Once Elizabeth realizes that her husband has perished down in the coalmines she starts to reflects on her relationship with her husband and realizes that they never truly even knew each other let alone loved one another “She had denied him what he was – she saw it now. She had refused him as himself. – And this had been her life, and his life.” She realizes how alone both of them truly were and is sadden and horrified by what she sees within herself and their marriage. She admits that some of the fault in their marriage was part hers, “She looked at his naked body and was ashamed, as if she had denied it.” She goes through an entire array of emotions, curiosity, anger, sympathy, forgiveness and cool appraisal, as she washes her husband’s body and ponders what their life had been together. She then comes to the conclusion that the purpose in her and her husband’s coming together was to create life. “He and she were only channels through which life had flowed to issue in the children.”
What of the children? We first meet John, the son of Elizabeth and Walt Bates. He is a “small, sturdy boy of five” and is resentful of his mother’s authority as he “stood quite still and defiantly” when she scolded him about going down to the brook. In John, Elizabeth sees “the father in her child’s indifference to all but himself”, in other words she sees the image of her husband. John is an ever-present reminder of his father. Annie, on the other hand, is a sweet, gentle, loving and innocence child, who still enjoys the simple beauty of things and is still untouched by life’s harsher realities. She is what her mother might have been once. The simple joy of discovering chrysanthemums in her mother’s apron pocket “You’ve got a flower in your apron!” said the child, in a little rapture at this unusual event”, is a good example of this. However, Elizabeth feel doesn’t feel the same way. How does she feel about these flowers her daughter discovered? She feels nothing and sees everything that is wrong in her life, “It was chrysanthemums when I married him, and chrysanthemums when you were born, and the first time they ever brought him home drunk, he’d got brown chrysanthemums in his button-hole.”
Next we will look at the fourth character in the story, which is Grandma Bates. She is the mother of Walt Bates and is a widow. She comes to the house when one of Walt’s co-workers brings new of an accident down in the coalmines. He interrupted her bedtime ritual of having a drink before bed. What is her purpose for coming to see Elizabeth? Why to bring her comfort, of course, during this stressful time. She is nostalgic and reminisces about how Walt was when he was young “it seems but a week or two since he brought me his first wages. Ay-he was a good lad.” Grandma Bates goes on to point out that “He was a happy lad at home, only full of spirits” and she didn’t understand what happen to him after he got married to Elizabeth, “You’ve had a sight o’ trouble with him, Elizabeth, you have indeed. But he was a jolly enough lad wi’ me, he was, I can assure you.” Perhaps she blames Elizabeth for the way her son turned out.
Now we come to our last character, in the short story of the “Odour of Chrysanthemums”, Walter Bates. There are many questions surrounding Walt’s untimely demise down in the coalmines. Did he deliberately put himself in harms way? Did he feel that Elizabeth would be better off without him? He delayed in coming home and stayed down in the mines a little longer than normal. The manager, who was very trouble by what happened, couldn’t understand why Walter would have done such a thing, “Never knew such a thing in my life, never! He’d no business to ha’ been left. I never knew such a thing in my life! Fell over him clean as a whistle, an’ shut him in.” Could this have been suicide? The signs were there. No sign of a struggle. The body wasn’t bruised and he deliberately stayed behind. Maybe his life was no “bed of roses” either and he decided to end his life in order to get away from Elizabeth.
The “Odour of Chrysanthemums” is a good story about the relationship between two people, who do not know each other. The story, also, questions why people have relationships and that we really don’t have control over our lives. Eventually, we have to answer for the way we live our lives.
