John Steinbeck's The Chrysanthemums

John Steinbeck's The Chrysanthemums was published in the late 1930s, "when some critics consider his greatest works were published aincluding Tortilla Flat (1935), Of Mice and Men (1937), The Red Pony (1937), and The Grapes of Wrath (1939)" (http://www.hrc.utexas.edu). The story is about Elisa, a farm wife who is sexually frustrated, lonely, and in need of validation as both a woman and a human being.

The first sentence - "The high grey-flannel fog of winter closed off the Salinas Valley from the sky and from all the rest of the world" -- evokes a suffocating sense of isolation (1). When we meet her she is working in her flower garden. "Her figure looked blocked and heavy in her gardening costume, a man's black hat pulled low down over her eyes, clod-hopper shoes, a figured print dress almost completely covered by a big corduroy apron " (1). Her femininity is submerged by the hard physical labor of the farm, this passage tells us. "Her work with the scissors was over-eager, over-powerful" (2), Steinbeck writes, indicating she is filled with passion that has no other outlet. She keeps glancing at the men, indicating both a break from her boredom a

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Category: Literature - J