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Odour of Chrysanthemums in Telling Tales — character analysis

Telling Tales · Graham Swift, D. H. Lawrence, Helen Dunmore, John McGahern, Kazuo Ishiguro, Claudette Williams and Penelope Lively · Set text on AQA GCSE English Literature (8702) — Modern texts option; not on Pearson Edexcel International GCSE (4ET1) · Grade 9 Notes

In one sentence. A miner's wife waits for a husband she thinks is drinking, and meets him at last as a stranger

Elizabeth Bates lives in a cottage beside the railway sidings of a Nottinghamshire colliery with her two children, John and Annie, and a third child on the way. Through a long winter evening she waits for her husband Walter, sure he has gone past his own door to the pub, and her anger hardens. As the hours pass, anger turns to fear. She goes to a neighbour, the miner Rigley, and later her mother-in-law arrives with news of an accident. Walter has been trapped by a fall underground and has suffocated. The men carry his body into the cold parlour, and Elizabeth and his mother wash and dress it. Looking at him, Elizabeth realises that she never knew him and that their marriage was two strangers fighting in the dark. The story moves from a domestic grievance to a reckoning with death and with herself.

This study ends with D. H. Lawrence. Build your reading of Odour of Chrysanthemums in Telling Tales, teach it, then defend it against D. H. Lawrence.

How Odour of Chrysanthemums (D. H. Lawrence) develops

The waiting

Section I is built from waiting. The story opens with a small engine passing the colliery as the miners come up, then finds Elizabeth in the garden calling her son in from the brook. Her father, an engine driver, stops for tea and tells her he means to marry again soon; he also reports that Walter has been boasting in a pub about money he means to spend. Indoors the tea and the dinner wait, the children wait, and Elizabeth's anger grows.

Key moment. Elizabeth picking a sprig of the pale chrysanthemums and tucking it into her apron band, after scolding John for scattering their petals on the path (Section I: the garden). The flowers enter the story as something she picks almost without choosing. The gesture is tender and unconsidered, and Lawrence lets it sit in the reader's mind until the flowers return in the parlour.

Key moment. Annie noticing the flower in her mother's apron, and Elizabeth explaining that chrysanthemums marked her wedding, Annie's birth and the first time Walter was brought home drunk (Section I: the lamp). The flower now carries the whole history of the marriage. The moment comes just as the lamplight reveals that she is pregnant, so the child to come is placed inside the same pattern.

From anger to fear

Section II follows Elizabeth out into the dark. She will not go into the bright pub to fetch her husband; instead she asks at the Rigleys' cramped, untidy house. Jack Rigley says he left Walter finishing a stint at the coal face and goes to look for him. Back at home, Elizabeth hears the winding engine and starts at every sound.

Key moment. Elizabeth's mother-in-law arriving late in the evening, weeping, to say that Walter has had an accident (Section II: the news). The older woman's grief is loud and self-absorbed; Elizabeth's thoughts turn at once to practical things, the pension and the work of nursing him. Lawrence sets two kinds of feeling side by side and judges neither simply.

Key moment. A miner at the door reporting that Walter has been dead for hours, shut in by a fall behind him and suffocated (Section II: the death). The fall did not crush him; it trapped him. The image of a man sealed in, with no visible wound, prepares the story's final idea that he was always closed off from her.

The body in the parlour

Elizabeth prepares the cold parlour where the chrysanthemums stand in vases. The manager and his men carry Walter in, a vase is knocked over, and she mops up the water before anything else. When Annie calls down asking whether her father is drunk, Elizabeth says that he is asleep. Then the two women strip and wash the body.

Key moment. Elizabeth kneeling beside her husband's washed body and realising that she had never known him, that they had met and fought in the dark, and that she had denied him what he was (Ending). This is the story's turn. The anger of the evening is replaced by shame and pity, and the reader is asked to see the marriage through death's clear light. It is a judgement on her as well as on him.

