Odour of Chrysanthemums | Lawrence’s ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’: Isolation and Paradox
In the following excerpt, Hudspeth discusses
ways that Lawrence presents a history of the Bates’s
married life through depicting Elizabeth Bates’s
state of mind as she waits for her husband, not
knowing he has been killed.
‘‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’’ develops from an apparently simple, recurring conflict between a young collier and his wife, now pregnant with their third child. The husband is given to regular drunken sprees, which the wife bitterly resents. Through the narrative, Lawrence reveals the complexity in their lives: the husband’s drunkenness is a result of intense frustrations that the wife has never understood; these frustrations emerge as basic, ineluctable human realities for Lawrence. The story is formally divided into two sections, each reinforcing and clarifying the other. The...
[The entire page is 2579 words long]
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