The Rocking-Horse Winner

D. H. Lawrence’s “The Rocking-Horse Winner” was first published in 1926 in Harper’s Bazaar magazine. It was published again that same year in a collection that was put together by Lady Cynthia Asquith, a friend of Lawrence’s. Some critics have argued that the characters in the story are modeled after Asquith and her autistic son. Lawrence’s works are known for their explorations of human nature through frank discussions of sex, psychology and religion. Lawrence’s later short stories, such as “The Rocking-Horse Winner,” display a movement toward tabulation and satire as opposed to his earlier short fiction, which reflected more the traditional nineteenth-century English short story — anecdotal, or tales of adventure. “The Rocking-Horse Winner” is a sardonic tale employing devices of the fairy tale and a mockingly detached tone to moralize on the value of love and the dangers of money. In “The Rocking-Horse Winner” and other later stories, Lawrence moved beyond the strictures of realism and encompassed a broader range of styles and subjects than in his earlier work. Critics view “The Rocking-Horse Winner” as an example of Lawrence’s most accomplished writing. Lawrence is considered a modernist, a member of a literary school opposed to the literary conventions of nineteenth-century morality, taste, and tradition. Evident in “The Rocking-Horse Winner” is Lawrence’s distain for conspicuous consumption, crass materialism, and an emotionally distant style of parenting popularly thought to exist in England during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Thus, the story is considered by many to be an example of modernist prose.

Author Biography

David Herbert Lawrence was born September 11, 1885. His father was Arthur John Lawrence, an illiterate coal miner in the Nottinghamshire area of England; his mother was Lydia Beardsall Lawrence, a teacher. The fact that his mother had more education than his father caused friction in the Lawrence household. From boyhood, Lawrence was very close to his mother and, following his mother’s encouragement, he studied at Nottingham University College, where he began writing short stories. In 1908, he moved to Croyden, just south of London, and began teaching. He never returned to his childhood home.

Lawrence began to publish poetry and, because he had developed tuberculosis, decided to quit teaching and write full time in 1911. That same year he published his first novel, The White Peacock, which was well received by critics. When he was twenty-seven years old, Lawrence eloped to Germany with Frieda von Richthofen Weekly, the wife of one of his college professors, and they were married in 1914. He and Frieda returned to England just before the beginning of World War I, but they endured continual harassment from the English government due to Lawrence’s objections to the war and Frieda’s German ancestry.

Lawrence’s next novel, The Rainbow, was judged obscene and was banned in England; many of his subsequent works incited similar controversy. This experience left Lawrence bitter and more convinced than ever that the forces of modern civilization were oppressive and unhealthy. After the war, the Lawrences lived an itinerant life in Germany, Austria, Italy, Sicily, England, France, Australia, and Mexico, before finally settling in Taos, New Mexico. All this travelling provided the settings for many of the stories and novels that Lawrence wrote in the 1920s and also inspired four books of travel sketches. In 1930, Lawrence entered a hospital in France in an attempt to cure the tuberculosis that had plagued him most of his life, but he died that same year. Although he was originally buried in Vence, France, his remains were later moved to Taos, New Mexico, and buried at Kiowa Ranch.

Although Lawrence’s most famous work is his novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover, many critics agree that his short stories, including “The Rocking-Horse Winner” (1926) are better than his novels. His thematic focus on relationships between men and women, the destruction of relationships by the desire for wealth, and his explorations of psychological motivation in human behavior earned him an international reputation as an important twentieth-century author.

Themes

In “The Rocking-Horse Winner,” a young boy, Paul, perceives that there is never enough money in his family, he sets out to find a way to get money through luck. He discovers that if he rides his rocking-horse fast enough, he will somehow “know” the name of the winning horse in the next race. He begins to make money and secretly funnel this money to his mother, but the desire for more money only grows more intense instead of going away. He finally rides his rocking-horse so furiously in order to discover the winner of the Derby that he falls into illness and dies, just as the winning horse earns his family an enormous fortune.

