Summer break finally gave me some time to bear down and read short stories that I have put on hold for some time, allowing me time to ponder over human conditions that may not be so foreign to us after all.
In John Steinbeck’s short story “The Chrysanthemums,” Elisa Allen is the hardened and isolated wife of a farmer living in California’s Salinas Valley. The only creative outlet that Elisa can feel proud of is her “planting hands,” which is the talent she has for growing flowers and tending her garden. Ironically, though gardening is her pride and joy and a source of even a “little smugness,” Elisa also manages to bury her femininity and desires with the things she wears and carries as a gardener. However, after an awkward and sexually tense encounter with a nomadic tinkerer who exploits her loneliness and vulnerability, Elisa is finally tempted to get out of her shell—with disastrous consequences that ultimately devastate her confidence and newly acquired sense of herself as a woman. Interestingly, the theme of carrying and then trying to discard the burdens of one’s identity is also explored in Tim O’Brien’s short story about American soldiers during the Vietnam War, “The Things They Carried.” But whereas Elisa actively tries to shed the items that kept her identity hidden from even her own self, the soldiers do the opposite of Elisa: in spite of the heavy equipment and guns they are forced to carry as soldiers, they desperately try to hold onto anything that reminds them of their previous life as a civilian: photographs and letters, good-luck charms, “premium dope,” and memories that somehow weighed more on them than any piece of military gear.
When the reader is first introduced to Elisa, she is physically encased in the trappings of her passion. She wears a “gardening costume” which makes her figure look “blocked and heavy.” She also wears a “man’s black hat pulled low down over her eyes” and “clodhopper shoes.” Her “figured print dress” is almost completely eclipsed by a “big corduroy apron with four big pockets to hold the snips, the trowel and scratcher, and the knife.” Elisa’s identity as a woman is repressed so that she can function better as a gardener. Moreover, because she lives in an unforgiving environment, Elisa cannot afford to let herself go. At the opening of the story, Steinbeck explicitly makes clear how the “high grey-flannel fog of winter” has “closed off” Elisa’s farm from “all the rest of the world,” covering the valley like a lid over a “closed pot.” Both Elisa and her environment are restricted and contained, unable to fully express their true identity.
As a result, when Elisa first meets the stranger coming in on his “crazy, loose-jointed wagon,” she can’t help but envy his freedom, his leisurely trip “from Seattle to San Diego and back every year.” Elisa fails to recognize that the man is faking an interest in her flowers to get money out of her, and when he leaves she attempts to shed all of the previous items that informed her asexual identity: the heavy gardening clothes and tools. She symbolically scrubs herself with pumice and notices her body for the first time: “She tightened her stomach and threw out her chest. She turned and looked over her shoulder at her back.” Ironically, however, as Elisa heads into town with her husband, she sees the chrysanthemums that she had given to the man and that the man had callously thrown away on the side of the road. Elisa’s revelation that she had been taken advantage of and that her encounter was a one-sided affair that was of significance only to her reduces her to tears, and she becomes “like an old woman.”
For the various soldiers that Tim O’Brien profiles in “The Things They Carried,” the weight of their equipment and guns varies with the duties that each soldier has in his unit. However, O’Brien stresses that the weight they carried is not merely physical. “To carry something was to hump it, as when Lieutenant Jimmy Cross humped his love for Martha up the hills and through the swamps. In its intransitive form, to hump means to walk, or to march, but it implied burdens far beyond the intransitive.” For soldiers like Jimmy Cross, then, it is important that they carry the invisible burdens that only they can see, because these burdens are what define them, not the military packs they carry on their back and the weapons they hold by their side.
When Jimmy Cross’s obsession with Martha contributes to the death of one the soldiers in his unit, Jimmy decides to give up on Martha. “He was realistic about it. There was that new hardness in his stomach. He loved her but hated her. No more fantasies, he told himself.” In other words, Jimmy forgoes his identity as a boyfriend in order to be a more effective lieutenant. By giving up the one essential thing that he carried with him throughout the war—his memories of Martha—Jimmy kills a part of himself for the good of his unit. Jimmy sheds a psychological weight in order to retain the physical part of his identity, but Elisa sheds a physical weight (the bulky clothes and tools) in order to tap into her sexuality that she has managed to repress so far. However, though both Jimmy and Elisa are guided by different motivations, in the end they both discover that what they have left may not be all that it’s cracked up to be.
