The Odour of Chrysanthemums Questions and Answers by David Herbert Lawrence

Marks-10/15

1. Theme of the Story

[Q. Write a note on the themes of the story “Odour of Chrysanthemums”.

Or,

Q. Towards the end of the story, Elizabeth feels that she and her thusband were two isolated beings eternally apart. Give reasons.

Or,

Q. How does D.H. Lawrence portray the physicality of the relationship in ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’? Would you say it is a blunt/frank depiction of the physical?

Or,

Q. How does the death and absence of Walter demonstrate Lawrence’s ability in creating presence through absence?

Or,

Q. What is the thematic role of death in this short story?

Or,

Q. Why do you think Walter’s death makes Elizabeth rethink her entire marriage/its meaning?

“Odour of Chrysanthemums” focuses on a dramatic moment in the life of Mrs. Elizabeth Bates, the accidental death of her husband, Walter Bates. The story develops in three major stages. “Odour of Chrysanthemums,” by D. H. Lawrence, once again is full of themes and motifs. One could study this text and come up with many different interpretations.

Lawrence also seems to reference rolls of sex in his story. Lawrence stresses the essential separation of all people, particularly the separation of men and women. This is indicated by Elizabeth Bates’s emotional distance from all those around her, with the exception of her daughter, Annie, and with the way in which characters talk at, rather than engage in dialogue with, each other.

Recognition of the separation of all people and particularly of men and for Lawrence, must take place in the dark, through the sensual channels of dimmed sight, muffled odors, and touch rather than through intellectual understanding. Elizabeth Bates recognizes the apartness of her husband by gazing on and touching his stillwarm body. She recognizes that he is now apart from her in the world of death, just as during his life he was apart from her in his sexual difference, his masculinity.

Similarly, his son John, who resembles his father, is described as being separate from his mother in his shadowy darkness and even in his “play-world.” Finally aware of the “infinite” separation between herself and her husband whom “she had known falsely,” Elizabeth will submit to life, her new “master,” as she had not submitted to her husband by acknowledging his essential otherness.

Life v/s Death

While the centrality of death in the story’s conclusion is anticipated in its first paragraph, the arrival of Walter Bates’s dead body at the Bates’s home introduces the story’s climactic final phase. This phase addresses the relationship between death and life, in light of a consideration of the relationship between men and women. From the beginning, darkness and gloom permeate the story’s atmosphere, and a sense of dread oppresses Elizabeth Bates.

In the story’s first paragraph, the mine and its train are presented as life-destroying forces which startle animals, blight the natural setting, and cramp human lives. Given the dangers of underground work, Elizabeth Bates and her neighbors seem aware that Walter Bates may have died in the mine.

In addition to the sense of melancholy fatalism which pervades the beginning of the story, readers learn that in the recent past, Elizabeth Bates’s father has been widowed. These different elements foreshadow the focus on death at the conclusion of the story and the way it will inform the future life of Elizabeth Bates.

While Walter Bates has probably been dead for the first part of the story, a period coinciding with Elizabeth Bates’s anxious anticipation of his arrival, the story shifts into a mythic dimension with the stark presence of his half-naked body. The two women kneeling by the miraculously untouched and still beautiful body conjure up images of the pieta, the scene of the Virgin Mary holding the body of the crucified Christ. In the story, however, there is another mythic dimension evoking the Egyptian story of Isis and Osiris.

This mythic story concerns the care of Isis for her husband Osiris who becomes a lord in the realm of the dead. In Lawrence’s story, Elizabeth Bates nearly worships her husband’s corpse and imagines a possible meeting with him in the afterlife. Encountering the dignity and finality of death, she realizes that she has been misguided in her futile attempts to criticize and change her husband.

The story implies that she will spend the rest of her life attempting to incorporate this realization, achieved through an encounter with death, into her life. She will live, the story implies, anticipating a meeting with her husband in the realm of the dead.

