INTRODUCTION
This lesson will introduce you to โOdour of Chrysanthemumsโ one of the best stories of D.H. Lawrence. Best known for his novels, Lawrence was also an accomplished poet, short story writer, essayist, critic and travel writer. The controversial themes for which he is remembered (namely the celebration of sensuality in an over intellectualised world) and his relationship with censor sometimes overshadow the work of a master craftsman and a thinker. In this unit, you will get a glimpse of the life and works of D.H. Lawrence and an in-depth analysis of his story โOdour of Chrysanthemumsโ and an elaborate discussion on the styles, techniques and language employed in the story.
D. H. LAWRENCE: HIS LIFE AND WORKS
David Herbert Lawrence is one of the most versatile and influential figures in the 20th century literary canon. His works represent an extended reflection upon the dehumanising effects of modernity and industrialisation. In his works Lawrence confronts issues relating to emotional health and vitality, spontaneity, and instinct.Lawrence was born on September 11, 1885, in the small coal-mining village of Eastwond, Nottinghamshire. Lawrenceโs father, Arthur, was a miner, and the mining boom of 1870โs had taken the family around Nottinghamshire. By the time, Lawrence who was the familyโs fourth child, was born, the family had settled in Eastwood for good. Lawrenceโs mother, Lydia Beardsall,an intellectually ambitious woman was disillusioned with her husbandโs dead-end job and irresponsible drinking habits and therefore encouraged her children to advance beyond their restrictive environment.
Lawrence, a sickly, bookish child, won a scholarship to Nottingham High School in 1898. But he left school in 1901 and became a clerk at a surgical appliance factory (the experience is recreated in his largely autobiographical novel, Sons and Lovers). In the years 1902 to 1906, Lawrence served a pupil teacher at the British School, Eastwood. He joined University College, Nottingham in the fall of 1906 and received his teacherโs certificate in 1908. During these early years, he was working on his first poems, some short stories, and a draft of a novel Laetitia, that was eventually to become The White Peacock.
In the autumn of 1908, the newly qualified Lawrence left his childhood home for London to become a teacher in Davidson Road School, Croydon. Lawrence continued writing poetry and prose and he soon came to the notice of Ford Madox Ford, then known as Ford Hermamn Hueffer and editor of the influential The English Review. Hueffer published his story โOdour of Chrysanthemumโ in that magazine and introduced Lawrence to Heinemann, a famous publisher of London. His career as a professional author now began in earnest, although he taught for another year. Shortly after his first novel, The White Peacock was published in 1910, his mother died. She had been ill with cancer. Lawrence had an extremely close relationship with his mother and his grief following her death became a major turning point in his life, as is reflected in the death of the character of Mrs. Morel which forms a major turning point in his autobiographical novel Sons and Lovers, a work that draws upon much of the writerโs provincial upbringing. In March 1912, Lawrence met Frieda Weekly with whom he was to share the rest of his life. She was six years older than her new lover, married to Lawrenceโs former modern languages professor from University College, Nottingham. They eloped to Germany. From Germany they walked Southwards across the Alps to Italy, a journey that was recorded in the first of his travel books, Twilight in Italy. During his stay in Italy, Lawrence completed the final version of Sons and Lovers that, when published in 1913 was acknowledged to represent a vivid portrait of realities of working class provincial life.
Words
- Destitution: poverty. Traumatic: distressing; unpleasant.
- Wanderlust: strong desire to travel.
The couple returned to England shortly before the outbreak of the World War I and were married on July 13, 1914. Weekleyโs German parentage and Lawrenceโs open contempt for militarism meant that they were viewed with suspicion in wartime England and lived in near destitution. Nevertheless, Lawrence was actively prolific in the period, publishing The Rainbow (1915) and working on Women in Love.
After the traumatic experience of the war years, Lawrence began what he termed as his โsavage pilgrimageโ a time of voluntary exile. He escaped from England at the earliest practical opportunity, to return only twice for brief visits and spent with his wife the remainder of his life travelling. His wanderlust took him to Australia, Italy, Ceylon (Now called Sri Lanka), the United States, Mexico and South of France. He continued writing novels, poems, and even books on psycho analysis, though only Lady Chatterleyโs Lover, a heavily censored book approached the fame and reputation of Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow and Women in Love. His fragile constitution gave out on him, and he died of tuberculosis on March 2, 1030, in Vence, France. Lawrence is one of the few writers whose reputation is staked equally on novels, short stories and poetry, and through his initially censored work now seems tame, he opened up the door to sensuality for countless writers after him.
