AnalysisontheOdourofChrysanthemums-2019年文档资料

1、AnalysistheOdourof Chrysanthemums【】 Symbolism and imagery is the main characteristic of D. H. Lawrence's writing style. This essay lays special stress on the short stories of him, and takes one of his short stories, The Odour of Chrysanthemums, as an example to demonstrate the symbolic meaning.1

2、 Background of the StoryThe development of Odour of Chrysanthemums ' is typical of the process by which many of Lawrence's earlystories reached their final published form1. It probably wrote in the autumn of 1909 and it was revised again and again. This is the version that appeared in his fi

3、rst collection of short stories, The Prussian Officer, published in November 1914.The story is loosely based on events in Lawrence's own family. His paternal uncle, James Lawrence, was killed in a mining accident at Brinsley Colliery in 1880. He was married to Mary Polly ' Renshaw and they h

4、ad three children, the last of whom was born after her father'sdeath. They lived in a cottage between the road and therailway line at Brinsley, and it is in a fictional recreation of this cottage that the action of the story takes place. In much of his fiction Lawrence changes the names of place

5、s, but here Brinsley, Selston and Underwood are correctly namedand located, while the Lord Nelston was a real pub in Nottingham Road.2 Analysis on the StoryImpressionistic and symbolic, dense with figurative language, D.H. Lawrence's "The Odour of Chrysanthemums" relies heavily on imag

6、ery (such as the chrysanthemums, and the frequent altercation of darkness and light) for effect.At the opening paragraphs, every detail contributes to the atmosphere of evening in late autumn, at the same time as anticipating the events of the story. There is a strong sense of the conflict between n

7、ature and industry: the woman finds herself “insignificantly trapped ” by the engine, while the flames of the pit- bank are seen as “red sores ”, as if the countryside if blighted by the mine.The sense of menace thus created is carried into the next section of the story, where Lawrence builds up ten

8、sion as the family anxiously awaits the father's return. Wegradually become aware not only of Mrs. Bates's genuine fears about her husband's safety, but also her resentment towards him and the way in which she draws her bewildered children in to the battle between them, for instance by a

9、ssociating the son's bad' qualities with his father.A further dimension is added to the drama when Mrs.Bates goes to a neighbor to enquire about her husband.It clearly costs her something to reveal her anxiety to people she regards as inferior,and the broader dialect spoken by the Rigleys an

10、d the wary respect with which they treat Mrs.Bates suggests they are aware of some kind of superiority in her.The arrival of her garrulous mother-in-law, who also speaks a broader dialect, intensifies this sense of class difference, and introduces a new kind of conflict:the competition between wife

11、and mother over the man.When the husband 's dead body is brought to the house the story moves into an entirely new register. Firstly, there are the contrasted reactions of the mother and the wife, with the former speaking in sentimental and childlike terms of the dead man, while the latter is co

12、oler and more concerned with the practicalities of dealing with her husband's body and looking after her children. In theearliest surviving version of the story, the reactions of the mother and the wife are the much more similar.The sightof her husband 's body resolves for Elizabeth the past

13、 conflicts between them, and she is almost grateful that he has come home dead rather than drunk: “Think how he might have come home - not white and beautiful, gentlysmili ng(but) (u)gly, befouled, with hateful wordson an evil breath, reek with disgust. She loved him so much now; her life was mended

14、again, and her faith looked up with a smile; he had come home to her, beautiful”.In the final version of the story, however, this sense of reconciliation and beauty is replaced by something much less positive and much more powerful. The s and phrases suggest distance and lack of understanding:“apart

15、 ”,“alien ”,“isolated ”, “they had met in the dark”.Elizabeth feels that “her soul was torn from her body ” as for the first time she honestly confronts the reality of her relationship with her husband and understand that their sexual meetings have been those of“two isolatedbeings” and that they hav

16、e constantly denied each other 's essential selfhood.3 Symbolism of the ChrysanthemumsThe chrysanthemums in the story symbolize Elizabeth 's emotions. It meansthe misery in her life. At the beginning of the story, Elizabeth has tucked a chrysanthemum into the waistband of her apron, and ther

17、e are more decorating the parlor, but they do not symbolize happiness for her. It reminds her of her terrible marriage and her drunken husband. And it's chrysanthemums again that evening when he is brought in from the mine, dead, and laid out in the parlor. One of the men bringing in her husband

18、's body accidentally knocks over the vase of chrysanthemums she had put there earlier in the evening - the ones that reminded her so bitterly of the lost dreams of her life. The chrysanthemums which opened her married life have now closed it.The chrysanthemums, which bloom a little while in the

19、fall and then die, are symbolic in this story of the fragility of our inner lives. Elizabeth Bates suddenly discovers that inside herself she is a person, with unique thoughts and passions and fears; her husband was just as much of an individual as she, but one whomshe never really sought to know beneath the surface. Their marriage had been dead long before her husband lost his life that night int