The Perils of Industrialization in Lawrence’s “The Odour of Chrysanthemums”

D. H. Lawrence’s short story “The Odour of Chrysanthemums,” tells the story of a woman who comes to terms with the flawed nature of her marriage after her husband is killed during his work at a coal mine. Many scholars have viewed this story as a simple tale that shows that both members of a marriage carry a responsibility to nurture their union. However, there is a deeper underlying theme that Lawrence exposes in his writing. “The Odour of Chrysanthemums” is a condemnation of man’s industrial progress at the beginning of the 20th century. Lawrence shows that industry is destroying the natural environment and erasing mankind’s ties to the natural world. The dehumanizing nature of industrial labor is what ultimately leads to the protagonist’s realization that she does not truly know her husband anymore.

The opening lines of D. H. Lawrence’s short story “The Odour of Chrysanthemums” juxtapose the cold machinery of industrialization against the natural environment. Lawrence describes a locomotive steadily chugging through the countryside to show the starkly contrasting attributes of the natural environment and the industrial monstrosities that man has created:

The small locomotive engine, Number 4, came clanking, stumbling down from Selston with seven full waggons. It appeared round the corner with loud threats of speed, but the colt that it startled from among the gorse, which still flickered indistinctly in the raw afternoon, outdistanced it at a canter. (1)

This short description characterizes the machinery produced by industry as loud, clumsy, and uncaring as it tirelessly grinds through the environment. The young horse’s fluid movement allows it to run faster than the hulking locomotive, though it is not even running at full speed. The colt’s ability to out-pace the locomotive shows that man’s mechanical creations cannot compare to the grandeur and beauty of the natural world. Literary critic Cai Yamin notes that “While the colt symbolizes a young and natural life-force, the train suggests the slow, but mechanical machine that is the more powerful and more dominant force in the landscape” (15). The steady pace of the locomotive, which mirrors the inevitable growth of industrialization, forces the colt to flee from its resting place within the gorse. This action serves as a testament to the fact that the impact of industrialization has pushed the natural world out of the way with impunity. In the same manner that the colt is disturbed from its natural state, the environment has been disturbed by man’s industrial progress. Lawrence’s subsequent description of the environment surrounding the mining town of Brinsley Colliery shows that man’s decision to choose industrialization over the natural world is causing the environment to wither and decay.

Lawrence’s depiction of the adverse effect that industrialization has on the environment begins with the initial image of the colt being disturbed by the locomotive. He notes that the colt ran from his resting place among “the gorse, which still flickered indistinctly in the raw afternoon” (1). This marks the first instance where Lawrence uses negative terms to describe the state of the natural world. The gorse flickers “indistinctly” which evokes the idea that the plant life has lost its natural luster and has been dulled by the encroaching industrial machinery. “Moreover, all of the sentences in this opening paragraph depict mechanical things as overwhelming and corrupting the beauties of nature” (Yamin 15). Lawrence’s bleak description of the environment evokes the feeling that the land is slowly decaying, yielding to an inevitable death that is being brought upon it by industrial progress. Lawrence describes this slow death of the environment by noting:

Withered oak leaves dropped noiselessly, while the birds, pulling at the scarlet hip beside the track, made off into the dusk that had already crept into the spinney. In the open, the smoke from the engine sank and cleaved to the rough grass. The fields were dreary and forsaken, and in the marshy strip that led to the whimsey, a reedy pit-pond, the fowls had already abandoned their run among the alders, to roost in the tarred fowl-house. The pit-bank loomed up beyond the pond, flames like red sores licking its ashy sides, in the afternoon’s stagnant light. (1)

Lawrence consistently depicts each natural scene in this paragraph through a lens of decay and death. The grass had become tinged by smoke, a pond is choked by weeds while the waste material from the coal mine burns toxically by its bank, and the birds have been forced from their natural habit into coops because the trees are dying. Lawrence makes it abundantly clear that industrialization is indiscriminately destroying the natural environment for the sole purpose of mankind’s progress. However, Lawrence shows the folly in this by reminding the reader that man is a natural being, and by destroying the environment, we also destroy ourselves.

Lawrence links man to his environment by including depictions of people among his bleak description of the environment. Like the dying flora and fauna, the men and women of Brinsley Colliery are depicted as inconsequential and they are overshadowed by hulking machinery. Just as industrialization has robbed the environment of its vitality, it has also robbed mankind of a piece of its humanity by destroying its link to the natural world. The impervious locomotive chugs mindlessly to its destination and Lawrence notes that:

A woman, walking up the railway line to Underwood, drew back into the hedge, held her basket aside, and watched the footplate of the engine advancing. “The trucks thumped heavily past, one by one, with slow inevitable movement, as she stood insignificantly trapped between the jolting black waggons and the hedge.” (1)

Lawrence has created symmetry between this image of a woman and the image of the young colt. Both are forced to move out of the way to make room for the locomotive as it clanks by. By creating a parallel between the woman and the colt, Lawrence shows that man and nature are tied together. Mankind cannot escape our ties to nature, and the people of Brinsley Colliery are suffering from the effects of industrialization in the same way that the decaying environment is suffering.

