The Industrial Landscape

Leeds by Turner

The industrial landscape, which D H Lawrence describes in The Odour of Chrysanthemums, is an engineered environment against which people struggle. Those who populate the scene, like the woman with the basket in the introduction, are trapped. They adjust to their mechanical environment by efforts of will.

In struggling to survive in an alien world Elizabeth Bates, the wife and mother, has learnt discipline. She knows what must be done, if she and her family are not to succumb to poverty and disgrace. But alongside her discipline there remains a person of feeling, someone who is touched by the grace offered by the chrysanthemums.

Lawrence uses the occasion of the meeting of father and daughter to describe Walter, the woman’s husband, as a drinker, and to show the stress between Elizabeth and her father. Walter conforms mechanically to the discipline that is associated with life as a struggle, but he is aware of the alienation inherent in this discipline. He attempts to escape his alienation by drinking.

Lawrence describes the inside the Bates’ house in terms of ‘life’; this contrasts with the dreary, forsaken and stagnant ‘death’ outside. Blood relations are living fragments set apart from this mechanical world. In this respect Lawrence’s point of view is close to that of Marx; who believed that mechanical production denies man his 'species being'. But ‘death’ is ineluctable. The sullenness shown by the child, his conformity with a discipline he has no sympathy with, is the same as his father’s.

However Elizabeth interprets this hopeless resentment as a self-centred indulgence. She takes alienation for granted and struggles to live on its terms. She is persuaded that there is no place of grace. She represents herself as someone who is able to meet the challenge of mechanical work. She is therefore proud and judgmental, rather than sympathetic. She has taken on the perspective of those whose mechanical strategies produced the industrial revolution.

Elizabeth fears her husband may be injured in the mine, but is angry with him because she finds him inadequate to what she believes is required. She tells herself that she was a fool to marry him.

One evening Elizabeth is concerned because Walter is late back from work. She believes her husband is drinking. If it is also the fear for her husband as a person then she does not acknowledge this. From her adopted perspective such knowledge is unthinkable. As a neighbour sets out to search for Walter in the public houses Elizabeth’s blood responds to a possibility she dare not represent.

The miners who bring home Walter’s body distance themselves from his death by means of a technical discussion of the accident at the mine. It is as if emotions are evil, and mechanical explanations good.

Later Elizabeth becomes aware an unmistakable feeling of dread. But her immediate response is practical; the turn of events remains unacknowledged.

Elizabeth finds she is able to respond with feeling, in a natural way, to Walter’s body. It has the power of an interdisciplinary spectacle. To have known her husband only as a function is revealed as a dream in which she has been living. Lawrence’s story shows how Elizabeth, who has adopted the dominant culture as her sole perspective, is shamed by her husband’s death. But what, as the pregnant mother of two children, is the alternative to the dream?

The culture that Lawrence exhibits and opposes is the mechanical reason of the enlightenment. Lawrence suggests that while Walter conforms in his practice to this culture because he has no choice, he does not believe in it as his wife does. This causes the estrangement between man and wife that Lawrence may have found between his own parents.

The Odour of Chrysanthemums illustrates Lawrence’s belief that ‘we must either love or rule’. This story shows how the need to rule was an imperative early in the twentieth century. But this social urge to power conceals people from one another. Only the death of her husband can reveal him to his wife.