The Chrysanthemums

Symbolism in The Chrysanthemums John Steinbeck’s short story The Chrysanthemums shows Elisa Allen, a strong, capable, childless woman of thirty-five who is frustrated with her present life with her husband, Henry, a man of unscrupulous confidence (French 83). She “longs for what women’s magazines vaguely call romance” (Segal 215), and is “a woman who has a strength of will usually identified with men, as well as an ambiguous combination of traditionally masculine and feminine traits” (…

…Pony: A Reader’s Companion to Steinbeck’s Complete Short Stories. New Jersey: The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 1987 French, Warren. John Steinbeck. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1975. French, Warren. John Steinbeck’s Fiction Revisited. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1994. McMahan, Elizabeth, Susan X. Day, and Robert Funk. Literature and the Writing Process. 5th ed. New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1999. Segal, David., ed. Short Story Criticism: Excerpts from Criticism of the Works of Short Fiction Writers. Vol. 11. Michigan: Gale Research, Inc., 1992.