How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
She seemed to be occupied by her husband. 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. She glanced at the clock, then took the potatoes to strain them in the yard. (1.36)
We quickly learn that Elizabeth and her husband, Walter, don't have the happiest of married lives. We haven't even learned Walt's name yet (in this story, Lawrence often likes to refer to people by their gender or place in the family), but we already know Elizabeth sees him as a bad husband.
Quote #2
"No," she said, "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." (1.76)
Here, Elizabeth is denying that the smell of chrysanthemums holds any appeal for her, partially because they remind her of her wedding. Again, Lawrence is really driving home that these guys don't get along.
Quote #3
As they stumbled up the entry, Elizabeth Bates heard Rigley's wife run across the yard and open her neighbour's door. At this, suddenly all the blood in her body seemed to switch away from her heart. (2.29)
As already noted elsewhere, Lawrence likes to define characters according to their familial/marital relationships. This moment provides a good example, as we never learn Mrs. Rigley's name; she is simply Mrs. Rigley or "Rigley's wife."
Quote #4
"We must lay him out," the wife said. She put on the kettle, then returning knelt at the feet, and began to unfasten the knotted leather laces. (2.116)
It is definitely worth wondering why Lawrence avoids character names like the plague. Also, why "the wife"? Why not "his wife"?
Quote #5
They never forgot it was death, and the touch of the man's dead body gave them strange emotions, different in each of the women; a great dread possessed them both, the mother felt the lie was given to her womb, she was denied; the wife felt the utter isolation of the human soul, the child within her was a weight apart from her. (2.122)
Hmm, okay, maybe we're now getting a better picture of why Lawrence uses descriptors like "wife" rather than character names. It seems like the characters are feeling pretty disassociated from their own lives, and describing someone as "the wife" plays up that feeling of being alienated. As you can see here, Elizabeth (or "the wife") even feels separated from the child growing inside her. If that's not alienation, we don't know what is. Except maybe this.
Quote #6
And her soul died in her for fear: she knew she had never seen him, he had never seen her, they had met in the dark and had fought in the dark, not knowing whom they met nor whom they fought. (2.128)
Here, we get Elizabeth reflecting on her relationship with her husband. Seeing his body, she seems to have realized she never really knew him and vice versa. Pretty sad stuff, if you ask us.
Quote #7
And now she saw, and turned silent in seeing. For she had been wrong. She had said he was something he was not; she had felt familiar with him. Whereas he was apart all the while, living as she never lived, feeling as she never felt. (2.128)
Because she never really knew her husband (in her view), Elizabeth seems to feel like she has done him wrong, saying she had "said he was something he was not." It seems like she's feeling guilty about this mistake, but hey—hindsight is always 20/20.
Quote #8
And he was the father of her children. Her soul was torn from her body and stood apart. She looked at his naked body and was ashamed, as if she had denied it. After all, it was itself. It seemed awful to her. She looked at his face, and she turned her own face to the wall. For his look was other than hers, his way was not her way. She had denied him what he was—she saw it now. She had refused him as himself. —And this had been her life, and his life. (2.129)
Here, we learn it's not just regret that haunts Elizabeth now that she believes she failed to see her husband for who he really was—she actually seems to feel ashamed.
Quote #9
He and she were only channels through which life had flowed to issue in the children. She was a mother—but how awful she knew it now to have been a wife. And he, dead now, how awful he must have felt it to be a husband. (2.130)
Continuing with Elizabeth's monologue of regrets about her married life, we learn that she outright finds it to have been "awful . . . to have been a wife." It seems she still feels she can function as a mom, but the wife gig did not work, in her view.
Quote #10
It was finished then: it had become hopeless between them long before he died. Yet he had been her husband. But how little!— (2.130)
In what is probably one of the saddest moment in the whole story, Elizabeth recognizes that her marriage was doomed a long time before Walter died and believes that he was really, when all was said and done, only her husband a "little."