58 pages • 1 hour read
The Rocking Horse Winner
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Symbols & Motifs
The Rocking Horse
The shining rocking horse, the expensive Christmas toy, becomes Paul’s source for the “luck” he must prove to his mother to get her attention. It reflects the tension of the Apollonian/Dionysian dichotomy. Jonathan Swift, after all, chose the horse as a symbol of reason in Gulliver’s Travels—the Houyhnhnm, the idyllic being who acts justly, converses and thinks clearly, the savior of Gulliver from the despicable, sensual Yahoos.
This rocking horse, not at all a Houyhnhnm, champs its head, charges wildly, and takes the whip to be beaten to a frenzy. It is the vehicle to ride for the Dionysian ecstasy. Paul uses the horse, known for its sexual prowess, to imitate the sex act through masturbation. The mother hears this when she stands outside his bedroom door, the “soundless noise, yet rushing and powerful. Something huge in violent, hushed motion” (Paragraph 217). She knows what it is, but she can’t “place” it: “And on and on it went, like a madness” (Paragraph 218), the sound of sex she long ago stopped sharing and hearing.
The reader is reminded this is a quest. Paul, to save his fair maiden, dies in bringing her the prize of “eighty-odd thousand” pounds. To do it, he rides the chosen animal, symbolically powerful, courageous, noble, and free. This horse, however, is merely a toy—a fact that ironically mocks the futility of trying to satisfy an insatiable mother.
The House
The house in “The Rocking Horse Winner” symbolizes the manifestation of greed. Haunted by the whispers for money, filled with fear and anxiety, it reflects the inner state of the unappeasable matriarch. The children hear the whisper. The toys hear the whisper. It pervades the house and defines their experience. No person or thing escapes it.
When the mother commandeers Paul’s entire £5,000 in a single lot, she spends most of it on the house—the furniture, the flowers, the cushions—and the whispers become overt voices that “went mad, like a chorus of frogs on a spring evening,” screaming not only “more money” but also “more than ever!” (Paragraph 180). The voices terrify Paul and distract him from his studies with the tutor. He must “know” the name of the winner to stop the voices.
The mother finally acknowledges her son when he becomes sick and frail. Her prescribed antidote, to remove him from the house, never gets administered. He must stay there until the Derby, for the house harbors his “secret within a secret” the rocking horse in his room (Paragraph 193). He rides the horse to the fateful climax, the knowledge of Malabar, and collapses. Paul dies there, in the house of greed, the greedy uncle saying the last word to the greedy mother, “eighty-odd thousand to the good, and a poor devil of a son to the bad” (Paragraph 242).
Eyes
The tell-tale eyes in “The Rocking Horse Winner” speak for the children when the house whispers: “They would look into each other’s eyes, to see if they had all heard. And each one saw in the eyes of the other two that they too had heard” (Paragraph 5). The protagonist, who bears the same name as Paul Morel in Sons and Lovers (as observed with the theme of The Unhealthy Relational Dynamic of Emotional Incest) has blue eyes. Lady Cynthia Asquith comments on a photo taken of Lawrence by W. G. Parker on June 26, 1913: “With his broad, jutting brow, and clear, sensitive, extremely blue eyes—very wide apart—he looked half fawn, half prophet, and very young.”
The reader knows Paul’s inner state through his eyes. When Paul seeks his mother’s attention, asserting he has luck, he looks at her with “unsure eyes.” When he rides the horse to find luck, “his eyes had a strange glare in them” (Paragraph 41). When he confides in his “lucky” Uncle Oscar about his partnership with Bassett because he gave him his first winning 10-shilling note, he gazes at him “from those big, hot blue eyes” (Paragraph 86). During his first trip to the races when Daffodil wins, “his eyes were blue fire,” and he accepts “with eyes blazing” the four £5 notes his uncle brings him (Paragraph 105).
When Paul tells his uncle that he started betting to bring luck to his mother, he watches him “with big blue eyes, that had an uncanny cold fire in them” (Paragraph 158). Failing to “know” the winner for the Grand National and the Lincoln, he “became wild-eyed and strange, as if something were going to explode in him” (Paragraph 181). Then, he shares his obsession with his uncle about knowing for the Derby, “his big blue eyes blazing with a sort of madness” (Paragraph 183). Although he is frail, his mother agrees to let him stay in the house until after the Derby, but he hardly hears her, “and his eyes were really uncanny” (Paragraph 207). When his “madness” peaks, “madly surging on the rocking horse” and he knows the winner (Paragraph 221), Malabar, “his eyes blazed at her for one strange and senseless second” before he collapses unconscious, his eyes “like blue stones” (Paragraphs 224, 233).
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By D. H. Lawrence
