elisas abilities into question, and never derogated her skills at repair work. He simply said it was a lonely life, and in that at least, he was honest. This does not, of course, excuse his contemptible dishonesty over the flowers, but even that is understandable. He wanted to make enough money to buy his dinner, and needed to get into her sympathies so she would pay him. He did not beg. He asked for work, and he performed the work well enough. And to this day, salesmen everywhere will attempt to find common ground with a potential customer simply to worm their way into a sale. How many salesmen today will regale a fifty-ish customer with tales of pets, grown children, and grandchildren (real or imagined) in an attempt to get into their confidence? In the end, Elisa is really no worse off than she was at the beginning of the story. The only difference is that her eyes have been opened. Her innocence having been lost, she knows now that she is unhappy, something she had not realized before. Now what she will do about itwell, that is another story. Or possibly not; possibly she will simply continue as before, but with an entirely unwelcome knowledge that passion can be faked by men as well as women, and that even beauty is corruptible.

Hughes 7

Works Cited Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams. 1900. 5 March. 2012. < psychclassics.yorku.ca/Freud/Dreams/dreams.pdf > Web. Steinbeck, John. The Chrysanthemums. Anthology of the American Short Story. Ed. Nagel, James. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. 2008. 653-662. Print.