The story is one of contrasts, the main one being the contrast between the living and the dead. This juxtaposition is shown through the story’s symbols, such as the chrysanthemums, which at the beginning of the story, appear alive and growing outside the house, and towards the end of the story, are plucked dead-in one of Elizabeth’s memories of Walter, they appear brown and wilting. Their odor, once Walter has passed away, also reminds Elizabeth of death.

When Walter’s body is brought back to the house, both his mother and Elizabeth are in awe of it. In death, he has a dignity he may not have possessed in life, and Elizabeth realizes that she never knew who he was; death reveals this truth to her.

She turns her thoughts to practical questions as well-such as how she might raise her children on a small pension alone-as she realizes that although death is the ultimate master, life is her current ruler, and she has to answer to its demands immediately. Walter’s peaceful appearance in death stands in contrast to Elizabeth’s striving attitude in life, and yet she knows that she too will one day die.

The Corrosive Effects of Marriage

This story is a portrait of a marriage in the process of disintegration. In fact, the process is very far along. This theme is presented subtly; there is no potential for a showdown between husband and wife where grievances are aired and scores settled. God or fate takes care of the latter and the former will continue eating away inside at Elizabeth.

The subtlety extends to how the tension in the story builds through Elizabeth’s response to her husband not arriving home alongside the other miners. She had fallen into habits that were in turn stimulated by habits adopted by her husband. These habits do not reveal a brittle union on the point of collapse; if anything, it suggests that if things had turned out differently, this marriage would continue to slowly die a day at a time for decades.

Isolation of Individual Lives

When Elizabeth looks over Walter’s dead body, she feels “the utter isolation of the human soul.” She realizes that she and Walter have always been two separate entities who didn’t understand one another, and even when they were physically intimate, there was a lack of understanding and emotional connection between them.

She reacts flinchingly towards the baby growing inside her, as it’s a reminder of the distance that couldn’t be overcome between her and Walter, even by children. She understands that although the distance is emphasized now by death, they were removed from each other long before Walter passed away.

Even before Walter dies, Elizabeth is a picture of isolation. At the very beginning of the story, she watches the miners pass, but her husband doesn’t come. She commands the household on her own, and the references to Walter show that she’s emotionally removed from him even before he dies. In the description of her son, John, for example, she sees “the father in her child’s indifference to all but himself.”

Finally, the way the story’s told-from Elizabeth’s perspective, in her head-also emphasizes her solitude by further removing the reader from the perspectives of the other characters in the story.

Light and Darkness

The theme of light and darkness is of significance since most of the story takes place late in the afternoon and at night, and the narrative focuses on the relationship of life and death. Elizabeth Bates awaits her husband as shadows lengthen, her son emerges from dark undergrowth, and her daughter returns late from school.

The family huddles in the house where the light is insufficient for Elizabeth’s son John, who, like his father, always craves more brightness and warmth than his home provides. The boy is even dissatisfied with his sister’s tending of the fire as if he may lose that light.

When Mrs. Bates goes out to her neighbors to seek her husband, “there was no trace of light,” and even the helpful neighbors ominously suggest that their children, if unattended, may “set themselves afire.” Elizabeth has said earlier that her daughter’s reaction to the chrysanthemums she wears in her apron is so extreme that “One would think the house was afire.”

Fire which should bring light and warmth, and which is trapped in the coal the workers seek in the mine, is insufficiently bright and even conveys a sense of danger. Awaiting her husband back in her own home, Elizabeth is unable to make a fire in the parlor where there is no fireplace. When the men arrive with the body of Walter Bates, Elizabeth carries an unlighted candle, and after the men leave, Elizabeth and her mother-in-law clean the body in the dim light cast by a single candle.

Only when Elizabeth is confronted with the naked reality of her husband does she realize that she never knew him: “they had met in the dark and fought in the dark.” The darkness signifies their inability to really comprehend and appreciate the separation. Now that she has gained an insight into this separation and now that the darkness of death, a death occurring in a mine’s darkness, is plainly before her, she sees clearly.

The unrecognized gulf between herself and her husband has been as wide as that between light and darkness, life and death, and now she is left to wonder if she and her husband were to meet in the “next world” whether he would recognize her.

