Thursday, November 8, 2012

D. H. Lawrence's "The Odour of Chrysanthemums"

She herself breaks off a crumble of "wan flowers," h dodderying them to her face as if remembering much positive emotions in times past (Lawrence 337). Elizabeth absentmindedly sticks the flowers into her apron. wherefore her daughter is delighted at the "unusual event" of comprehend flowers in her mother's apron, begs to sprightliness them, notwithstanding Elizabeth remarks, "Go along, silly!" (Lawrence 340). The chrysanthemums smell beautiful to the daughter, but not to Elizabeth, because they hold unpleasant memories for her, "It was chrysanthemums when I married him, and chrysanthemums when you were born, and the get-go time they ever brought him home drunk, he'd got br deliverness chrysanthemums in his button-hole" (Lawrence 340). Later, after Elizabeth learns from her mother-in-law of the death of Walter, her husband, she notices: "There was a cold, deathlike smell of chrysanthemums in the room" (Lawrence 345). When the men come in carrying the system of her husband, one of them knocks a vase of chrysanthemums off a panel: "As soon as she could get in the room, she went and picked up the broken vase and the flowers" (Lawrence 346).

Elizabeth's lack of emotion about the husband's death is crisply contrasted with that of her mother-in-law. The mother-in-law wails and moans, and cannot be comforted because of her son's death. Even in washing his body for burial she ca


Paley's father demands that she phase out her story. In his words, "I object not to facts but to people sitting in trees talking sense littlely, voices from who knows where . . . " (Paley 141). This is a error that beginning writers often make. They put their characters in situations without giving nice information to allow the reader to visualize them and their predicaments. Responding to her father's request, Paley makes the mother in her story come to life graduation by describing a key physical characteristic, her hair: "Dark, with heavy braids, as though she were a girl or a foreigner" (Paley 141). indeed her sociological background is revealed by describing her parents, "From out of town. Professional people. The first to be divorced in their county" (Paley 141).
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Finally, the mother's psychological background is described, " . . . a smart woman who came to N.Y.C. full of interest love give excitement very up to date" (Paley 141).

In galore(postnominal) ways, the fibber of the story has led a sheltered life. He is an educated black man, a teacher in Harlem. and he distances himself from his students and their problems, just like other faculty members, whom the narrator observes in a courtyard with the students: "A teacher passed through and through them every now and again, quickly, as though he or she couldn't wait to get out of that courtyard, to get those boys out of their kettle of fish and off their minds" (Baldwin 48). Likewise, the narrator has kept his distance from former childishness acquaintances, who have succumbed to life on the streets. When he runs into one of Sonny's old friends, now a drug addict, the narrator at first treats his with disrespect: "Then I felt guilty--guilty, probably, for never having hypothetical that the poor bastard had a story of his own, much less a sad one" (Baldwin 49). The narrator's mother has even saved him from the reason that his father turned to drink--the tragic death of his own brother at the hands of racists hoodlums. As the nar
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