SOURCE: “‘The Chrysanthemums’: Steinbeck's Pygmalion” in Steinbeck's Short Stories in “The Long Valley”: Essays in Criticism, edited by Tetsumaro Hayashi, Ball State University, 1991, pp. 1–9.

In the essay below, Shillinglaw asserts that “The Chrysanthemums” was heavily influenced by the Pygmalion myth as utilized by Ovid and George Bernard Shaw.

For John Steinbeck “life was not a struggle toward anything, but a constant process in it,” writes Jackson J. Benson, and “that process for man … was largely a matter of learning. It was the major ‘action’ for both his life and work.”¹ It is clearly the major “action” in his two most famous stories about women, “The Chrysanthemums” and “The White Quail.” As Steinbeck records in his journals, the germ for each is that moment when a woman learns something profound about herself, a moment of insight either grasped or denied: Elisa seeing the chrysanthemums on the road; Mary in...