Lawrence is perhaps best known for his novels Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow, Women in Love and Lady Chatterley’s Lover; within these novels Lawrence explores the possibilities for life and living within an industrial setting. In particular, Lawrence is concerned with the nature of relationship that can be had within such settings. Though, often classed as a realist, Lawrence’s characters can be better understood with reference to his philosophy. His depiction of sexual activity, though shocking at the time, has its roots in his highly personal way of thinking and being. It is worthy to note that Lawrence was very interested in human behaviour of touch and that his interest in physical intimacy has its roots in a desire to restore our emphasis on the body, and re-balance it with what he perceived to be western civilisation’s slow process of over-emphasis on the mind. In his later years, he developed short novel form in St. Mawr, The Vision and The Gypsy and The Escaped Cook.
Lawrence’s best known short-stories included “The Captain’s Doll”, “The Fox”, “The Lady bird”, “Odour of Chrysanthemums”, “The Rocking Horse Winner” and “The Women Who Rode Away”. His most praised collection is The Prussion Officer and Other Stories, published in 1914. His collection The Woman Who Rode Away and Other Stories, published in 1928, develops his themes of leadership that he explored in novels such as Kangaroo, The Plumed Serpent, and Fanie and Annie.
Although, best known for his novels, Lawrence wrote almost 800 poems, most of them relatively short. His first poems were written in 1904 and two of his poems, “Dreams Old” and “Dreams Nascent”, were among the earliest published works in The English Review. His early works clearly place him in the school of Georgian poets. But the First World War dramatically changed his work and he began to write free verse influenced by Walt Whitman. His best known poems are probably, those dealing with nature such as those in Birds Beasts and Flowers and Tortorises.
Although Lawrenceโs works after the Georgian period are clearly in the modernist tradition, they were often very different than many other modernist writers, such as Ezra Pound. Modernist works were often austere in which every word was carefully worked on and hard fought for. Lawrence felt all poems had to be personal sentimentally and that spontaneity was vital for any work.
Lawrenceโs criticism of other authors often provides great insight into his own thinking and writing. Of particular note are his Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays and Study in Classic American Literature. In the latter, Lawrenceโs response to Whitman, Mcville and Edgar Allan Poe shed peculiar light on the nature of Lawrenceโs craft.
EXPLANATION OF THE SHORT STORY
โOdour of Chrysanthemumsโ regarded as one of D.H. Lawrenceโs most accomplished stories, was written in 1909 and published in Ford Madox Fordโs English Review in June, 1911. A different version, which transformed and expanded the concluding section in which Elizabeth Bates reflects on her married life in the presence of the body of her husband, was published in 1914 in The Prussian Officer and Other Stories. The storyโs controlled analysis of the harsh industrial setting and of Elizabeth Batesโ psychological transformation has been widely admired. H.E. Bates has even argued that Lawrenceโs greatest achievement is his short fiction.
The storyโs evolution in three major versions has been examined by a number of critics. The final versionโs unsentimental and highly judgmental condemnation of Elizabeth Bates for the failure of her marriage has been related to Lawrenceโs liberation from the influence of his beloved mother upon her death in 1910. The story is frequently compared to Sons and Lovers, a largely autobiographical novel, in which Lawrence explores his parentsโ conflicted relationship. As in โOdour of Chrysanthemumsโ a jolly, hardworking and drink-obsessed miner in Sons and Lovers is disparaged by his wife who longs for a more genteel life. The harsh, bleak mining villages of Nottinghamshire, which Lawrence knew so well, are powerfully evoked in โOdour of Chysanthemumsโ and contrasted with the unfettered beauty of the natural world.
Here, the final version of the story that appeared in The Prussian Officer and Other Stories has been taken for the unit.
The story begins with a description of the sights and sounds of a bleak mining village at the end of the coal minerโs afternoon shift. A locomotive engine comes chugging along the tracks, pulling seven loaded wagons behind it. It pulls into the collieryโs loading area,as various miners make their way home. Nearby, is a low cottage with a tiled roof and garden, a sparse apple orchard, and a brook beyond. Elizabeth Bates emerges from the chicken coop, watching the miners walk along the rail road. She turns and calls her son, John, who emerges from the raspberry patch. She tells him that it is time to come in. The locomotive her father is driving appears in the distance. As John makes his way to the house, she chides him for tearing off the petals of the chrysanthemums and scattering them on the path. She picks a few of the flowers and, after holding them against her cheek, sticks a sprig in her apron.