Responsibility

The obsession with wealth and material items is pitted against the responsibilities of parenting in “The Rocking-Horse Winner.” It is the responsibility of the parents to provide for the children in a family. It is also the responsibility of the parents to spend money wisely and budget carefully, so that the bills are paid and no one goes without food, clothing, or shelter. However, in this story, Lawrence turns this on its ear, making the parents complete failures at financial dealings and their son Paul incredibly gifted at making money, albeit by gambling.

The parents in the story drift from one thing to another, never really finding anything they can do to provide for the family. The mother “tried this thing and the other, but could not find anything successful.” The father, whose main talents are having expensive tastes and being handsome, “seemed as if he would never be able to do anything worth doing.” When Paul gives his mother 5,000 pounds from his winnings, rather than paying off debts and saving for the future, she spends all of it on material things, causing an even more urgent need for more money.

Generosity and Greed

The disparity between Paul’s generosity and his mother’s greed is another theme of “The Rocking-Horse Winner.” Paul generously offers all his winnings to the family, in order to relieve the family’s dire need for money. He seems to have no needs of his own and is motivated solely by the desire to help his mother. Paul’s unselfish generosity is contrasted starkly with the mother’s greed and selfishness. When the mother first receives the news from the lawyer that she has “inherited” 5,000 pounds from a long-lost relative which will be paid out to her in yearly increments of 1,000 pounds (a scheme dreamed up by Paul), she does not inform the family of their good fortune. Instead, she goes immediately to the lawyer and asks to receive the entire amount right away. Paul agrees, and the money is spent foolishly on more material things for the house. Instead of relieving the family’s need for money, Paul’s plan backfires and thus there is a need for even more money.

Paul and his mother are complete opposites. Paul, in his childish innocence, gives and gives to the family, without any desire for thanks and without any desire to keep any of the money for himself. He ultimately gives the most precious gift of all: his life. Hester, Paul’s mother, has no idea where all this money is coming from and does not seem to care. Hester has become so obsessed with wealth that her heart turns completely to stone; she cannot even feel sad when her son dies.

Oedipus Complex

Paul’s desire to earn money for the family can be said to be an unconscious desire to take his father’s place, a concept that psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud termed the “Oedipus complex.” This is a reference to the story from ancient Greece in which Oedipus, who was raised away from his parents, accidently kills his father and marries his mother. Freud suggested that all boys go through a stage where they want to take their father’s place. Paul’s desire to take care of the family’s needs is Oedipal. Since the main way of earning this money — the rocking horse — is also bound up in sexual imagery, it seems clear that Lawrence intentionally characterizes Paul this way.

Criticism

 “The Rocking-Horse Winner” belongs to the group of stories D. H. Lawrence wrote in the last years of his life. During this period, critics have noted, he abandoned the realism that characterizes his mid-career work, and turned toward a style of short story that more closely resembles the fable or folktale. In the words of Janice Hubbard Harris, in The Short Fiction ofD. H. Lawrence,“The Rocking-Horse Winner” and other stories of the period, represent the “desire of a fierce and dying man to prophesy, sum up, assess the world he is leaving rather than present or imitate it.” The story also presents several themes that held Lawrence’s attention throughout his career.

The style and tone of “The Rocking-Horse Winner” reveal immediately that this story comes from the world of fable and legend. The distant, solemn tone of the narrator: “There was a woman who was beautiful,” signals us that this is an old story. Quickly it becomes apparent that this is a quest narrative of some sort. The boy hero will try to win the love of the distant queen/mother. The object of the quest is to gain access to “the centre of her heart [that] was a hard place that could not feel love, no, not for anybody.” The hero rides off, captures the treasure, and returns home to present the riches to his love. But the opening of the story is also foreboding, because “undercutting this fairy tale, however, is another, which forms a grotesque shadow, a nightmare counter to the wish-fulfillment narrative,” in Harris’s words. The quest is hopeless, Harris points out, because the mother can never be satisfied and “every success brings a new and greater trial.”

