58 pages • 1 hour read
The Rocking Horse Winner
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Themes
The Unhealthy Relational Dynamic of Emotional Incest
Lawrence, knowledgeable about Freud, Oedipus, and incest, writes about it in his fiction experientially. Sons and Lovers was initially entitled Paul Morel after the novel’s protagonist, who shares his name with the son in “The Rocking Horse Winner.” As soon as there is a parent and child, there is the potential for love to be directed in an unhealthy way. Lawrence’s novel Women in Love portrays the author’s most famous model of “healthy” love: when a man and woman can achieve “star equilibrium” in a love relationship where the sexuality of the feminine and the masculine are in balance and meet in polar orbits around each other as a positive nexus. This requires two adults.
That cannot happen in “The Rocking Horse Winner.” The story features a young boy who moves into adolescence, graduating from the nursery to the dinner table and removing his rocking horse from the playroom he shares with his sisters to the confines of his bedroom. Too self-absorbed to be aware of her children (except to know she does not love them), the mother confides her dissatisfaction with her life to a small child. She long ago dismissed her husband as a love object. The child becomes a sounding board for her unhappiness.
To the child she is everything. With no possibility of a sexual connection with the mother, the child internalizes her desire for luck as the way to bring her satisfaction and pursues it with passion. The rocking horse, her Christmas gift to him, suggests an unconscious choice of a toy to ride as a masturbatory substitute for sexual intercourse.
For the boy to become the successful lover and take his father’s place, he must manifest luck, something the father failed to do. His mother gives him no credence when he asserts that he is “lucky.” He needs to compel her attention. Paul turns to horses—the rocking horse to ride and the horse races to win–as the ticket to achievement, to the climax. He must bring money.
Luck: Fortune and Providence
The mother not only very specifically defines luck but firmly situates it within a cosmic economy: “It’s what causes you to have money. If you’re lucky you have money. That’s why it’s better to be born lucky than rich. If you’re rich, you may lose your money. But if you’re lucky, you will always get more money” (Paragraph 18).
Luck, however, happens to you; it is beyond your control, something you either have or have not. Moreover, the mother tells her son that no one, except perhaps a tight-lipped God, knows why one person is lucky while another is not. Therefore, while her cosmic economy presents a fixed logic with luck as the cause for wealth, the equation nevertheless lacks a clear cause for luck itself; the closest thing to a cause is divine caprice beyond mortal understanding, beyond knowing—and therein begins her son’s obsession.
Paul’s obsession to satisfy the mother becomes his obsession with knowing what God knows. It is also an obsession with proving that he has the favor of this inscrutable providence, proving that he is a “lucky person.” He makes no distinction between having luck and achieving it:
He went off by himself, vaguely, in a childish way, seeking for the clue to ‘luck.’ Absorbed, taking no heed of other people, he went about with a sort of stealth, seeking inwardly for luck. He wanted luck, he wanted it, he wanted it (Paragraph 41).
While his mother refers to God almost as an unknown, expressionless variable in a materialistic equation, Paul makes the deity a relational source of revelation: “God told me” (Paragraph 26). An irony is that this God’s favor ultimately resembles a bargain with the devil—or perhaps some other strange, not wholly benevolent god—with Paul himself as the price and sacrifice. This relates to how the boy’s enterprise is as much about controlling divine favor as receiving it; Lawrence’s fiction often includes mythic and biblical allusion and symbolism, and the Old Testament issues an apropos warning, “What will happen to you for offering food and wine to the gods you call good luck and fate? Your luck will end” (Isaiah 65:11-12). In other words, if a man thinks he can control his fortune rather than accepting what God gives, he is doomed.
Lawrence may have had this in mind at the end when Uncle Oscar calls Paul a “poor devil”: “My God, Hester, you’re eighty-odd thousand to the good, and a poor devil of a son to the bad. But, poor devil, poor devil, he’s best gone out of a life where he rides his rocking-horse to find a winner” (Paragraph 242). God and the devil commingle in this final statement by Uncle Oscar. Paul speaks his last words to his mother: “Mother, did I ever tell you? I am lucky!” (Paragraph 239). He dies in the night, and his luck ends.
The Malignant Insatiability of Greed
“The Rocking Horse Winner,” as a kind of morality fable, compels the reader to recall that “love of money is the root of all evil,” a biblical statement so often distorted as “Money is the root of all evil.” This underlies the entire quest in the story, as the beautiful woman’s love of money has displaced her love of all else:
She married for love, and the love turned to dust. She had bonny children, yet she felt they had been thrust upon her, and she could not love them. […] Only she herself knew that at the centre of her heart was a hard little place that could not feel love, no, not for anybody (Paragraph 1).
What does she love? Money! Medieval texts carry depictions of the Seven Deadly Sins, foremost among them the sin of Avarice—Greed, his face distorted by discontent, a bag of belongings flung on his back. This woman can never be happy, can never be satisfied, can never have enough. No amount of money will satisfy her craving. It slips through her fingers and manifests as things that demand more things: When she requests for Paul’s gift of £1,000 a year to be given in a lump sum, the house is suddenly filled with new décor; Paul is headed to an expensive school in the autumn; and there are “flowers in the winter, and a blossoming of the luxury Paul’s mother had been used to” (Paragraph 180).
Nevertheless, the abundance only intensifies the household whispers: “There must be more money! Oh-h-h; there must be more money. Oh, now, now-w! Now-w-w-there must be more money!—more than ever! More than ever!” (Paragraph 180). The mother’s greed fuels Paul’s raison d’etre: Win more money, bring more money to place on the altar to ease the mother’s anxiety: “Although they lived in style, they felt always an anxiety in the house. There was never enough money” (Paragraph 3).
The final winning horse, Malabar, completes the tale, its name recalling the Latin malus (meaning evil or bad) and the English bar: the bar of gold gone bad, gold turned in upon itself. Surely Lawrence intends the curious progression of names: Daffodil paying 4 to 1, Lively Spark paying 10 to 1, and Malabar paying 14 to 1. The first two horses convey vitality, affirmation of life, and even a golden color. The final horse conveys doom. Paul’s query to Bassett sums it up: “Did you go for all you were worth, Bassett?” (Paragraph 237). Paul, the “poor devil,” went for all he was worth—only to be dismissed in death by the embodiments of greed, his mother and uncle.
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