John Steinbeck’s “The Chrysanthemums”: A Portrait of a Female as Fenced in Her Self-made Fence

John Steinbeck’s classic short story “The Chrysanthemums,” despite its very simple plot, conveys profoundly a world of meaning. The dominant interest in critical evaluation of this short story has tended to see Elisa Allen, the protagonist, as a woman oppressed in a male-dominated society. The object of this paper is to question the long-accepted view of Elisa as a wholly sympathetic character through a symbolic Freudian interpretation of the story which will lead to some sort of psychoanalysis of the protagonist, Elisa, and Steinbeck himself, when writing the story. Actually, this paper, by means of Freudian psychoanalysis, seeks to come to the conclusion that the prevailing interpretation of the story fails to square with its figurative design and structure in which the female protagonist appears to be less a woman imprisoned by men than one who keeps herself within a fence of sexual defensiveness. In fact, “The Chrysanthemums” can then be read as Steinbeck’s response to feminism.