Maintaining the Illusion of the Beautiful in an Ugly World

Lawrence opens his story with vivid imagery that suggests not just the dreariness of the world inhabited by these characters but the unlikelihood of things ever changing very much. For the most part, with little variation, the life they live on the day of the story will be much like the life they are still living a decade or more from then. Elizabeth’s world is especially dreary because her husband wastes so much money on drinks, nothing is left for even the basics. The flowers are an attempt to impose something beautiful into this world.

Social Class Distinction

“Odour of Chrysanthemums” is set in a rural mining village, and there are strong indications that Elizabeth Bates considers herself socially superior to her husband and his fellow working-class colleagues who labor underground; however, by the end of the story, through her mythic encounter with his dead body, she comes to value her husband, and by implication, to ignore his class position.

Elizabeth Bates is described as a woman of “imperious mien,” who chides her son’s uestruction of flowers because it looks “nasty” and appears to cerisure her father’s decision to remarry soon after being widowed because it violates social propriety. Unlike her neighbors, she does not e the local dialect, an indication of class position, but she is not above criticizing one neighbor’s unkempt house. Unlike other miners’ wives in the community, she refuses to demean herself by entering the local pubs to entice her husband home. She is distressed when her children mimic their father’s habits and preferences.

British society is one with a long history oi rigid classic distinctions. The aristocracy was already all but deau by the turn of the 20th century, but so.ne things never die. Interestingly, this leg .cy even filters down to Elizabeth. She is viewed as exhibiting a superior attitude toward the mining community and, indeed, does fault herself for her failing marriage to marrying below her status.

For most of the sty, he. demeanor is one of simply: she didn’t have to settle for marrying below her class, she could have married better, but she married for love. By the end of the story, however, she has reached a state where she can be more honest about her contributions to the failure of her marriage as well as the flexibility and fluidity associated with such notions of class division.

Most significantly, however, Elizabeth Bates indicates her disdain for the social position of her community by fighting against her husband and his values. Probably lulled into marrying him by his good looks and his lust for life, she now resents him for making her feel like a “fool” living in “this dirty hole.” She seems to despise the manual nature of her husband’s work, indicated by her unwillingness to wash the residue of pit-dirt from his body when he emerges from his shift in the mine. Awaiting his return, sie angrily says she will force him to sleep on the floor.

However, her attitude dramatically shifts when she learns about the accident. She even entertains a fleeting, deluded notion that she may transform her husband morally while nursing him back to health, but her illusions disappear when the dead body of her husband is carried into her home by miners supervised by the pit manager. Viewing the body “lying in the naive dignity of death,” she is appalled and humbled at what appears to be her husband’s new distance from her.

But she slowly comprehends that their former connection was based solely on an unnamed attraction above and beyond the conditioning of social class, and the lure of compatible personality, common interest, or shared experience. She now acknowledges that their relationship was part of a different order of experience, which belonged to a mythic dimension.

It is a dimension which includes the physical work of the dark mine, the sexual attraction of the body, and the mysterious world of the dead. The story ends with the laws of this new mythic dimension overriding Elizabeth Bates’s former concerns about social class.

Appearances and Reality

Just as the darkness has obscured her vision, so Elizabeth’s anger has distorted her perception of her husband and she has failed to recognize the reality of his essential difference. Similarly, her sense of smell has been deluded by illusory associations. She has associated the odor of the beautiful, though disheveled, chrysanthemums, a sign of beauty even in the rat-infested, mining village, with the main stages of her life with her husband, in which, as she tells her children, she has been a “fool.”

Only after the breath of her husband is smothered in the mine does she recognize that the smell of the chrysanthemums is really the smell of death. She has been more concerned with maintaining respectable appearances, such as when she ignores the body of her husband to clean up the dropped vase of chrysanthemums, than with facing concrete realities. Finally, after she has cleared the dirt from her husband’s body, she sees the reality of his masculine beauty and his difference from herself, and the vast gap which has always existed between them.

