Chrysanthemums’’ have focused on two ideas: that Elisa is oppressed, either by a male-dominated society or by a practical-minded one, and that her flowers are for her some sort of compensation for what is missing in her life. The chrysanthemums have been interpreted as symbols of Elisa's sexuality, or childlessness, or artistic sensibility, and all of these connections make sense when looking at Elisa's connections to her husband or to society. It is also possible, I believe, and useful, to look at the flowers as literal flowers, as signs of Elisa's connection with the natural world.
Since the rekindling of the feminist movement in the 1960s and 1970s, and the rise of the environmental movement in the same years, writers including Annie Dillard, Alice Walker and Starhawk have wondered in writing whether the same impulses that lead men to conquer new land and dominate the environment also lead them to dominate women. In 1974, the French writer Francoise d'Eaubonne applied the term ecofeminism to the philosophy that women have a spiritual connection with nature that is stronger than men's, that women and nature are dominated by men in similar ways, and that women's connections to nature can be a source of strength.
Carol J. Adams explains in the introduction to her anthology Ecofeminism and the Sacred, ‘‘Ecofeminism identifies the twin domination of women and the rest of nature. To the issues of sexism, racism, classism, and heterosexism that concern feminists, ecofeminists add naturism—the oppression of the rest of nature. Ecofeminism argues that connections between the oppression of women and the rest of nature must be recognized to understand adequately both oppressions.’’
''Oppression'' seems too strong a word for the ways in which Elisa is subdued by her life as Henry's wife, yet clearly she is limited in ways that frustrate her. She is proud of her garden, but must fence it off to protect it from the domesticated animals, the ‘‘cattle and dogs and chickens.’’ She feels she must ask Henry's permission to enjoy a glass of wine. Even the tinker, who seems to understand her at least a little bit, keeps telling her what she cannot do. ‘‘It ain't the right kind of life for a woman,’’ he says. ‘‘It would be a lonely life for a woman.’’
Elisa already leads a lonely life, in terms of her connections with other human beings. Her only passion is for her garden, and when she is alone in the garden she is her truest self. As Henry says, she has ‘‘a gift with things.’’ Her mother, too, had the gift. ‘‘She could stick anything in the ground and make it grow. She said it was having planters' hands that knew how to do it.’’ Her connection with the garden, with nature, is something she feels but cannot explain. She tells the tinker, ''I can only tell you what it feels like. It's when you're picking off the buds you don't want. Everything goes right down into your fingertips. You watch your fingers work. They do it themselves. You can feel how it is.They pick and pick the buds. They never make a mistake. They're with the plant. Do you see? Your fingers and the plant. You can feel that, right up your arm. They know.’’ It isn't just plant life that can call up this response. For Elisa, just being outside on a dark night sends her soaring: ''When the night is dark—why, the stars are sharp-pointed, and there's quiet. Why, you rise up and up! Every pointed star gets driven into your body. It's like that. Hot and sharp and—lovely.’’
This gift, this oneness with the plant, is a source of strength. Several times throughout the story, Steinbeck comments on her strength. As she works in the garden, her face is ‘‘lean and strong,’’ she uses ‘‘strong fingers,’’ her work is ‘‘over-powerful. The chrysanthemum stems seemed "too small and easy for her energy.'' She feels at her most powerful when she is using her planter's hands, which ''never make a mistake. You can feel it. When you're like that you can't do anything wrong.’’ The thought of sharing this connection to nature with another person—the ''lady down the road a piece'' who ''has got the nicest garden you ever seen''—makes Elisa giddy. Her eyes shine, her breast swells, her voice grows husky. And when she has done it, when she has reached past all the men in the story across the bridge of nature to another woman, she finds her greatest strength. ‘‘I'm strong,’’ she tells Henry. ‘‘I never knew before how strong.’’ What Elisa would like to do is get out of the Valley and see the world, to break her bonds with Henry and strengthen her bonds with the land. She is fascinated with the tinker's life, traveling back and forth trying ‘‘to follow nice weather." "That sounds like a nice kind of a way to live,’’ she says.
The word nice comes up again and again in her conversation with the tinker. The woman down the road has the ''nicest garden you ever seen,'' but she would like to have some ‘‘nice chrysanthemums.’’ ‘‘It must be nice’’ to sleep in the wagon, Elisa comments. ‘‘It must be very nice. I wish women could do such things.’’ For Elisa, the word is an expression of deep and mysterious feelings, of an essential connection. But both the men in her life reveal that they do not understand, that the word is one they can use casually. When Elisa describes the feeling of being under the stars, and comes close to reaching for the man, he replies, ''It's nice, just like you say. Only when you don't have no dinner, it ain't.’’ His response makes her ashamed. She has been about to reach for a kindred spirit, and he has just brought the conversation down from spiritual fulfillment to material comfort. Henry, too, fails the test. He walks in when she is at her most artificial, when she is penciled and rouged and the least like her natural self, and declares, ‘‘You look so nice!’’ Her reply is swift and terrible: ''Nice? You think I look nice! What do you mean by nice?'' However kindly he may be, however hard he tries, Henry just doesn't get it. For him, nature is something to be subdued, brought under control. It's how he makes his living. When Elisa is disturbed, after Henry returns from his chores, she looks down toward the river road ''where the willow-line was still yellow with frosted leaves so that under the high gray fog they seemed a thin band of sunshine.’’
When Henry is disturbed by his failure to say the right thing, he looks ''down toward the tractor shed.’’ He acknowledges Elisa's ‘‘gift with things,’’ but he sees the flowers only in terms of their size, not their beauty. ''Some of those yellow chrysanthemums you had this year were ten inches across.’’ (Elisa knows that for men, size is all that matters when it comes to flowers, and at first she brags about her chrysanthemums in those terms with the tinker.) Henry does not understand growing things only because they are beautiful. Instead, he wishes she would ''work out in the orchard and raise some apples that big.’’ The tinker, even when he is trying to establish himself as a sensitive soul, makes a slip and betrays his own lack of comprehension. Just after describing their appearance he comments, ''They smell kind of nasty till you get used to them." "It's a good bitter smell,’’ Elisa retorts, ''not nasty at all.’’ In ''The Chrysanthemums'' men are constantly at odds with nature. The first hint of human activity in the story is an image of farming: ''On the broad level land floor the gang plows bit deep and left the black earth shining like metal.’’
Henry and the men from the Western Meat Company make a deal for steers, or castrated cattle. Henry's roadster bounces along the road disturbing animals, ‘‘raising the birds and driving the rabbits into the brush. Two cranes flapped heavily over the willow-line and dropped into the river-bed.’’ No wonder the narrator refers to the ranch as ‘‘Henry Allen's foothill ranch.'' These activities are not Elisa' s; she literally has no ownership of them.
The ultimate betrayal of nature is the tinker's, the deliberate destruction of the chrysanthemums for the sake of fifty cents and a red pot. Stanley Renner rightly points out that Steinbeck himself was not a feminist. In Modern Fiction Studies he writes, ‘‘although, of course, biography need not inevitably determine a writer's perspective, Steinbeck's feelings about his marriage at the time the story was written were far from those of the implied author who would have written the essentially feminist version of the story.’’ It is not at all required, however, that Steinbeck be a feminist himself, much less an ecofeminist, for the body of thought called ''ecofeminism'' to have something interesting to say about Steinbeck's fiction. This is a case, then, of the story standing as an example of something that is true and important—the different ways men and women might respond to nature—that the author was not aware of revealing.
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