The Rocking-Horse Winner: Short Story

She wanted to rush to him at once, and know he was safe. She had bonny children, yet she felt they had been thrust upon her , and she could not love them. They looked at her coldly, as if they were finding fault with her. And hurriedly she felt she must cover up some fault in herself. In her preoccupation with material things, Hester neglects to provide Paul the love he needs to develop into a normal, mentally stable child.

Faulty Sense of Values. Hester makes stylish living the chief goal of her marriage.

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Consequently, her relationship with her husband and the care and nurture of her children—in particular, Paul—stagnate. Whenever money becomes available, she spends beyond her means. Though she and her husband rear their children in a "pleasant house" with servants and a nurse, they seem to regard them as objects for display, like the furnishings in the home.

Hester's spending and indebtedness create anxiety that haunts the house and personifies itself by repeatedly whispering the phrase: Lust for material objects, stylish living, and money so obsesses Paul's mother that she neglects Paul and his sisters. Paul then "inherits" her obsession. But he wants to win money for his mother, not for himself, in order to prove that he has the luck that his father lacks. Having luck and money will make him lovable to his mother, he apparently believes, and silence the house voices.

When he discovers that the five thousand pounds he sets aside for her is not enough to achieve his goals, he becomes obsessed with winning more. His mania ultimately kills him. Oscar Creswell acknowledges that Paul's wagering makes him nervous. But rather than take steps to stop Paul, he encourages him and asks for tips on winning horses. When Paul lies deathly ill muttering the name of his pick for the Derby, Oscar runs off "in spite of himself" and places a bet on the horse at fourteen to one odds.

Paul rides his rocking horse like a knight on a quest. He seeks a great prize, luck, that will enable him to win money wagering on horses. His winnings will free his mother from a great monster, indebtedness, that consumes all of her attention. Once free, she will be able to turn her attention to Paul and give him the greatest prize of all: In the first paragraph of the story, the narrator says Hester does not love her children. Nevertheless, outwardly she pretends to love them, and people say, "She is a good mother. She adores her children.

The climax occurs when Paul falls off his rocking horse after suffering a seizure that leads to his death. Paul picks the winning horse in the Epsom Derby but loses his life. The fortune he had amassed, eighty thousand pounds the equivalent of millions of dollars today , thus became his misfortune. Need help with Shakespeare? Click here for Study Guides on the Complete Works. Much of the communication in the story comes through the eyes.

For example, on the question of whether the mother loves her children, the narrator says in the first paragraph that "only she herself, and her children themselves, knew it was not so. They read it in each other's eyes. And each one saw in the eyes of the other two that they too had heard.

Shortly after the story begins, the narrator says Paul receives a rocking horse for Christmas. Generally, such a gift is appropriate only for a child between ages four and eight. Later, the narrator says Paul's mother enrolled him in Eton, one of the most prestigious public schools in England, for the autumn term known as the Michaelmas Half, which runs from September to the middle of December. Students who attend Eton range in age from thirteen to eighteen. Paul died sometime in June, about three months before his scheduled entrance to Eton.

The narrator indicates the month of Paul's death when he reveals that the boy won the Epsom Derby, which always takes place on the first Saturday in June. Thus, Paul is thirteen at the time of his death unless his birthday occurs between the first Saturday in June and the September date of his scheduled Eton entry. Knowing Paul's age is important, inasmuch as it can suggest the state of his mind at the end of the story.

If he is thirteen —or about to turn thirteen—when he suffers a seizure and falls off his rocking horse, one may speculate that he suffers from stunted maturity and perhaps a psychological disorder that alters his perception of reality. Since the publication of "The Rocking-Horse Winner" in , many writers have suggested that Paul's frantic rides on his rocking horse are manifestations of an Oedipus Complex. I n an book entitled Die Traumdeutung Interpretation of Dreams Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud , the founder of psychoanalysis, introduced this term to describe a psychological stage of development in which Freud maintained that a male child unconsciously desires sexual relations with his mother or a female child unconsciously desires sexual relations with her father.

In coining his term, Freud drew upon the story of Oedipus in Greek mythology. Here is the story, in brief: An oracle warns King Laius of Thebes that his wife, Jocasta, will bear a son who will one day kill him. After Jocasta gives birth to a boy, Laius acts to defeat the prophecy. First, he drives a spike through the child's feet, then takes him to Mount Cithaeron and orders a shepherd to kill him. But the shepherd, taking pity on the baby, spares him after tying him to a tree.

A peasant finds the baby and gives him to a childless couple—Polybus also Polybius , King of Corinth, and his wife, Periboea also Merope. They name the boy Oedipus meaning swelled foot and raise him to manhood. One day, when Oedipus visits the oracle at Delphi, the oracle tells Oedipus that a time will come when he slays his father and marries his mother. Horrified, Oedipus later strikes out from Corinth. He does not want to live anywhere near his beloved parents, Polybus and Periboea, lest a trick of fate cause him to be the instrument of their demise.

What he does not know, of course, is that Polybus and Periboea are not his real parents. On the road to Thebes, which leads away from Corinth, Oedipus encounters his real father Laius, whom he does not recognize, and several attendants. Laius, of course, does not recognize Oedipus either.

All of these details show Hester to be cold, unfeeling, wasteful, and shallow. He begins to ride his rocking horse furiously, even though he has outgrown it, because when he does so, he somehow is given the name of the horse that will win the next race. He makes an astounding amount of money this way with the help of the gardener Bassett who places his bets for him , and later with the help also of his Uncle Oscar.

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For the final big race, the Derby, he rides himself into a feverish delirium, but he is sure of the winner. His uncle places a large bet for him.