Moreover, the lasting effect of mankind erasing its ties to the natural world is that the people in the story begin to mimic the machinery that is destroying their human nature. As the train pulls into the town, “Miners, single, trailing and in groups, passed like shadows diverging home” (Lawrence 1). Lawrence does not describe the individual characteristics of the miners; their shadowy forms are indiscernible from one another as they trudge home from a day of hard labor. Lawrence is showing that man has become a slave to industry and that this is tearing away what it means to be human. These men are no longer unique individuals. They have degenerated into copies of one another that are defined by the work they do rather than by who they are. The miners, like the machines they serve, are forced to repeat the same tasks day after day, and their lives have become ruled by the repetition of these mindless tasks. By destroying the environment and erasing man’s ties to nature, industrialization has created human beings that are more machines than humans. The idea that industrial progress robs human beings of their humanity also serves as the catalyst behind the degeneration of the inter-personal relationships of the protagonist, Elizabeth Bates.

The main focus of this story is the relationship between Elizabeth Bates and her husband, Walter. However, the reader never gets to see the two interact directly because all of the action in the story occurs after Walter is dead. Elizabeth is first introduced as she waits for Walter to return home from his day of work in the coal mines. However, it is clear that she is bitter because her husband has a tendency to come home late because he has stayed out drinking. As she waits for Walter, Elizabeth looks across the railroad tracks:

Darkness was settling over the spaces of the railway and trucks: the miners, in grey sombre groups, were still passing home. The winding-engine pulsed hurriedly, with brief pauses. Elizabeth Bates looked at the dreary flow of men, then she went indoors. Her husband did not come. (Lawrence 3)

Again, Lawrence has included an image of tired workers who have been stripped of their defining characteristics. It is clear that Elizabeth’s husband has also degenerated into nothing more than a faceless worker. The fact that Elizabeth expects him to come home late shows that Walter, like his fellow workers, has fallen into a monotonous life that is governed by his work. Walter is machine-like in his predictability and his loss of identity is shared by Elizabeth, as well as all the other people in the town. This loss of identity rips away the sincerity of Elizabeth’s personal relationship with her husband, her children, and the people who live in Brinsley Colliery. While Elizabeth feeds her young children, her daughter finds chrysanthemums in her apron and remarks that they smell lovely. Elizabeth replies, “No, 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 button-hole” (Lawrence 6). This description of chrysanthemums mirrors the deteriorating relationship between Elizabeth and Walter. Elizabeth was given chrysanthemums when she married Walter, and when her daughter was born. At that time, the chrysanthemums had a positive connotation for Elizabeth, but over time, they began to remind her solely of the failings present in her relationship which had wilted just like the brown petals in Walter’s coat when he was carried home after getting drunk. Literary critic Yan Zhen notes that “Chrysanthemums symbolize love and the natural world. These pieces of softness show her real character and emotion which is too much hided by a man-centered society, an industrial force, class consciousness, most importantly her own social consciousness.” (103). Lawrence shows that Elizabeth’s deteriorating relationship with her husband, as well as other people around her, is due to the fact that they have all lost their identity. Furthermore, the culprit behind this loss of identity is the dehumanizing nature of industrial progress.

Lawrence often relates the idea of identity loss by describing people who are hidden by shadow. This literary device was used to describe the miners as they walked home from work, and Lawrence also uses this technique to show that Elizabeth has grown apart from her son who also has been robbed of his identity because he lives in a world that is controlled by industry. While Elizabeth and her two children sit at the table waiting for Walter to return home, her son John sits at the end of the table and “was almost lost in the darkness. Their faces were hidden from each other” (Lawrence 4). In fact, when Elizabeth looks at her son, she cannot see him as an individual, but rather, as a conglomeration of the negative aspects of Walter and her. She gazes at her son coldly and notes, “she saw herself in his silence and pertinacity; she saw the father in her child’s indifference to all but himself” (Lawrence 3). Even the children in this small mining town are subject to a loss of identity. Every person in the town bases their identity on their relationship to the town’s local industry (the coal mine) rather than their interpersonal relationships. Elizabeth is not an individual, she is a miner’s wife, and her children are miner’s children. It is only after her husband’s corpse is brought home after an accident at the mine that Elizabeth realizes that she did not truly know him anymore.

