How do you interpret Elisa’s asking for wine with dinner? How do youaccount for her new interest in prize fights?
What will be an ideal response?
- In the end, Elisa tries to satisfy her spiritual and erotic cravings by asking Henry if they might order wine with their dinner. “It will be enough if we can have wine. It will be plenty.” It isn’t enough, of course, and she cries “weakly—like an old woman”—she who had briefly thought herself strong (par. 121).
Her new interest in prize fights, in the spectacle of blood-letting she had formerly rejected, might manifest Elisa’s momentary wish for revenge on men: her desire to repay them for her injured femininity. At least, this is the interpretation of Elizabeth McMahan as well as Mordecai Marcus (“The Lost Dream of Sex and Childbirth in ‘The Chrysanthemums,’” Modern Fiction Studies 11 [1965]: 54–58). Alternatively, one may see in this curiosity about the violence of the boxing ring a woman’s envy of the opportunities given to men to work off their aggressions and frustrations in socially acceptable ways. Another interpretation may be that she finally realizes that since men (represented in both Henry and the salesman) do not have any genuine interest in her chrysanthemums—and therefore they have no sincere interest in herself—she might as well try to understand the man with whom she is “boxing” inside her “wire fence.”
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