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Just as his uncle arrives to tell him of the fortune he has made, he dies from the fever. He seems only concerned with relieving the anxiety he perceives in the house caused by a lack of money. He is so innocent in his enthusiasm for the game he begins playing with Bassett that even when his uncle discovers that he has been gambling, he does not stop Paul from gambling further. No one anticipates that Paul will pay a huge price for playing this game.

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. 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.

He seems to have no needs of his own and is motivated solely by the desire to help his mother. 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. 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: Hester has become so obsessed with wealth that her heart turns completely to stone; she cannot even feel sad when her son dies.

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. The story begins with fable-like simplicity but ends with a serious message about wasted lives. The symbolism in this story is very sexually oriented.

However, this is disturbing because Paul is very young and he is participating in. The rocking horse can also represent the fact that the overwhelming desire for money is a road that leads to nowhere, since this is a rocking horse that does not actually travel anywhere. Lawrence was writing during the early part of the twentieth century, and he, like most writers of the day, was significantly influenced by World War I. After the war, many people began to; question the old ways of looking at the world. Lawrence joined in the questioning by making his characters less sure of themselves, less bound by the rules of polite society that dominated nineteeth-century fiction.

Lawrence became interested in the psychological motivations for why people do the things they do. Psychology as a science was in its infancy at this time. Lawrence was also convinced that the modern way of life, long hours at cruel jobs for little pay, was dehumanizing.

His characters were often failures in relationships who felt aliented in their misery. Furthermore, his writing was frequently embellished with themes about greed, materialism, and degrading work, which were issues of increasing concern to people at the time. Critics argue that this story is an example of Lawrence moving away from realism and encompassing a broader range of styles and subjects. The story has generated a large amount of scholarly debate and has been compared to a wide variety of other works, including classic myths, parables, and the writings of Charles Dickens , among others.

Some critics focus on the socioeconomic, religious, and sexual aspects of the story. Other critics have highlighted the Freudian aspects of the work or have interpreted it in terms of economic theories and spiritual allusions. Though the story continues to stimulate debate, most critics agree that the plot, description, dialogue, and symbolism of the story are presented with great skill. 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.

The distant, solemn tone of the narrator: Quickly it becomes apparent that this is a quest narrative of some sort. 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.

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Paul, who learns from his mother to associate love with money, represents the desperate search for values in a cash culture. Since mothers know that they cannot change their husbands, they throw all their passion into creating desirable sons, whom, of course, they cannot possess. After this, the father is hardly mentioned in the story, let alone seen. 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. Lawrence, through his narrator, places all the blame on the mother and martyrs the boy in one final self-sacrificing ride.

Lady Ottoline Morrell and Philip Heseltine were outraged by their appearance in Women in Love as Hermione and Halliday, and although Lawrence tried to assure his friend Mark Gertler that he was not the model for the rat-like Loerke in the same novel, it is generally agreed that he was. That Lawrence used these materials as he did is surprising because it is generally agreed that Lady Cynthia occupied a rather special place in his life. His biographer, Harry T. In other stories in which she is the model for the heroine, she is treated with tact and affection.

I think some of his character hints are damnably good. Not only is Lady Cynthia pleasantly presented, but most stories in which she was the model for the. In The Ladybird, Lady Daphne, unfulfilled by her adoring husband, reaches unity of being through her love affair with Count Dionys. Biographical materials will show the striking similarities between the Asquith family and the family in the story.

Lady Cynthia, like Carlotta and Hester, was visited by very bad luck indeed in her firstborn son. In his infancy he seemed normal, and his charm and sweet temper delighted everyone. The editor of the Diaries labels his condition autism, a disorder still not well understood. A few days later Lawrence wrote a long letter about John in which he argued that she and her husband lacked a living belief in anything, that the world in which she lived had stunted her soul, and she had not resisted.

Herbert Asquith must have known the same thing, in his soul. The child knows that. Your own soul is deficient, so it fights for the love of the child. Lady Cynthia describes Lawrence strolling about their living room after tea, and suddenly noticing a small Louis XV table. Free yourself at once, or before you know where you are, your furniture will be on top instead of under you. Another letter concerned with Herbert Asquith also prefigures the story, as Lawrence tries to persuade Lady Cynthia not to push her husband into the money-making trap!

The Asquiths were not rich, and lack of money was a constant concern. Lawrence, who was tortured by the money-hunger he saw everywhere, urged his friend to realize the connection between money-lust and war:. You do need it. But the fact that you would ask him to. The thing is painfully irrational. How can a man be so developed to be able to devote himself to making money, and at the same time keep himself in utter antagonism to the whole system of money.

In one written in , when the Lawrences were planning to leave England, he urged Lady Cynthia to consider leaving also. There was nowhere to go.

Perhaps now he is beaten. Perhaps now the true living is defeated in him. But it is not defeated in you. Give him to the future. And finally Lady Cynthia lost her capacity to love her son, although she struggled not to do so. It was a nightmare for her to be in the same room with him, and she was violently reproached by his governess for her apparent callousness. It is to be regretted that the editor of the Diaries felt it necessary to remove much of the material concerning John, since some of the omitted passages might have provided additional links with the story.

And it is a matter of common knowledge that a behavior trait among children afflicted with autism is a forward-backward rocking motion of their bodies. It is likely that John would have had a rocking horse, and that he would have used it long after he outgrew it, given his condition. But about these possible, even probable, clues we can only speculate.

A small but significant hint in the story itself suggests that Lawrence had the Asquiths in mind, particularly since the phrasing seems to be a minor slip of the pen. Earlier in the story we are told that Paul has an elder sister. It would seem that in the Asquiths and in their eldest son Lawrence found ample background material for his story.