The train comes to a stop near the gate, and Elizabeth brings her father tea and bread and butter. He tells Elizabeth that it is time he remarried. He also informs her that her husband, Walter, had gone on another drinking binge and was heard bragging in the local pub about how much he was going to spend. Done with his tea, the old man drives off. Elizabeth enters the kitchen where the table is set and awaiting Walterโs return so that the family can have their tea. With no sign of Walter, Elizabeth continues preparing the meal. Her daughter, Annie, enters the room, and Elizabeth mildly scolds her for being late. She asks Annie if she has seen Walter; she has not. Elizabeth fears that Walter is again at the pub, and at Annieโs urging, they start to eat. Annie is transfigured by the slowly dying fire. Eating little Elizabeth grows increasingly angry.
Elizabeth goes to get coal and drops a few pieces on the fire, which snuff out almost all the light in the room. John repeatedly complains about the darkness and Elizabeth lights the overhead lamp, revealing for the first time that she is pregnant. Annie exclaims at the sight of the chrysanthemums in Elizabethโs apron. She removes them and puts the flowers to her lips, enthralled by their scent. Looking at the clock, Elizabeth realises that Walter will not get home until he is again carried in, intoxicated, by his friends. She vows not to clean him after his day of work and to leave him lying on the floor.
The children play quietly, afraid of angering Elizabeth, who sews in her rocking chair. After a while she sends them to bed, although Annie protests, as Walter has not come home yet. Elizabeth tells that when he does appear he will be all but unconscious from drinking. Putting the children to bed, she angrily and fearfully resumes her sewing. At eight oโclock, she leaves the house. She makes her way to a row of dwellings and enters a passage between two of the houses, asking Mrs.Rigley whether her husband is at home. Mrs.Rigley answers that he has had his dinner and then gone briefly to the pub and that she will go to find him. Mrs.Rigley soon returns with her husband in tow. He tells Elizabeth that he last saw Walter at the coal pit, finishing a job. Elizabeth suggests that Walter is simply at another pub, and Mr.Rigley offers to go and find out. He walks her home as Mrs.Rigley runs immediately to her neighbourโs house to spread the fresh gossip.
After Elizabeth has waited another forty-five minutes, her motherin-law enters the cottage, crying hysterically. In fear Elizabeth asks in a forthright manner if he is dead, but all her mother-in-law tells her is that he has been in a serious accident. As the mother-in-law laments and defends her own sonโs gradual slide into debauchery, a minor arrives to inform that Walter has been dead for hours, smothered after a cave-in. Elizabethโs mother-in-law breaks into tears, and Elizabeth quickly silences her, afraid that her wailing will wake up the children. She moves into the parlour to clear a space on the floor where the body can be laid. She spreads clothes on the floor to protect the carpet, takes out a clean shirt to air it, and then waits in the pantry.
Shortly after, the pit manager and another man arrive with the body on a stretcher. As they bring Walter into parlour and lay him on the floor, one of the men accidentally tips over a vase of chrysanthemums. Elizabeth quickly cleans up the water and the broken glass. Annie, who has woken up, calls from upstairs, and Elizabeth rushes up to put her to bed. The men try to silence Walterโs mother, who is still sobbing loudly. With Annie, in bed and the men gone, Elizabeth and her mother-in-law prepare to undress, clean, and lay out the body. Elizabeth embraces the body, trying to make a connection to her husbandโs still warm corpse. She and Walterโs mother wash the body. Elizabeth presses her check against the body but is repulsed by the dead flesh. She laments the distance in their marriage and the intimacy that they lacked as a couple. Walterโs mother rouses Elizabeth from her grief. Unable to weep, Elizabeth goes to fetch a shirt. With difficulty, she dresses Walter and covers the body with a sheet and locking the parlour door, she tidies the kitchen, afraid and ashamed of the harsh immediate realisations she has come to as a result of Walterโs death. She knew her immediate master was โLifeโ and the struggles of reality that she was left with. But, Walter was ultimate master from death, to whom she had to look up to, by virtue of having been his wife.