Given the stylized characterization and the symbolic landscape that Lawrence creates in “The Rocking-Horse Winner,” we can read the meaning of the story on several levels. In the first place, Lawrence seems to be offering a broad satire on rising consumerism in English culture. In particular, this story criticizes those who equate love with money, luck with happiness. The mother with her insatiable desire for material possessions believes that money will make her happy despite the obvious fact that so far it has not. For Lawrence she represents the futility of the new consumer culture in which luck and lucre mean the same thing. Paul, who learns from his mother to associate love with money, represents the desperate search for values in a cash culture. The force of Lawrence’s satire is directed at a society that is dominated by a quest for cash, and at those who buy into the deadly equation of love equals money.

This fable about a boy’s doomed attempts to satisfy his mother’s desires and win her love also provides Lawrence the opportunity to work out one of the themes that dominate his entire body of work, the relationship between mothers and sons. Lawrence’s theory, which is the central concern of one of his most famous novels, Sons and Lovers, is that mothers mold their sons into men who are the opposites of their undesirable husbands. Since mothers know that they cannot change their husbands, they throw all their passion into creating desirable sons, whom, of course, they cannot possess. In “The Rocking-Horse Winner,” the husband’s inadequacy is explicit. The narrator describes him as “one who was always very handsome and expensive in his tastes, [and] seemed as if he never would be able to do anything worth doing.” Making her feelings very clear to her young son, the mother “bitterly” characterizes her husband as “very unlucky.” When she confides in her son that she is dissatisfied with her husband, the mother sets in motion the boys futile quest to please her, to be the man she wants him/her husband to be. After this, the father is hardly mentioned in the story, let alone seen. The mother’s desire to make and possess her son constitutes another dark counter-narrative to the story’s wish-fulfillment theme.

Both Paul’s desire to win his mother’s love as well as her desire to make him into the image of an ideal husband are doomed to futility. This kind of misdirected and frustrated sexuality is a persistent theme in Lawrence’s fiction and nonfiction writing, and the fable-like quality of “The Rocking-Horse Winner” gives Lawrence an opportunity to dramatize some of theories about sexuality on a symbolic level. The course of Lawrence’s career demonstrates the evolution of his theories on sexuality and gender. By the end of his life, when “The Rocking-Horse Winner” was written, Lawrence’s ideas had evolved into his theory of polarity, which is based on the premise that maleness and femaleness are absolute opposites and that men and women cannot have any attributes of the opposite sex. The theory of polarity, which is derived in part from Lawrence’s acquaintance with Freudian psychology, asserts that an individual achieves wholeness by balancing his or her energy against another individual’s. For Lawrence, this balance is achieved by a flow of energy, like an electric current, which is usually rendered as sexual desire in his fiction.

Critics have noted the connections between Lawrence’s published ideas about sexuality, particularly in the essay “Pornography and Obscenity,” and in “The Rocking-Horse Winner.” In “A Rocking-Horse: The Symbol, the Pattern, the Way to Live,” an influential article written in 1958, W. D. Snodgrass analyzed the psychosexual dimensions of the story through the lens of Lawrence’s published writings. Snodgrass summarizes Lawrence’s thesis as the argument that pornography is “art which contrives to make sex ugly . . . and so leads the observer away from sexual intercourse and toward masturbation.” Paul’s rocking horse riding, then, represents masturbation, “the child’s imitation of the sex act, for the riding which goes nowhere.” Lawrence’s point, however, is not that Paul’s “secret of secrets” kills him. What is unnatural from Lawrence’s point of view is that Paul and his mother are locked into a pattern of mutually frustrated desire. Neither one of them is directing their energy at an appropriate “polarity.” Significantly, however, they do not share equal responsibility for their situation. Lawrence, through his narrator, places all the blame on the mother and martyrs the boy in one final self-sacrificing ride.