The Rocking-Horse Winner

1284 Words3 Pages

In one of his last short stories, “The Rocking-Horse Winner”, D. H. Lawrence tells a story about the life of a young boy, Paul, who has the ability to name the winner of any horse race by simply riding on his toy rocking horse. The short story is reminiscent to that of a Fairy Tale. Lawrence's simple style, coupled with elements of the supernatural suggest as much. However, this fable is not your average fairy tale. The text utilizes two reoccurring motifs: the eyes and hardness of the heart, to indicate a symbolic connection between Paul and his mother. This connection is essential in developing the irony of the text. The irony of the ill-fated characters produces a deeply sardonic fairy tale on the consequences of the never ending race for material wealth.

The mother of the tale is a person who lives in what can be described as genteel poverty. She is a woman who is said to have “started with all the advantages” (750), but she threw away all of her prospects when she married her husband, who is apparently unlucky. However, she is unable to let that lifestyle go and their family is left with a constant shortage of money. The mother is said to have married for love, but in the time since then it has “turned to dust”. She also has three children, but she does not love them either. She knows that her heart has a “hard little place that could not feel love...” (Lawrence, 750). In order to cover up this flaw she pretends as though she loves her children so the other parents within her social circle believe that she is a great mother. This artificial love manifests itself in the form of expensive gifts, servants, and a nurse (or nanny). However, in the privacy of their own home she is cold and distant from her children, and they know...

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...ne out of a life where he rides his rocking horse to find a winner. (Lawrence, 760)

Uncle Oscar, in saying this, is actually reiterating the thought process that brought Hester to the brink of her own undoing. Telling her that Paul is “best gone” from a life where he had to try so hard to please his own mother is bringing the materialistic notion full circle. Sure, his mother gets the money that she has always wanted, but at what price? The text is a cruel twist on the phrase “Lucky in money, unlucky in love”; she got the money that she's always wanted (because of her son's luck), but only after forfeiting the life of her only son. But who's to say this new sum will satisfy her thirst for money? The final ambiguity of the passage sheds light on the destructive power of the ill-contrived belief that the possession of money and material wealth is a necessity of life.

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