Odor Of Chrysantemus

According to the writers, the character is a construct, put together by the reader who combines all the information given in the text (information that can be contrastive). Every time he reads, the reader does a “Process of Nomination” because, as Barthes says, “to read is to struggle to name”. As Chatman says, a character is a mixture of personality traits. Moreover, Garvey talks about a“process of reconstruction” of a character in terms of “attributive preposition” that is to say the character’s name, the predicate and the modalizer (degrees and qualifications); unfortunately these prepositions are not always immediate, and the reader has to extract them from the text. We can also say that a character has several dimensions: can be defined as static or dynamic according to itsdevelopment during the narration. In this case Forster makes a distinction between flat and round: a flat character is a simple, unidimentional character, which lacks of complexity and does not develop during the narration; on the other hand a round character is multidimentional and develops during the narration. Nonetheless, we can’t certainly define a character only as flat or round, because we haveseveral degrees and shades to consider. That’s why Ewen made a further distinction into three continua or axes of complexity, development and penetration into the inner life. The complexity is a combination of several traits: in one pole we have a character constructed around one dominant trait along with a few secondary ones (for example allegoric features and caricatures). On the other pole we havefull complex characters. The development can be both physical and psychological and is not always fully traced in the text but also implied by it. When we talk about “penetration into the inner life” we divide characters that are seen only from the outside and the ones with their own consciousness, their thoughts and their feelings.

All the characters’ traits may not appear distinctly in thetext. That’s why Ewen himself made a basic distinction into the two major types of “textual indicators of character” : direct definition and indirect presentation. The first one presents a character by simply describing it, establishing an authoritative static and fixed idea of the character, where the reader has not any role in it than accept the character as it is. On the other hand, the indirectpresentation, rather than briefly describing a trait, it exemplifies it throughout a character’s actions, dialogues, monologues, external appearance, environment and reinforcement by analogy (names, landscape and between characters).



We can extend all these theoretical ideas to D.H.Lawrence’s short story “Odour of Chrysanthemums”. First of all we need to say whether they are primaryor secondary. Elizabeth Bates, Walter’s mother and Walter Bates can be considered primary, both quantitatively (they are the characters that most appear in the story) and qualitatively speaking (they are the ones around who the story evolves). The secondary ones are Elizabeth’s father, the children (Annie and John), Mr. and Mrs. Rigley and the miners.

Elizabeth Bates is for sure the maincharacter: all the story is focused on her life and even though the events are told by a narrator, most of the time the point of view is hers (“ He had probably gone past his home, slunk past his own door, to drink before he came in, while his dinner spoiled and wasted in waiting”: although it’s the narrator speaking, it is clear that is Elizabeth who thinks that of Walter). Her character can beconsidered round/dynamic and complex: in facts she develops throughout the story and she is characterized by different traits. Often these are opposed to each other, for example she is tired of her husband’s behavior (“her anger was evident in the stern unbending of her head”), but, at the same time, she excuses him and hopes he can change (“Perhaps he’s stopped to get some ripping done”) or she...