Relationships

At the beginning of the story, Elizabeth is seen interacting solely with her children, and although she grows impatient with them at times, she still worries about their safety and acts affectionately towards them. Her differing attitudes towards her children and her husband can be seen when John grumbles that the room is too dark-although his complaints remind Elizabeth of her husband’s irritating habits, she laughs affectionately at the appearance of these habits in John. In general, Elizabeth is quickly conciliatory when dealing with John, even though he’s surly and resentful.

The contrast between mother/son and wife/husband becomes even more obvious when Walter’s mother and Elizabeth react to Walter’s death. As Walter’s mother says, “But he wasn’t your son, Lizzie, an’ it makes a difference…” When faced with Walter’s body, Walter’s mother is able to remember all the endearing aspects of Walter from when he was a little boy she was raising, whereas Elizabeth feels suddenly that she was always married to someone she didn’t know.

Once Elizabeth’s attention turns towards her husband, her feelings become resentful and angry. She blames him for upsetting the household and drinking too much. For example, Elizabeth regards chrysanthemum flowers bitterly because they were present when she married Walter and when the other men carried Walter back after he started drinking. She connects them with the resentment and regret she feels towards her marriage, holding onto those feelings without the same willingness to forgive that she shows towards her children.

Even after she begins to worry about Walter and goes to search for him, she stubbornly believes that he likely went to the pub. Her anger towards him is almost a habit that she’s unable to let go of. She realizes this later when looking at Walter’s dead body, as his death finally shocks her out of her habitual resentment long enough to realize that the disappointment lay on both sides she didn’t make him happy either, since she never recognized who he was, busy as she was with resenting his influence on her life.

Elizabeth’s relationship with her unborn child actually reflects her feelings towards her husband more than her feelings towards her children. As the baby is still unborn and unformed, she feels that its presence is more a reminder of the distance between her and Walter, rather than a child she has maternal feelings for.

Sex Roles

The story stresses the essential separation of all people, particularly the separation of men and women. This is indicated by Elizabeth Bates’s emotional distance from all those around her, with the exception of her daughter, Annie, and with the way in which characters talk at, rather than engage in dialogue with, each other.

Recognition of the separation of all people and particularly of men and women, for Lawrence, must take place in the dark, through the sensual channels of dimmed sight, muffled odors, and touch rather than through intellectual understanding. Elizabeth Bates recognizes the apartness of her husband by gazing on and touching his still-warm body. She recognizes that he is now apart from her in the world of death, just as during his life he was apart from her in his sexual difference, his masculinity.

2. The Significance of the Title

[Q. What is the significance of the story’s title? Discuss briefly. Or, Q. What is the meaning of the title of “The Odour of Chrysanthemums”? Justify the appropriateness.]

“Odour of Chrysanthemums,” regarded as one of D. H. Lawrence’s most accomplished stories, was written in 1909 and published in Ford Madox Hueffer’s 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 story’s controlled analysis of the harsh industrial setting and of Eliza-beth Bates’s psychological transformation has been widely admired. H. E. Bates has even argued that Lawrence’s greatest achievement is his short fiction.

Impressionistic and symbolic, dense with figurative language, D.H. Lawrence’s ‘The Odour of Chrysanthemums’ relies heavily on imagery (such as the chrysanthemums, and the frequent alteration 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 handsc ne and strapping man, drinks away most of the wages he receives from his job in the coal mines, and she is too caur ‘t up in her own bitterness against him to be able to receive much joy from life.

On this fateful night, Elizabeth has absent-mindedly tucked a chrysanthemum into the waistband of her apron, and there are more, fresh-cut, decorating the parlor, but they do not symbolize happiness for her. As she notes, ‘It was chrysanthemums when I married him, and chrysanthemums when [my daughter was] born, and chrysanthemums the first time they ever brought him home drunk, he’d got brown chrysanthemums in his buttonhole.’