MAJOR THEMES
โOdour of Chrysanthemumsโ, a story based on the hardships of colliery life, is rightly considered to be among Lawrenceโs finest tales, one of the most carefully wrought of the early stories. It exemplifies his art at its most dramatic, his vision at its most sympathetic. A moving statement about the human condition is made within the context of the world, Lawrence knew as a child and young man. The collierโs son was able to observe his own milieu with the eyes of an outsider; the domestic tragedy is rendered with what seems a great detachment.
The story is bound together by the pervasive imagery of the flowers in its title. Lawrenceโs careful use of chrysanthemum flower throughout the story has several significant meanings. Beginning with the flowerโs first appearance, they are described in a less than positive manner. Mrs.Elizabeth Bates steps out of her house and walks past โdisheveledโ pink chrysanthemums. They are said to hang on the bushes like cloths; She also tells her son not to drop the flowerโs petals on the ground because it looks โnastyโ. When Annie tries to smell the chrysanthemums in her mothers apron band, she is pushed away. Her mother tells her that they donโt smell beautiful to her because โit was chrysanthemums when I married him, and chrysanthemums when you were born,โ and chrysanthemums the first time they ever brought her husband home drunk, heโd got brown Chrysanthemums in his buttonholeโ. And it was indeed chrysanthemums again the evening when heโs brought in from the mine, dead and laid out in the parlour. One of the men bringing in her husbandโs body accidentally knocks over the vase of chrysanthemums she had put there earlier in the evening โ the oneโs that reminded her so bitterly of the lost dreams of her life. The chrysanthemums which opened her married life had symbolically closed it. The chrysanthemums, which bloom a little while in the full and then die, are symbolic in this stay of the fragility of our inner lives. Elizabeth Bates suddenly discovers that inside herself, she is a person with unique thoughts and passions and fears, her husband was just as much of an individual as she, but one whom she never really sought to know beneath the surface. Their marriage had been long dead before her husband lost his life that night in the mine. In the end, even the vase of flowers is clumsily knocked on the floor, leaving nothing tangible behind, just an odour. The chrysanthemums symbolise a spot of beauty unrecognised by myopic Elizabeth, just as she never appreciated what she could have had with Walter, until it was too late.
The opening paragraph of the story is a brilliant, closely written descriptive set piece, carefully designed to establish the tone and mood of the story, to put the reader immediately into the imaginative world. It juxtaposes the hard, inhuman-machine-world of the mine against the beautiful, vulnerable, natural world. The description introduces the gap between people and nature which will widen at the end of the story to reveal an absolute division between men and women and life and death. In the storyโs first sentence, the mineโs locomotive engine startles a colt and traps a woman walking on the track and its smoke coats the grass. The mineโs pit-bank is powerfully described as having โflames like red sores licking its ashy sidesโ as if the slag heap is a wounded animal. In this setting where the oak is shedding its withered leaves โnoiselessly โand the whiners walk past the houses โlike shadowsโ, the wheels are โspinning fast-up against the skyโ and the engines come โwhistling in the wide bay of railway lines beside the colliery, where rows of trucks stood in harborโ, leaving an impression that human and animal life is โoverpowered by the mechanical force of the industry.โ
The most important aspect of the story is the impact of Walterโs death. Elizabeth was expecting a drunken husband, and when a dead one came home instead, she was forced to think about their marriage. Confronting his corpse was representative of her confronting the truth that her marriage was less than ideal. Walterโs death gives the reader a hint of what Elizabeth was about to realise that he was suffocated in life and, ironically, died in suffocation.
Elizabethโs confrontation of the truth leads her to realise something very important about her marriage. She realises that there hadnโt been anything between herself and her husband except for โcarnal knowledge of each other.โ She even feels that the relationship was not real โ she muses to herself, โI have been fighting a husband who did not exist.โ Because their relationship was based on the pleasures of the body of two strangers, she felt that her unborn child was โlike an ice in her wombโ.
