Winter-Crack Trees: Botanical Symbolism and D. H. Lawrence’s 1914 Revisions of Odour of Chrysanthemums

Abstract

IN an analysis of the opening paragraph of Odour of Chrysanthemums, Hal Blythe and Charlie Sweet draw attention to the manner in which D. H. Lawrence uses realistic detail to ‘set up his story’s ending’ by symbolically foreshadowing ‘the key insight of Elizabeth Bates’ concluding epiphany’. The colliery pit-bank of discarded waste can thus be read as both realistic scene-setting, and also as a symbol of the Bates’ children who are unwanted by-products of their parents’ sexual relationship. Lawrence’s fusion of realism and symbolism ‘contributes to the verisimilitude of the locale’, and also ‘adumbrates Elizabeth’s discovery at story’s end’ that ‘the true worth mined was the coal or the sex, an insight that the foreshadowing helps establish’.1 The pit-bank is not, however, the only instance of Lawrence fusing realism and symbolism to foreshadow Elizabeth Bates’ concluding epiphany; another example, also located at the opening of the story, is that of the winter-crack plum-trees growing in the garden of the Bates’ cottage. In the first published version of the story, which appeared in the 1911 June issue of the English Review, the trees are simply an incidental part of the naturalistic description of the environment of the Bates’ cottage: ‘There were many twiggy apple-trees, winter-crack trees, sinister looking bushes, and ragged cabbages’.2 However, in the revised 1914 version, published in The Prussian Officer and Other Stories, the trees are also used symbolically to parallel and prefigure the process by which Elizabeth arrives at her climactic epiphany at the close of the narrative.