Odour of Chrysanthemums Themes

Marriage (and marital conflict in particular) is so central to "The Odour of Chrysanthemums" that you'll feel like a certified marriage counselor by the end. Our heroine, Elizabeth, spends a lot of...

Although the corpse doesn't show up until pretty late in the game, death definitely dominates the story's final paragraphs—which is when you realize there have been hints all along that the Reape...

As we've already mentioned elsewhere in this section (see "Marriage"), in "The Odour of Chrysanthemums," Lawrence is constantly referring to characters by their role in the family rather than their...

Anxiety and fear ooze out of every pore in "The Odour of Chrysanthemums." At first, this anxiety is about if/whether/when Walter will come home drunk, which is sure to result in a confrontation bet...

Blame it on the a-a-a-a-a-alcohol. Walter's status as the family drunk is a big focal point in "The Odour of Chrysanthemums." Before she knows he's had an accident, Elizabeth assumes that he's late...

Everyone is "on the clock" in "The Odour of Chrysanthemums." Repeated references to the time—and, in particular, Elizabeth's hyper-attentiveness to time's passage—heighten our anxiety about Wal...

This family isn't exactly a ship of happy campers. Elizabeth spends most of "The Odour of Chrysanthemums" furious about her lot in life, and then that disgruntlement turns into full-on terror about...

With lots of family drama, "The Odour of Chrysanthemums" focuses heavily on feelings of alienation—and those emotions only get more intense when Walter, the family patriarch, turns up dead. Eliza...