The strong reaction of Walterโs mother had to his accident gives light to Lawrenceโs own mother. Walterโs mother is overbearing she talks at length about his boyhood days and how she learned to โmake allowancesโ for him, she worries about Elizabethโs pregnancy, and she rushes to answer the door when the miners come to the door. While some level of concern can be seen as expected behaviour, she crosses โthe lineโ when Walterโs body is being taken care of by Elizabeth. She becomes very jealous when Elizabeth begins, and pushes herself in Elizabethโs way. Lawrenceโs mother has been described as being โpushyโ. The great detachment of the narrative voice is all the more miraculous in the light of the fact that Walterโs mother is the stereotypical awareness mother. Despite its objectivity, the story is as Lawrence himself put it, โfull of (his) childhoodโs atmosphereโ.(D.H. Lawrence: Collected Letters. P. 159) This is a revealing description of a story that ends with a collierโs wife grieving over the dead body of her husband. Walter and Elizabeth Bates are instantly recognisable as versions of Walter and Gertrude Morel (in Sons and Lovers) and the emotional link with Lawrenceโs own mother is self-evident. โOdour of Chrysanthemumsโ along โThe Widowing of Mrs. Holroydโ, finds the most of his parentsโ marriage more directly than any other of his works other then Sons and Lovers.
STYLE AND LANGUAGE
Impressionistic and symbolic, dense with figurative language, D.H. Lawrenceโs โOdour of Chrysanthemumsโ relies heavily on imagery, such as the โChrysanthemumsโ, and the frequent altercation of darkness and light, for effect. It concerns one night, in the life of Elizabeth Bates, mother of two children, pregnant with her third. Her life is hard because she has been disappointed in her marriage; her husband, Walter, although a handsome and strapping man, drinks away most of the wages he receives from his job in the coal mines, she is too caught up in her own bitterness against him to be able to receive much joy from life.
On this fateful night, Elizabeth has absentmindedly tucked a chrysanthemum into the waistband of her apron, and there are more, freshcut ones decorating the parlour, but they do not symbolise happiness for her. As she notes, โIt was chrysanthemums when I married him, and chrysanthemums when (my daughter was) born, and, chrysanthemums the first time they ever brought him home drunk, heโs got brown chrysanthemums in his buttonhole.โ
And itโs chrysanthemums again the evening when Walter is brought in from the mine, dead, and laid out in the parlour. One of the men bringing in her husbandโs body accidentally knocks over the vase of the chrysanthemums she had put there earlier in the evening โ the ones that reminded her so bitterly of the lost dreams of her life. The chrysanthemums which opened her married life have how closed it.
The chrysanthemums, which bloom a little while in the autumn and then die, are symbolic in this story of the fragility of our inner lives.
โOdour of Chrysanthemumsโ takes place almost entirely under the cover of darkness and natural light appears only at the beginning when Elizabethโs father rolls through town. Once he leaves Elizabeth retreats to her home, lit only by candles and a wearing fire. She scolds Annie for coming home after dark, although Arnie claims itโs โhardly a bit darkโ. John complains of the lack of light in the cottage as the children eat their dinner, and Elizabeth can barely see their faces. Darkness obscures various dangers, when Elizabeth ventures out into the darkness to find Walter, rats scuffle around her; she senses eavesdropping housewives who are prone to gossip; and as Mr.Rigley escorts Elizabeth home, he warns her of the ruts in the earth that she cannot see in the blackness of night.
Darkness has a life-giving element as well as a dangerous and a threatening one. When Elizabeth prepares to receive Walterโs body in the parlour, the only paltry candle she brings does little to dispel the gloom. She can barely see Walter in a literal sense, but now for the first time she gets a glimpse of him as person. In life, she knew almost nothing about Walter, and even their closest physical encounters took place in the dark. Now, with darkness surrounding her and with Walter in the permanent darkness of death, startling truths come to light for Elizabeth. In this sense, darkness serves as kind of renewal. Morning will come for Elizabeth, but her life would be very different.
Throughout the story, Lawrenceโs dark, ominous imagery forms threatening backdrop to the charactersโ struggle. For example, when describing the Batesโ house, Lawrence writes, โA large bony vine clutched at the house, as if to claw down the tiled roof.โ We first see young John near raspberry plants that are โlike whipsโ. Lawrence twice compares humans to shadows miners who walk past the house are โlike shadowsโ
and Elizabeth returns to the house โlike a shadowโ after she puts the dustpan outside. We get the sense that these people are somehow disappearing, even as they go about their daily lives. Fire, in particular, appears repeatedly in the story, almost always as a threatening force. At the beginning of the story, Lawrence describes the flames rising from coal pit as โred roses licking its ashy sidesโ, as though the flames themselves are alive. Inside the house, when Annie cries out in pleasure at seeing the flowers in Elizabethโs apron, she is startled, fearing that โthe house was afireโ.
