The Corrosive Effects of Marriage
This story is a portrait of a marriage in the process of disintegration. In fact, the process is very far along. This theme is presented subtly; there is no potential for a showdown between husband and wife where grievances are aired and scores settled. God or fate takes care of the latter and the former will continue eating away inside at Elizabeth. The subtlety extends to how the tension in the story builds through Elizabeth’s response to her husband not arriving home alongside the other miners. She had fallen into habits that were in turn stimulated by habits adopted by her husband. These habits do no reveal a brittle union on the point of collapse; if anything, it suggests that if things had turned out differently, this marriage would continue to slowly die a day at a time for decades.
Maintaining the Illusion of the Beautiful in an Ugly World
Lawrence opens his story with vivid imagery that suggests not just the dreariness of the world inhabited by these characters but the unlikelihood of things ever changing very much. For the most part, with little variation, the life they live on the day of the story will be much like the life they are still living a decade or more from then. Elizabeth’s world is especially dreary because her husband wastes so much money on drink nothing is left for even the basics. The flowers are an attempt to impose something beautiful into this world.
Class Distinction
British society is one with a long history of rigid classic distinctions. The aristocracy was already all but dead by the turn of the 20th century, but some things never die. Interestingly, this legacy even filters down to Elizabeth. She is viewed as exhibiting a superior attitude toward the mining community and, indeed, does fault herself for her failing marriage to marrying below her status. For most of the story, her demeanor is one of simply: she didn’t have to settle for marrying below her class, she could have married better, but she married for love. By the end of the story, however, she has reached a state where she can be more honest about her contributions to the failure of her marriage as well as the flexibility and fluidity associated with such notions of class division.