And it’s chrysanthemums again that evening when he is brought in from the minº, dead, and laid out in the parlor. One of the men bringing in her husband’s budy accidentally knocks over the vase of chrysanthemums she had put there earlier in the evening the ones that reminded her so bitterly of the lost dreams of her life. The chrysanthemums which opened her married life have now closed it.

The chrysanthemums, which ploom a little while in the fall and then die, are symboli in this story of the fragility of our inner lives. Elizabeth Bates suddenly di covers 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 deacen sing before her husband lost his life that night in the mine. In the end, even the vase of flowers is clumsily knocked onto the floor, leaving nothing tangible behind, just an odour. The chrysanthemums symbolize a spot of beauty unrecognized by the myopic Elizabeth, just as she never appreciated what she could have had with Walte, until it was too late.

In 17th century the flower chrysanthemums were spread over Europe where the father of modern taxonomy coined the western name chrysanthemums which is derived from the Greek words “chrysos” meaning gold, and “anthem on” meaning flower, it is also referred it today as mums .

The flower chrysanthemums hold both positive and negative meaning across different periods and cultures, for instance, in the Victorian era chrysanthemums used to show friendship and well wishing whereas the Buddhists use it as offerings because it is believed that this flower holds a powerful Yang energy, in China, the chrysanthemum is traditionally offered to the elderly as they symbolize long life as well as good luck in the home, while in Australia chrysanthemums associ ed with mother’s day and in Belgiu. and Austria, is used memorial flower to honor the dead by placing it on the graves.

The symbolic meaning of the flower chrysantnemums also changes depending on the flower color, red symbolize love, Yellow chrysanthemums symbolize pain of love or sorrow, White symbolize loyalty and honesty, Violet symbolize a wish to get well. The flower was brought to England in the 18th century, and its interpretation was entirely different, it was considered as symbolic of deep isolation and sorrow.

Although the flower chrysanthemums had several meanings and most of them are happiness and joy. D. H. Lawrence employs it with the negative de like, death, disappointmer and bitterness. and he goes even further and makes the flower associated with the main protagonist Elizabeth existence .

Elizabeth has this contradictory feelings toward this flower because it remind her of her marriage with Walter and represent all the disappointments she has experienced in life, for instant when Annie Elizabeth’s daughter raptures the flower’s smell Elizabeth claims to disagree like if she hates her own existence, Elizabeth is a complex character, in the beginning of the story when she find out her son collecting flowers and dropping the leaves she tells him to stop because they look nasty even if she keeps them around the house and grabbed a bunch and puts it in her apron.

Likewise in other situation Elizabeth’s husband alter is brought home drunk and he has a brown chrysanthemums She says, “It was chrysanthemums when I married him, and chrysanthemums when [our child was] born, and chrysanthemums the first time they ever brought him home drunk, he’d got brown chrysanthemums in his buttonhole.” As if it is the flower that represents how Walter is seen by her.

In the 1900s many writers gives the attention to women and used to term chrysanthemums using it as a symbol of the main female character such as John Steinbeck in his sty ‘the chrysanthemums’ which was published in 1937, giving his ideology and interpretation to the flower attributes the protagonist Elisa and the limited scope of her life and confined to a narrow environment, she explicitly identifies herself with the flowers, even saying that she becomes one with the plants as if she trapped inside the garden.

The flower chrysanthemums used again and over again in different colors, shapes and places to symbolize the phases Elizabeth going through a cycle of birth, marriage ,loss and death .It is foreshadowing in the form of progression of the cycle to the upcoming things and the things and the others not experienced yet as death being the final stage.

Brown chrysanthemums symbolize the moments before death, the life fading away along with the destruction resulted by corruption, and if we look at it in different angle it could be also a hint about industrialization versus nature, Whereas at the end the broken bucket of chrysanthemums is clearly a metaphor of Elizabeth and Walter broken bond which is

more shattered by his death, given that she tries ropping away the broken pieces of the vessel as if she clearing unconsciously her marriage failure, furthermore the author highlights the chrysanthemums significance as symbol of dea ŉ in the situation when Walter’s body is laid ” there was a cold deathly smell of …..

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