The Metaphor of Industrial Corruption
in D. H. Lawrence's "Odor of Chrysanthemums"

[Remember that the title is the first indication of what your paper is about.  Avoid "filler" or "warming up" your reader: go directly to the point of your paper.  Where you place the thesis in the opening paragraph is up to you.  However, wherever you place it, all the other material in the opening paragraph should serve to better clarify or to explain that thesis statement.  You should be able to move the thesis sentence anywhere within the paragraph and still have the information flow and to make sense.]    In D. H. Lawrence's "Odor of Chrysanthemums," the opening paragraphs establish a tone for the story of bleakness and despair.  Through the narrator we learn that the story takes place at Brinsley Colliery, the industrial base of an English coal-mining town.  Readers encounter a dreary landscape that depicts the harsh effects of industrialization at the expense of the natural environment.  We wonder, for example, how the landscape would appear if it were not for the effects of that industrialism.  But by close attention to the ways in which the narrator compares nature to machines and industry in the opening paragraph, we understand that such an opposition is important for an understanding of the story.  Through the narrator's descriptions, a mechanistic corruption seems to pervade the setting, tainting all that it comes in contact with—especially people. [The thesis now follows: it should be a one sentence, specific statement of what you intend to argue.  If it helps, frame your thesis into the formula "I intend to argue that ______________, because ______."  The "because" in the preceding offers the precise argument--the topic--of your intended paper--the subject.  Remember: your thesis can never be too precise or limited.  The problem with papers is most often that students try to write on all of the work or to generalize about many things as opposed to one scene, one event, one image, etc.  Ask yourself: what one idea can I offer that will help someone who has already read this work in order to help him or her to understand it better?  I don't need to retell the plot or talk about things other than my one, specific idea, which will help a reader to better appreciate the work we both have read.]     I intend to argue that the first few paragraphs of this story act as more than a detailed description of a polluted landscape; they serve as a metaphor for the inability of people to survive the mechanical impositions on their lives, because those impositions corrupt human nature as much as the natural environment.  [Thesis sentence: notice that the thesis limits itself only to the opening of the story--not all of the work or general observations.]

[All papers follow the formula of 

1. Why am I writing this paper? (The thesis and clarification--Introduction)

2. How? (How will I prove the contention I made in the introduction?  This constitutes the "proof," the largest section of a paper--Body)

3.  What? (The conclusion: What have I said?  Summarize your paper in one [possibly two for long papers] paragraph that states what you have attempted to argue, without repeating or merely rephrasing the introduction.)]   The first paragraph significantly begins by linking a small locomotive with a colt who manages to outrun the "clanking, stumbling" train, even though running "at a canter" (1728).  The colt is described as emerging from "among the gorse, which still flickered indistinctly in the raw afternoon."  While the colt represents a young and natural life-force, the train suggests the slow, but methodical machine that is the more powerful and more dominant force in the landscape.  So too, a woman, who stands between a hedge and a row of coal-carrying wagons, is also described as standing "insignificantly trapped" between the two.  Thus the reader may assume that whatever is natural, even though superior to the mechanical, has been relegated to a background of indistinction, for the colt is faster than the engine and the woman represents the humanity that is pushed aside by machines.  Moreover, all of the sentences in this opening paragraph depict mechanical things as overwhelming and corrupting the beauties of nature.  Fields are "dreary and forsaken," while "withered oaks" stand among polluted, smoky grass.  None of the adjectives in this paragraph are positive; rather, the scene describes a raw, bleak, and ugly landscape.

The brief second paragraph, which consists of a single sentence, seems to summarize the opposition between nature and the mechanical: "The engine whistled as it came into the wide bay of railway lines beside the colliery, where rows of trucks stood in harbor."  The image of trucks "in harbor" seems ironic since we normally associate a harbor with the sea and the power of nature, and the word "harbor" also suggests rest, peace, and protection against the power of nature.  But given the opening descriptions of the setting for the story, we cannot assume that the Brinsley Colliery and its effects on the surrounding countryside represent anything peaceful or safe.  This assumption is apparently confirmed by the third paragraph, which begins with a description of the miners, who, "single, trailing, and in groups, passed like shadows diverging home."  They too appear insignificant, like the gorge from which the colt emerged, or the woman who was pinned between the trucks and hedge.  Humanity and what is natural are at the mercy of the industrial environment and come off a poor second in the struggle, like the description of a "large bony vine" that "clutched at the house"; nature is death-like, grasping for life in its final moments, for living things are depleted and malnourished.

At this point in the story, however, readers anticipate that Lawrence's story is about more than the realistic description of a coal-mining community, which is confirmed when the narrator focuses on a particular person, a woman who is described in positive terms: "She was a tall woman of imperious mien, handsome, with definite black eyebrows.  Her smooth black hair was parted exactly" (1729).  We later learn that this is Elizabeth Bates, a mother of two small children with another on the way, who stands in contrast to her surroundings, as well as the simple folk who are her neighbors, people who treat her with gentleness and respect.  All descriptions that have preceded her arrival in the story, therefore, metaphorically suggest her own struggle against the mechanical, unnatural, and ugly surroundings.

The tone of the story suggests, however, that she too, like the landscape in which she lives, will not survive this struggle.  When her husband Walter, a worker in the mines, does not come home at the usual time, she automatically assumes that he has gone off to one of the local pubs to spend his pay in drink.  Elizabeth has seen his "mechanical" behavior before, for whenever he is paid he sneaks past his home, going off to spend more money in an evening of drinking than he gives her to feed their family.  As readers, we know that Elizabeth's expectations about Walter are true, even though he never speaks in his own defense.  Because of the descriptions in the story's opening, we readily believe that he too has been corrupted by the ugliness of the Brinsley Colliery town.  Even when we learn that Walter has been killed in a mining accident, our trusts in Elizabeth’s first assumptions are not shaken.  The events confirm that Walter's death was "unnatural," in that he was not crushed to death—indeed, was not even bruised—but rather died of asphyxiation when buried alive.  He too has been smothered by industry.

The metaphor here is unmistakable: all in the mining town are quietly suffocating, dying alone, cut-off, and isolated from other human beings.  By focusing on Elizabeth, however, the narrator points up her isolation in the midst of a living death; she has lost her husband to the very industrialization that is destroying the countryside.  And rather than weep as she stares at his lifeless body, she is suddenly shocked at how little the husband and wife knew one another.  Even when making love, creating the child with whom she is pregnant, "they had been two isolated beings, far apart as now" (1742).  While this isolation may have been particular to them, the tone of the opening few paragraphs suggests that all life, not just Elizabeth's and Walter's, is being destroyed by the "unnaturalness" forced upon them by machinery, industrialism, and the destruction of nature.

[The conclusion.  You should be able to re-read your paper and then state in one paragraph what you said in several pages.  What is the one last thing you want to leave your reader?  Conclusions do not merely rephrase the introduction or to pick out specific sentences for rephrasing, or introduce new material--they summarize your argument that has been made in the body of your work.]   While the opening paragraphs at first appear to merely sketch a background or setting for a more particular story to follow, it soon becomes clear to the reader that those descriptions metaphorically detail the life of Elizabeth Bates, who is losing her own nature amid the same destructive forces that killed her husband.  Like the "twiggy trees" that dotted the landscape, the insignificance of the miners who "passed like shadows" on their way home, and the "disheveled pink chrysanthemums" that grew before her house (1728), nature—and her nature—is swallowed up by an industrialism that people create, which takes away their humanity.

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