A review of “Odour of Chrysanthemums” by D.H. Lawrence
D.H. Lawrence’s short story “Odour of Chrysanthemums” is about a woman, Mrs. Bates, whose husband doesn’t come home one night, and she assumes that he was out at the bar drinking all night. After the children go to sleep, she walks down the road to talk to the neighbor to see if they have seen her husband. Her neighbor, Mr. Rigley, tells her to go home while he goes to find her husband, Walt. Waiting at home, Mrs. Bates’ mother-in-law comes in saying Mr. Rigley said to her that Walt has been in an accident and she needs to comfort Mrs. Bates. When Mr. Rigley and a couple of other men bring Walt back, he dies of asphyxiation from being trapped in the mine. Walt’s mother cries and keeps weeping by calling her son “my boy.” Mrs. Bates tells her daughter to go back to sleep after she awakes to the noise. She lies to her daughter, telling her that Walt is sleeping. This is a callback from when she told her children that he would be sleeping on the floor when their father got home. Mrs. Bates breaks down crying because she realizes that she and her husband never truly knew each other.
D.H. Lawrence was an author out of the modernist movement that had a unique style of storytelling. Lawrence was known for challenging conventional moral attitudes such as sexuality, the latter on full display in his novel “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” (Charters, 2015, p. 786). A standard literary device used in modernism is the stream of consciousness, in which the author either never uses period punctuation or rarely uses one. The opening to this story has few periods and uses the stream of consciousness to set the mood for the rest of the narrative. When scholars look at D.H. Lawrence’s works, they state that he “had two great functions: providing an emotional experience, and then, if the reader had the courage of his or her feelings and could live imaginatively, becoming “a mine of practical truth” (Charters, 2015, p. 786). Another literary device Lawrence uses is foreshadowing. In the beginning, Mrs. Bates tells her children that the guys will bring home their father like a log, which happens. The chrysanthemums also predict how Mrs. Bates will feel at the death of her husband.
The story’s title is a reference to the pink chrysanthemums that Mrs. Bates has in her garden. She has some of the flowers in her apron, and her daughter notices them. This is the reveal that Mrs. Bates is pregnant. Mrs. Bates says that the flowers’ smell reminds her of her husband coming home drunk. When they bring in her husband’s dead body, one of the men accidentally knocks over a vase of chrysanthemums. Because “Elizabeth keeps vases of chrysanthemums in her home,” it suggests that she has mixed feelings about the flowers, much like her marriage. She both resents them and embraces them because of the memories they evoke with her husband and family (Sparknotes.com, 2021).
Upon reading the story, I wasn’t sure what it would be about because it sets up that the setting was a mining town. Even Mrs. Bates’s father was a miner, as well as her husband. But as I continued to read, I began to get a feeling about the primary purpose of the story. It’s a story about a woman, who despite having children with including being pregnant, she was unhappy in her marriage. She blames it on her husband’s drinking, but the more she thinks about it, the more she realizes that she and her husband never indeed saw each other. That includes seeing each other fully naked because she looks at her husband’s naked body on her floor. She starts to cry not because her husband died but because she never truly knew him at all. She had thought he went to the bar and thus didn’t go out looking for him. But instead, he was still working in the mine and got trapped; and wasn’t discovered until it was too late. That is sort of a metaphor for her marriage. It’s a tragic tale that uses some romantic language to convey the character's true emotions.
Works Cited
Charters, Ann. The Story and Its Writer: An Introduction to Short Fiction, 9th edition. Bedford/St. Martins, 2015.
Sparknotes.com, 2021, https://www.sparknotes.com/short-stories/odour-of-chrysanthemums/symbols/
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