Setting

"Odour of Chrysanthemums" is a story about Elizabeth Bates and the recognition she gains, upon her husband's death, concerning the gap between them. The style of "Odour of Chrysanthemums" is highly poetic and is characterized by a profusion of descriptive adjectives and adverbs. The story's first paragraph juxtaposes the hard, inhuman machine-world of the mine and the beautiful, vulnerable, natural world. This description introduces the gap between people and nature which will widen at the end of the story to reveal an absolute division between men and women, and life and death. In the story's first sentence, the mine's locomotive engine startles a colt and traps a woman walking on the track, and its smoke coats the grass. The mine's pit-bank is powerfully described as having "flames like red sores licking its ashy sides," as if the slag heap is a wounded animal. In this setting where the...