Death Foretold by a Flower

One can begin by looking directly at the title of the story, “Odour of Chrysanthemums.” “The diction, like the title of this story, imbues a fragrance upon the reader” (Amoia, 1). Rather than imbuing a pleasing fragrance, it suffocates the reader with an odor, a stench… the stench of death. The diction suggests something of that foul a nature. Should Lawrence not have been implying death, he might have entitled the story, “Light Scent of Chrysanthemums.” With the title given, it appears that the reader knows more about Walter’s whereabouts than his wife. Lawrence uses the flower immediately to fore

The final mention of the flower is again used with its traditional meaning, but this time with a bit of irony. “One of the men had knocked off a vase of chrysanthemums. He stared awkwardly, then they set down the stretcher. Elizabeth did not look at her husband. As soon as she could get in the room, she went and picked up the broken vase and the flowers” (Lawrence, 2327). Imagine chrysanthemums, a symbol of death, lying on the floor right where the dead body is to be laid. As a symbol to Elizabeth, there can be no doubt that when she remembers the night her husband was brought home dead, she will first think of the “deathly smell of chrysanthemums” and of the vase of chrysanthemums breaking on the floor; then of her dead husband. Elizabeth’s attention could not be turned from the flowers until she had picked them up. Only then was she able to look at her husband.

At this point, the reader comes to Lawrence’s most obvious symbolic usage of the chrysanthemum. Annie mentions the beautiful smell of the flower, to which Elizabeth responds, “…not to me. 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 buttonhole” (Lawrence, 2321). Here, the character herself makes the flowers symbolically representative of the events in her life.

This does not sound like a beautiful place to live. The beauty of nature is simply not present in this world. It has been choked out by the industrialization of the time. Mining has killed the beauty of nature and thus nature itself. So, this flower, a beautiful and delicate part of nature, not only represents human death but represents its own as well.

Some topics in this essay:
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