Mrs Rigley, whom Elizabeth approaches for help in finding Walter, asks Elizabeth to make sure the children donโt โset themselves afireโ. Fire brings warmth and light into the Batesโ home, but the characters are always conscious of the threat that accompanies it.
The animal and natural imagery that Lawrence uses suggests that the characters are part of a larger, more unpredictable natural cycle of life and death. John is like a frog when he crawls out from underneath the sofa, and Elizabeth says angrily that when Walter comes home drunk heโll be โlike a logโ. One of the miners who brings Walter home compares the cavewith a โmousetrapโ, which suggests that Walter himself was a mouse as he worked in the dark, narrow mines. Walterโs motherโs tears are like โdrops from wet leavesโ, so impersonal that Lawrence says she was โnot weepingโ. The unborn child feels โlike iceโ in Elizabethโs womb, an inhuman image that emphasises how separate Elizabeth feels from both the child and its father. Finally, life and death themselves take on human qualities at the end of the story, when Elizabeth says they are her โimmediate motherโ and โultimate masterโ, respectively. These are forces beyond her โ or anyone elseโs โ control, and she realises that she will always be subservient to this natural cycle.
The language of โOdour of Chrysanthemumsโ is highly poetic and is characterised by profusion of descriptive adjectives and adverbs. The opening paragraph of the story is a brilliant, closely written descriptive set piece, carefully designed to capture atmosphere of the mining district of England at the turn of the last century when life was harsh and sometimes unnecessarily cruel. The onomatopoeic words are effectively used to create the scene of the heavy, oppressive atmosphere that pervaded the district and surrounded its inhabitants. โThe small locomotive engine came โclanking and stumblingโ down from Selston and โthe trucks thumped heavily past.โ The woman, who stepped back from the train as it thundered by โstood insignificantly trapped, between the jolting black wagons and the hedge.โ This is symbolic of the way of life for the women of the village, trapped in their mundane lives of drudgery and grime. The fields take on the mantle of personification when they are described as โdreary and forsakenโ. The pitbank is powerfully presented as a wounded animal in the sentence: โThe pit-bank loomed up beyond the pond, flames like red sores licking its ashy sides suggesting harmful impact of industrialisation where miners โpassed like shadows diverging home.โ The scene being set by Lawrence is one of futility and inevitability. The emotions suggested are of hopelessness and resignation. Elizabeth Bates is portrayed as a sad and bitter woman. The rhetorical repetition of โbitterlyโ confirms this description. She even laughed โbitterly. The house she lives in is covered in ivy. โA large bony vine clutched at the house, as if to claw down the tiled roofโ The personification of the vine as it โclutched at the houseโ and the symbolism suggested in it is as if the house was being smothered and suffocated by the strangling action of a giant monster.
Towards, the end of the story when Elizabeth looks at the corpse of her husband, she realises that for years, she has not really seen Walter. He was her husband but chronically distant from her, and she feels โashamedโ because she had allowed him to be himself. Instead, of feeling anger and resentment she recognises that her own expectations and refusals helped to tear them apart. The pity she feels for Walter, sharply contrasts with her earlier harsh view of him, serving as an epiphany โ she suddenly recognises as a human being, rather than simply a difficult burden. โElizabeth realises she has been culpable in her own unhappiness. At the end of the story she submits to both life and death as her โmastersโ, humbled by her own mistaken attitude and, we may assume, about to carry on with a new
perspective.
In the story, Lawrence uses โlocal dialectโ to add authenticity and vitality to the storyโs setting and to support the idea of isolation among characters. Lawrence grew up among mining families in Nottinghamshire, and his father was a ninth, so Lawrence was familiar with the intonations, elisions (omissions), and distinctive verbal patterns used in the community. The local details make the characters come alive. When Elizabeth goes to Mrs.Rigley to find out whether her husband had seen Walter that evening, Mrs.Rigley asks โAshaโe come whom yit?โ The men who eventually bring Walterโs body home tell Elizabeth, โE Wor smothered!โ when describing Walterโs fate. Surrounding these interludes of coarse dialect is Lawrenceโs elegant, carefully calibrated prose, which helps emphasise the separateness of this particular community from the rest of the world. Perhaps, most significant is the dialect used by the locals which stands in sharp contrast to Elizabethโs more proper or standard speech patterns and emphasises her isolation from the rest of the community. We get the sense that Elizabeth is truly an outsider, perhaps hailing from a distant community or even a higher social station. Her father speaks in Standard English as well, although he is a bit rough than Elizabeth, confirming that Elizabethโs family comes from somewhere else. She clearly resents having come to this place, and though Lawrence never tells us exactly what she gave up or what other options had been open to her, we know that she has been disillusioned by what life offered her. The absence of dialect in Elizabethโs speech emphasises that she is isolated, not only from the husband but also from
the community in which she lives.
