Literature and Themes of Confinement

            The settings in "The Chrysanthemums" and "To Set Our House in Order" bring to life the confinement of Elisa and Grandmother MacLeod. Elisa is painfully aware she is trapped in a man's world while Grandmother MacLeod is unaware of being trapped in the past. .
             From the onset of "The Chrysanthemums" a tone of isolation is introduced: "The high gray-flannel fog of winter closed off the Salinas Valley from the sky and from the rest of the world. On every side it sat like a lid and made of the great valley a closed pot" (Steinbeck 214). This sense of confinement continues as we see Elisa enclosed by a wire fence and working in her garden. Her work is limited to this wire enclosure and the house. The rest of the farm is reserved for her husband's labours. In contrast his area covers a vast territory and offers various types of work. He has contact with the outside world. He uses motor vehicles such as tractors, the fordson, and the roadster meaning he has freedom to move around. These surroundings describe a physical world where Elisa is confined inside a man's world. Further evidence of this entrapment is in the description of her clothes: "Her figure looked blocked and heavy in her gardening costume, a man's black hat, clodhopper shoes, a figured printed dress almost completely covered by a big corduroy apron"( Steinbeck 214). Although Elisa knows, "I've got a gift with things" (Steinbeck 215), and she has ambition, "her work with the scissors was over-eager, over-powerful. The chrysanthemums seemed too small and easy for her energy" (Steinbeck 214), she has nowhere to use her talent. It is the Great Depression when only the necessities were valuable leaving Elisa's talent worthless. This is played out in the retelling of the arrival of the travelling man. His desperation is evident when he says in a whining undertone, "Maybe I won't have no supper tonight" (Steinbeck 216), and "Only when you don't have no dinner, it ain't" (Steinbeck 218).