'Odour of Chrysanthemums' — D.H. Lawrence
D.H. Lawrence — Context and Background
D.H. Lawrence (1885–1930) was born in Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, into a working-class mining family. His father was a coalminer; his mother was a schoolteacher who was acutely conscious of class difference and who pushed her children towards education and social improvement. This personal history saturates 'Odour of Chrysanthemums', first published in 1911 in The English Review. Lawrence understood from the inside both the physical world of the pit and the psychological world of the miner's wife who keeps the home — her mixture of dependence, resentment, exhaustion, and suppressed emotion.
Lawrence was writing during the height of the Industrial Revolution's legacy. The Nottinghamshire coalfields were both economically central and socially brutal: men entered the pit and returned (or did not return) to women who managed households on uncertain wages. Lawrence was interested in how industrialisation dehumanised labour, and by extension how it hollowed out relationships — making strangers of people who shared a bed.
Plot and Structure
Elizabeth Bates waits at home with her children for her husband Walter to return from the pit. She assumes he is drinking at the pub — this is the pattern. Her irritation and contempt are established early: she is competent, long-suffering, and frankly dismissive of Walter. But Walter has not been drinking. He has died in a pit accident: a fall of rock came down behind him at the coal face and shut him in. The fall never touched him — he was smothered. His body is brought to the house by his workmates, and Elizabeth and Walter's mother wash the body together in a long, sombre scene. The story ends with Elizabeth's realisation — delivered with devastating clarity — that she and Walter were strangers to each other, that she never truly knew him and he never truly knew her.
Structurally, the story is in three sections: waiting (dominated by irritation and domesticity), the arrival of the body (shock and practical management), and the washing of the body (revelation and self-knowledge). The final section is the heart of the story, and it moves into something close to interior monologue, giving access to Elizabeth's thoughts as she confronts what her marriage actually was.
The story's climax is not Walter's death but Elizabeth's realisation over his body: that she never truly knew him, and that their marriage was a life of mutual estrangement. Lawrence presents death not as the end but as the moment that finally makes truth possible.
The Chrysanthemums Motif
Chrysanthemums appear at three key moments, acquiring layered symbolic meaning. At the opening, ragged pink chrysanthemums hang beside the garden path — associated with the house, with endurance, with the ordinary. Elizabeth breaks off a twig and pushes it into her apron-band. Her daughter Annie says they smell beautiful, and Elizabeth answers: 'It was chrysanthemums when I married him, and chrysanthemums when you were born, and the first time they ever brought him home drunk, he'd got brown chrysanthemums in his button-hole.' The chrysanthemums become a motif for life's key passages — love, new life, and now death.
When Walter's body is brought in, chrysanthemums become explicitly associated with death. The scent that accompanied Elizabeth's most significant life-moments is now the odour of the dead. Lawrence uses the chrysanthemum motif to suggest that death was always present in the marriage — that the relationship was always heading here — and that Elizabeth's moments of happiness were touched by the same odour as her grief. The title gestures towards this ambiguity: 'odour' is not quite 'scent' — it is heavier, more corporeal, more troubling.
Themes: Marriage, Alienation, and Self-Knowledge
Lawrence is deeply interested in the failure of modern relationships to achieve genuine intimacy. Elizabeth and Walter have lived alongside each other without ever truly meeting. Walter escaped the oppression of the pit and the suffocating domesticity of home through drink; Elizabeth managed the house with an efficiency that displaced feeling. Their marriage is a parallel existence, not a shared one. Lawrence suggests this is partly the product of class and industrial life: the pit separates men from families in fundamental ways — physically, psychologically, and in terms of how masculinity is constructed around labour and escape.
Alienation operates at every level: Elizabeth is alienated from Walter by resentment; Walter is alienated from domestic life by the pit and by drink; both are alienated from their own emotional lives by the demands of survival. Elizabeth's self-knowledge arrives too late to do anything with — she cannot apologise or repair or love differently. This tragic irony is the story's emotional centre.
The story opens with a sharply observed industrial landscape: the colliery, the engine puffing, the rows of miners' cottages, the winding wheels, the slag heaps. Lawrence does not romanticise this landscape but presents it with a kind of documentary precision that draws on his childhood knowledge. The environment is not merely a backdrop: it imposes itself on the characters, dictating the rhythms of their lives, the hours of their waiting, the risks they accept as ordinary. The pit is not neutral scenery — it is an active force, the thing that kills Walter and the thing that has structured every aspect of Elizabeth's life.
Pathetic fallacy appears in the description of the gathering dark and the cold as Elizabeth waits — the landscape's bleakness mirrors her emotional state. But Lawrence's setting also has a life of its own that is independent of his characters: the industrial world continues regardless of individual suffering, which reinforces the story's sense that human beings are small and expendable within systems larger than themselves.
Chrysanthemums appear at three stages: the opening (Elizabeth's house and its endurance), within the house (associated with weddings, births, illness — life's key passages), and at Walter's death (the same odour now attached to grief and mortality). Lawrence makes the scent connect life and death, suggesting they have always been inseparable in this marriage.
Language and Form: AO2 Analysis
Lawrence's prose shifts register across the story. The early sections are cool and observational — almost journalistic in the precision of their domestic and industrial detail. This precision itself communicates Elizabeth's character: she is efficient, observant, not given to romantic illusion. As the story moves into the washing of the body, the prose becomes more lyrical and interior, moving closer to Elizabeth's consciousness. The shift in register tracks her shift from competent manager to a woman confronting her own emotional reality.
Lawrence uses tonal shift deliberately: the controlled, almost flat prose of the waiting sections makes the emotional release of the final scene more powerful by contrast. The body-washing scene is one of the most sustained passages of interior psychological revelation in early twentieth-century short fiction, and it is the moment at which Lawrence's AO2 methods — register, free indirect discourse, symbolic resonance — work together most powerfully.
On the Modern Texts question, you write one essay without an extract. Strong responses on Lawrence will move beyond 'the story is sad' to analyse how Lawrence constructs Elizabeth's epiphany through specific techniques: the chrysanthemum motif, the shift in narrative register, the use of interior monologue in the final scene. AO3 context — Lawrence's mining background, the industrial landscape, early twentieth-century marriage and gender roles — should be embedded in analysis, not presented as background information. AO4 marks reward accurate, varied punctuation and spelling; aim for complex sentences with embedded clauses.
For your essay, remember that Lawrence's most important technique is the chrysanthemum motif: track its three appearances and what each one adds. A confident response will argue that the story's real subject is self-knowledge — specifically, the kind that arrives too late to change anything.