The story ends with Elizabeth tidying the kitchen, submitting to life as the master she must serve, and shrinking from death as the master she fears.

How Odour of Chrysanthemums is written

Lawrence opens with a long, slow description of the colliery, the engine and the miners coming up, so the industrial world is established before any person speaks.

Dialogue is in the local dialect for the miners and their families, set against Elizabeth's more correct speech, which marks her pride and her distance.

The narration moves into Elizabeth's thoughts, so the reader shares her anger and then her horror. At the end it reports her realisation almost as an argument with herself.

Light and dark structure the story: the fire, the lamp, the black sidings, the single candle in the cold parlour.

Odour of Chrysanthemums in context

The story is set beside Brinsley Colliery in Nottinghamshire, near where Lawrence grew up as a miner's son. Pit accidents, long shifts and the pub were part of ordinary life.

Elizabeth's first practical thought, of the pension and what she could earn, reflects how completely a miner's family depended on one wage.

First published in a magazine in 1911, the story was revised for Lawrence's collection The Prussian Officer and Other Stories (1914); the ending in this set text is the revised one.

Relationships

  • Chemistry — Both show a family rearranged by a death, and a woman whose grief is not what others expect.
  • A Family Supper — Both are set around a meal that waits and a parent who controls the table; both turn on what is unsaid.
  • The Darkness Out There — Both end with a woman made to see that she had judged a person wrongly.

What Odour of Chrysanthemums (D. H. Lawrence) stands for

  • Chrysanthemums: the marriage's milestones, beauty and sorrow together, and finally the cold smell of death.
  • The pit and the fall: the industrial world that feeds the family and kills its men; Walter shut in, as he was shut off from her.
  • Fire and dark: the warm kitchen hearth against the black sidings and the cold parlour.
  • The unborn child: life continuing, and a weight apart from her at the moment of loss.

Why Lively made Odour of Chrysanthemums (D. H. Lawrence)

  • To show the daily life of a mining family, with its poverty, drink and danger, from inside.
  • To show grief as a moment of truth that overturns a person's understanding of her own life.

Readings you could defend

More than one reading of Odour of Chrysanthemums (D. H. Lawrence) can win the debate. These are the credible alternatives — argue one, and know the others.

  • A tragedy of a marriage, in which both partners failed each other and only death shows it.
  • A judgement on Elizabeth, whose pride and coldness the ending exposes.
  • A story about mining communities, where danger is ordinary and women carry the cost.

Essay arguments

  • Lawrence builds the story on a long delay, so the reader shares Elizabeth's anger before sharing her horror.
  • The chrysanthemums move from apron to vase to the smell of the parlour, tracing a marriage from beginning to end.
  • The ending reverses the story's sympathy: the absent drunkard becomes a man Elizabeth never let herself see.

Odour of Chrysanthemums (D. H. Lawrence) in theme essays

  • Grief and loss: the body in the parlour; the two women's grief.
  • Parents and children: Elizabeth shielding John and Annie; Walter's mother remembering her boy.

Questions that get asked

  • How is a marriage judged in ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’, and how does one other story you have studied present a relationship that has failed?
  • Explore how Lawrence shows a character changing her understanding of someone in ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’ and in one other story you have studied.

Think you understand it?

Reading is the start. On Incandio a topic counts as mastered only once you have taught it and defended it — the two things a revision guide cannot ask of you.

Incandio this topic → Prove it. Teach it. Defend it. What does “Incandio it” mean?

  1. Teach it — Explain your reading of Odour of Chrysanthemums in Telling Tales to Ember, an AI pupil who has not made one, and answer the awkward question. Understanding is credited; wording is not required.
  2. Defend it — Hold your reading of Odour of Chrysanthemums in Telling Tales against D. H. Lawrence in a short, structured debate marked against descriptors you can read first.
  3. Then the exam — exam-style practice, marked on Incandio.

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