With numerous examples of a foreshadowing incident or disaster โOdour of Chrysanthemumsโ, provides a sense of an inevitable tragedy. Lawrence gives us clues to Walterโs fate from the beginning of the story, when Elizabeth bitterly says to the children that he โcan lie on the floorโ when he comes home and that heโll be โlike a logโ. After Elizabeth puts the children to bed, she attempts to distract herself with her sewing, her anger at the situation becoming โtinged with fearโ. Later, when she seeks the help of Mr.Rigley, he escorts her down the dark alleyway in front of his house, warning her to be careful of the deep ruts in the earth, afraid that someone could slip in the uneven surface of the ground. This idea of accidental physical harm is echoed in Walterโs death, caused by a fatal cave in at his mine.
Developments beyond the scope of the story are foreshadowed as well, particularly in Lawrenceโs description of the children. Annie in divided in her affections, respectful of her motherโs ire yet loyal in her love for her father. How her affections will eventually be is suggested in Annieโs hair, which by the fire changes is changing from blond, the colour of Walterโs hair, to brunette, the colour of Elizabethโs. These details subtle suggest the fact that Annie would be forced transfer her affections exclusively to Elizabeth when Walter dies.
After going through this unit, you have come to know that D.H.Lawrence was one of the most versatile and influential writers of the 20 century. His works express his belief in the emotional and sexual impulse which is creative as well as true to human nature. You have learnt about his life and works and you have been acquainted also with one of his best short stories โOdour of Chrysanthemumsโ along with the techniques he employed in writing this beautiful story. His impressionistic and symbolic style and language will help you to appreciate his narration skills as a story-teller. You should be now able to discuss the symbolic substance of the story and write comprehensively about its techniques and style and assess it worth in its totality.
1) Abrams, M.H. et al ed. (2000).D.H. Lawrence, New York: W.W. Norton& Co. Inc.
2) Aldrit Keith. (1971).The Visual Imagination of D.H. Lawrence. London: Edward Arnold.
3) Draper R.P. (1970). D.H. Lawrence: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
4) Fernhough, Anne. (1993). D.H. Lawrence, Aesthetics and Ideology, Oxford: O.U.P.
5) Ford Madox Ford.(1937).D.H. Lawrence in Portraits from. Life.Boston:HonghtonMiffin Co.
6) Hough, Graham .The Darkshun : A Study of D.H. Lawrence. London: Duckworth.
7) Kinkead-Weekes, Mark. (1996).D.H. Lawrence :Trumph to Exile. Cambridge University Press.
8) Pinion, F.B. (1979). A D.H. Lawrence Companion. New York : Harper & Raw Publishers.
ANSWERS TO CHECK YOUR PROGRESS
Ans to Q No 1: The English Review, Autumn, 1908. Ford Madox Ford was the editor.
Ans to Q No 2: The White Peacock.
Ans to Q No 3: Colliery lifeโฆthe minesโฆthe working conditions.
Ans to Q No 4: Brinsley Colliery.
Ans to Q No 5: Selston.
Ans to Q No 6:Lawrence uses โlocal dialectโ to add authenticity and vitality to the storyโs setting and to support the idea of isolation among characters. The local details make the characters come alive.
Model Questions
Q 1: Write a note on the theme of the story โOdour of Chrysanthemumsโ.
Q 2: How does D.H. Lawrence develop the imagery of Chrysanthemums
throughout the story โOdour of Chrysanthemumsโ?
Q 3: Give a character sketch of Elizabeth Bates.
Q 4: How does Lawrence portray Walterโs mother? How deeply was she
affected by her sonโs accidental death?
Q 5: Describe the scene of the house after the body of Walter Bates is
brought in.
Q 6: How does the death and absence of Walter demonstrate Lawrenceโs ability in creating presence through absence?
Q 7: How does the use of local dialect add to the authenticity and vitality of
the storyโs setting?
Q 8: Prepare a brief note on the style and technique of the story โOdour of chrysanthemumsโ.