The short story The Chrysanthemums is about a young woman named Elisa, whose husband owns a plantation and is the ideal man for a woman in the early 20th century. Yet she is still unhappy. She isn’t given much leniency, and her husband leaves her alone all the time. Then, a traveling man looking for work flatters his way into a conversation and a job. Once her husband comes back, the both of them go to dinner and she learns that the traveling man was using her the whole time, which leaves her even more emotionally distressed. In John Steinbeck's The Chrysanthemums, through symbolism and tone he depicts the unhappiness of most women in their role with the early 20th century, even when they have a seemingly perfect life.
The tone of the short…show more content… Just like how when Elisa and her husband go to dinner after he gets back from work. The two of them are making their way down the road when Elisa spots what she thinks is the chrysanthemums that she gave to the man. Her first thoughts are, “He might have thrown them off the road. They wouldn’t have been much trouble, not very much. But he kept the pot” (458). Steinbeck uses thoughts like “they wouldn’t have been much trouble” to express the way that Elisa feels about the plants and her emotional connection to their wellbeing. Because she has such a deep understanding of the way that the chrysanthemums are being treated, they symbolize how both she and most of the women during the early 20th century are being treated. Through the way it leaves her so emotionally destroyed, everything that’s wrong with women’s roles comes into play. Therefore, the chrysanthemums symbolize how overlooked women are in their role and how much it emotionally crushes them. Even Steinbeck, as a man, understands how tough it is for women to have so much, yet at the same time, so little expected of them from society and their standing in a relationship. And they are just expected to be perfectly fine with it
