Death and Rebirth

1969

A Dissenting View of D. H. Lawrence’s The Odour of Chrysanthemums

During the entire evening covered by the story, Elizabeth builds an anger, tinged with apprehension, over her husband’s irresponsibility.  She blames him for her loneliness and isolation.  She gives the impression she is suffering from doing her required duty as a mother and wife, while he makes merry with the other men, shirking his duty as husband and father.  there is a gradual growing fear that harm may have befallen him, but her past experience has been that this is not the case, and that he is well and happy in some pub.  Yet her fear is strong enough that it does not come as a complete surprise when he is brought home dead, instead of dead drunk.  It does not escape her that he died lingering behind on his job either.

But in his death she sees the realities of both their lives.  Perhaps she even sees his death as an escape from her prison of insensitivity.  This tinges her with guilt, even more than the guilt she felt for misjudging his motives.  Still this guilt seems minor to her feelings.  In the dead body, she sees the impersonal object that he was to her in life.  She ceases to blame him, realizing it was as awful for him as it had been for her.  She feels sorrow and respect toward him, knowing he had dwelt in as much alienation from her as she from him.

She views his death as not a tragedy to her and her children, because it is a death, but because their tragedy was in living together and knowing each other.  The tries to act out the tragedy of death, but cannot, for it has actually ended a tragedy of life.  Death is his tragedy, not hers, for she can try again, while he cannot. She feels no emotion toward the dead body, for it is a stranger’s body.  She feels no claim on it, because she made no claim on it in life.  She respects him enough as a man not to touch him more than she must.  At first, she kisses him, but the kiss has no more meaning than it had meant in life.  She finds their life together had been no more alive than the dead body left in her parlor.  She doe not fear her life without him, for now she has another chance.  

She does fear she will die without fulfilling that chance and be a stranger to someone, or that she really is not reborn anymore than the dead man is reborn, or their love was reborn, by the kiss she gave him when the body was first left.

She shows this not only by her thoughts, but by the lack of emotion toward his death, as in her inability to cry, her rationalization that she should cry for his mother’s sake and in her calmness in waiting for the necessary things to be done.