Why would a mother not adulate her biological children? Psychologically, the woman is displacing her frustration, “for the love (that) turned to dust”, on her children. The children conjure her reminiscence of the love that transmuted into dust occasioning the extermination of her maternal love. The family’s craving to lead a standard of living that cannot be sustained by the existing monetary resources is inauspicious. D.H Lawrence explicates, “Her children were growing up, they would have to go to school. There must be more money, there must be more money. The father, who was always handsome and expensive in his tastes, seemed as if he never would be able to do anything worth doing. And the mother, who had great belief in herself, did not succeed any better, and her tastes were just as expensive.” Clearly, the two parents are extravagant, superficial consumers who place immense significance on money. Consequently, money becomes the vital motivation in the family such that the family exists in scenery that covertly hollers: “There must be more money! There must be more money!”
The woman programs Paul using the lucky/unlucky binary when she tells him, “we’re poor members of the family…it’s because your father had no luck.” The woman’s affirmation hints at the causal correlation between luck and money. Paul emphasizes that he is lucky after his mother endorses that neither she nor her partner is fortunate. The conditioning upsurges Paul’s fixation with realizing his luck. Paul’s end goal is to make sufficient money so that the whispering, that is associated with money, can terminate in his house.
The lucky/unlucky binary degenerates when Paul perishes. D. H Lawrence expounds, “ And even as he lay dead, his mother heard her brother’s voice saying to her: “My God, Hester, you’re eighty thousand to the good, and a poor devil of a son to the bad. But, poor devil, poor devil, he’s best gone out of life where he rides his rocking-horse to find a winner.” Paul validates that he is lucky, unlike his parents, for the luck accords him eighty-thousand pounds. However, he passes away on the night for he had fallen off the rocking horse in the course of tracking luck. His death suggests that he is unlucky because he will not be able to relish even a penny of the thousands that he credits to the rocking-horse-stimulated luck. If Paul hard persisted after the triumph, the lucky versus unlucky binary would have been tenable. Paul’s supposed luck brings him money and death in identical measures.
“The Odour of Chrysanthemums”
Elizabeth Bates’ symbolic interaction with the chrysanthemums is disparate from her Annie’s. When her daughter asks, “ Don’t they smell beautiful?” Elizabeth replies, ““not to me. It was chrysanthemums when I married him, and chrysanthemums when you were born, and the first time they ever brought him home drunk, he’d got brown chrysanthemums in his button-hole.” Referencing the girl’s birth and her husband’s first episode of drunkenness when discrediting the chrysanthemums’ odour implies that the woman does not attach importance to the flower. The scent is dreadful, for the woman, because she correlates it happenings that shrank her pleasure in life. Therefore, the birth of Annie is not gratifying as well as it is equated to her husband’s drunkenness.
The chrysanthemums in the parlour signify mortality. D.H Lawrence elucidates, “The candle-light glittered on the lustre-glasses, on the two vases that held some of the pink chrysanthemums, and on the dark mahogany. There was a cold, deathly smell of chrysanthemums in the room.” The goal of introducing the chrysanthemums in the parlour would have been to make the parlour eye-catching (due to pinkness) and dynamic. Elizabeth Bate’s discernment of the chrysanthemums in this case implies that the flowers are adverse pointers of the goings-on in her melancholic life.
Elizabeth Bates’ apprehension foreshadows of her companion’s demise. D.H Lawrence illuminates, “When Mrs Bates came down, the room was strangely empty, with a tension of expectancy.” On the outward, she makes evident that she is disenchanted with her spouse’s propensities of unpunctuality and drunkenness. Her intrinsic tension points to the telepathy that cautions her that there could more to his tardiness other than drunkenness. Also, the intuition nudges her to the degree that she goes to the Rigley’s to make inquiries about her husband. Ultimately, her dread becomes factual when the inanimate body of her partner is conveyed into the house.