Elizabeth’s epiphany that she lost an understanding of her husband’s true identity is foreshadowed by the ubiquitous metaphor of chrysanthemums. When workers from the coal mine bring her husband’s dead body in on a stretcher, one of the men accidentally brushes against a vase of chrysanthemums which shatters on the floor. The recurring image of chrysanthemums has deteriorated throughout the story mimicking the deterioration of Elizabeth and Walter’s relationship. In the beginning, the chrysanthemums were fresh, then as time went on, they became withered and brown, and now, finally, they lay broken and irreparable. Elizabeth soon comes to the realization that her relationship with her husband had also become broken and irreparable. As Elizabeth and her mother-in-law wash Walter’s corpse to prepare it for burial, the shock of seeing her husband as a lifeless shell forces Elizabeth to come to the conclusion that she had forgotten who he really was. She does not cry as she looks at the body of her husband:

As she looked at the dead man, her mind, cold and detached, said clearly: “Who am I? What have I been doing? I have been fighting a husband who did not exist. He existed all the time. What wrong have I done? What was that I have been living with? There lies the reality, this man.” (Lawrence 15)

It is at this moment that Elizabeth finally realizes that her husband had become foreign to her. She also realizes that her children, including the unborn child she is pregnant with, are strangers to her as well. Many scholars have interpreted Elizabeth’s final epiphany to mean that, though on the surface Walter appears to be the main source of contention in the marriage, both Elizabeth and Walter share responsibility for the deterioration of their union. Literary critic Volker Schulz notes, “Although Mrs. Bates is shown, above all, to recognize her own share in this mutual failure, the failure had been unmistakably mutual: 'He was no more responsible than she'. The failure of this marriage is not simply due to the husband's drunkenness or the wife's nagging. These patterns of behavior are rather symptoms of their fundamental incompatibility” (366). However, these critics ignore the deeper cause of distress in their marriage. The metaphor of chrysanthemums that represent the Bates’ marriage implies that, initially, their union had been happy. When they were married, and when Elizabeth’s daughter was born, she received chrysanthemums from her loving husband. These chrysanthemums were fresh and beautiful which mimics the natural and harmonious state of their marriage. It is only after Walter is forced to work in the coal mines as a slave to industrial progress that their marriage deteriorates. The fact that Elizabeth realizes she doesn’t know her husband, her children, or herself, cannot be attributed to a lack of commitment from either Walter or Elizabeth. The reason that Elizabeth no longer has a sincere relationship with her family is that her family has been robbed of their identities by industrial progress. Lawrence reveals the dehumanizing effects of industrial work throughout this short story. The miners have been relegated to mindless repetitive tasks and this has caused them to lose their true identities as well as their link to the natural world. They are no longer defined as individuals but as workers. This dehumanization extends to the miner’s immediate family as well. Lawrence makes it clear that industrial progress is destroying both the environment and the interpersonal relationships of the townspeople of Brinsley Colliery, which is why Elizabeth’s ultimate epiphany serves as a condemnation of the dehumanizing effects of industrial progress rather than admittance of fault for a deteriorating marriage.

In conclusion, D. H. Lawrence’s short story “The Odour of Chrysanthemums” paints a stark picture of life in a small industrial town. Lawrence shows the detrimental effect that industry has had on the environment surrounding the small mining town of Brinsley Colliery. Furthermore, Lawrence shows that industrialization causes the decay of not only the environment but human inter-personal relationships as well. The bleak existence of the Bates family serves as a testament to the degenerative effects that hard industrial labor can have on the families of workers. Industrial work is what ultimately kills the patriarch of the Bates family and forces Elizabeth Bates to come to the harrowing realization that she had not truly known her husband in years. Moreover, due to the dehumanizing effects of living in a town that revolves solely around industry, Elizabeth realizes that she doesn’t know who she is anymore. By showing that this small town and its inhabitants have become identified solely by their relationship to industry, Lawrence shows that the ultimate price that human beings must pay for industrial progress is their individuality.

Works Cited

Cai, Yamin. "Industrial Corruption: The Main Culprit for the Relationship between Husband and Wife in Odour of Chrysanthemums." Canadian Social Science 3.4 (2007): 14-17. Academic Search Complete. Web. 10 Nov. 2013.

Lawrence, D. H. The Odour of Chrysanthemums. London: Penguin, 2011. Web. <http://letras.cabaladada.org/letras/odour_chrysanthemums.pdf>.

Schulz, Volker. "D.H. Lawrence's Early Masterpiece of Short Fiction: Odour of Chrysanthemums" Studies in Short Fiction 28.3 (1991): 363. Academic Search Complete. Web. 10 Nov. 2013.

Yan, Zhen. "Husband and Wife Relation in Odour of Chrysanthemums." Canadian Social Science 4.2 (2008): 102-105. Academic Search Complete. Web. 10 Nov. 2013.