The Crysanthemums

El Paso Community College

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A Kind of Play: Dramatic Elements in Steinbeck's "The Chrysanthemums"

Critic: John Ditsky

Source: Wascana Review, Vol. 21, No. 1, Spring, 1986, pp. 62-72

Criticism about: John (ernst) Steinbeck (1902-1968), also known as: John Ernst Steinbeck, Jr., John (Ernst) Steinbeck, John Ernst Steinbeck, Amnesia Glasscock

Genre(s): Short stories; Novellas; Novels; Plays; Poetry; Social novels; Letters (Correspondence); Novels of the soil; Proletarian novels; Essays; Film scripts

The longstanding critical assumption, routinely delivered and seldom questioned, that John Steinbeck represented an odd late flourishing of literary naturalism--rather than, as now seems increasingly clear, an innovative sort of romanticism--has had the predictable effect of retarding appreciation of his accomplishments. Among the latter are the ways in which Steinbeck's language emerges from his contexts: arises organically but not necessarily with "real-life" verisimilitude from situations which must therefore be seen as having demanded, and in a sense therefore also created, a discourse of a sometimes patent artificiality--of a rhetorical loftiness appropriate to the dramatic seriousness of the given subject matter, but unlikely as an instance of "observed" intercourse in English, American variety. For only from such a vantage point can we hope to make sense of many of the exchanges which animate such diverse works as Cup of Gold, To a God Unknown, The Moons Is Down, and Burning Bright. Yet the sorts of usage I am referring to must necessarily give pause to the reader of even In Dubious Battle, The Grapes of Wrath, and East of Eden. Recently, however, Steinbeck criticism has increasingly begun to accept the writer on his own terms, a process no more complicated than the reading closely of what heretofore has been often subjected to a routinely and callously applied imposition of extraneous critical assumptions. I think that the ways in which situation creates language--and action--can be seen in such a famously "naturalistic" piece as that famous short story which leads off Steinbeck's single lifetime collection of short fiction, The Long Valley (1938): "The Chrysanthemums."

Elisa and the stranger work through their temporary relationship through dialogue that has nothing to do ostensibly, with the struggle for power that is going on.

"The Chrysanthemums" occupies its keynote position in The Long Valley with good reason. Not only does it serve as a striking introduction to a number of Steinbeck's attainments and prepossessions, but it also achieves an astonishingly eloquent statement of Lawrentian values that is valuable in its own right. The story is usually perceived--quite rightly--as a study in psychological interconnection and revelation, and I have no wish to alter such assumptions. Rather, I would like to direct some further attention to the ways in which Steinbeck allows text to flow from context: that is, shows speech and gesture being spontaneously brought into being by means of the rigors, the labor, of interpersonal drama. It is in short, the dramatist Steinbeck who concerns me here, though it is no one of his works created for the stage that I will use as my example.

Whether or not "The Chrysanthemums" is what I would call it, one of the finest American short stories ever written, surely its craft is such as to reward reader attention and require critical inquiry.

In dramatic terms, "The Chrysanthemums" involves but three main characters: a ranch couple, Elisa and Henry Allen; and an unnamed tinker. It is December in the Salinas Valley. The Valley is shut off from the rest of the world by fog, and the weather anticipates change: "It was a time of quiet and of waiting." The imminence of change is reflected in Nature herself, then: something is about to happen. Elisa Allen is already at work in her flower garden; she is a dramatic "giver," her present quantity clearly laid out by the narrator:

. . . She was thirty-five. Her face was lean and strong and her eyes were as clear as water. 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 with four big pockets to hold the snips, the trowel and scratcher, the seeds and the knife she worked with. She wore heavy leather gloves to protect her hands while she worked.

Steinbeck's list of dramatic personae is thus fleshed out by being given the additional accountrements of sexual misidentification: Elisa wear man's clothing, and carries tools meant to prod and poke. She is also at a stage that later would be taken for granted as constituting "mid-life crisis." Moreover, the constricted world that Elisa inhabits is further limited by being divided--as more notably, later on, the world of The Wayward Bus is divided--into male and female precincts, domains of activity into which the members of the opposite sex shall not intrude Elisa's world, of course, is that of her garden; at work within it, her femininity takes on a fullness it does not possess, apparently, inside her "hard-swept looking little house, with [its] hard-polished windows." She is mistress of her chrysanthemum milieu; indeed, "The chrysanthemum stems seemed too small and easy for her energy", and the flowers' insect enemies are no match for her "terrier fingers." As she looks towards where her husband is completing a deal to sell cattle to two other men--a deal he has not informed her of beforehand--"her face was eager and mature and handsome" in the enjoyment of indulgence in the creativity of helping beautiful things grow.

When her husband finally reports on his