The Rocking Horse

Within the story entitled The Rocking Horse Winner by D.H. Lawrence, the audience is divulged into the sordid family life of a adolescent boy named Paul, where there are three obvious morals told through the story’s style and symbolism. Also present within The Rocking Horse Winner are elements of supernaturalism and cold harsh reality.

The first distinct moral in The Rocking Horse Winner is that we must not let ourselves be succumbed to greed and the need for materialistic items over our responsibilities in life. The mother and father’s obsession with wealth and material items is at battle with their parenting responsibilities within The Rocking Horse Winner. The mother and father have replaced love with the constant, overwhelming desire for additional money. It is the responsibility of the parents to provide for the children in their family. Especially, where as young children are concerned, they should never feel the need to provide for their parents. The Rocking Horse Winner portrays the financial destruction of an upper class family struggling to maintain their high level status while regularly spending beyond their means. The mother and father have expensive tastes that can not be supported with their mere common jobs. In order to give their family the best and retain their illicit status, both parents embezzle all of their resources to

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purchase materialistic things. The Rocking Horse Winner depicts how greed and the need possessions and money drives a member of this upper class family to resort to drastic measures.

(Lawrence; The Rocking Horse Winner Study Guide)

The second obvious moral to The Rocking Horse Winner is that often one does not realize what they have and how they we feel about it until it is gone. Early on within the story we learned that Paul’s mother had attractive, bonny children. Yet, “when her children were present she always felt the center of heart go hard”. She knew “that there was a place in the center of her heart where she could not feel love for anybody, not even her children”. Later on in the story, the mother goes on to show her emotions and love when she has “seizures of uneasiness” about Paul and finds him fiercely riding his rocking horse into unconsciousness and finally plumaging to his death. When she is presented with losing her child, she realizes what she had, a little too late. (Lawrence p.980, 988)

The third apparent moral to The Rocking Horse Winner is even if you have good luck, eventually it will run out. Paul had begun to question what luck was, as he had heard about luck from his mother and Uncle Oscar. When questioned by Paul as to what luck was, his mother stated that luck is what causes you to have money. Paul’s mother believed that in order to be successful in the society in which they lived and to make money, they had to have luck. Young Paul seemed to be the first to understand her theory when he asked his mother “why don’t we keep a car of our own? Why do we

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always use Uncle’s, or else a taxi”? His mother blamed their financial status on his father’s luck or lack of luck. This created a realization to Paul that in order to be rich, you had to be lucky. The astonishing pressure to acquire money was so great that eventually the desperate, youthful son journeyed out to find luck in an attempt to please his unhappy, money hungry mother. Convinced that he could be lucky, Paul became driven by the haunting, unspoken phrase: The must be more money! This unspoken phrase was constant and consumed their family. It could be heard by the children at all times throughout their lavish home, even though the words were not actually being spoken. They even heard it at Christmas when their nursery was filled with expensive toys. Paul felt that if he could get lucky, he could stop the whispers that filled his home. The emphasis on luck was recurring throughout The Rocking Horse Winner. Paul and his family thought luck was a gift but in this case it actually ended up being a deadly curse. Paul did prove to his mother that you could find luck but what he did not realize then was that there would be a horrific price to pay for it. Paul’s method of luck eventually led to his downfall and death. Paul began to ride his rocking horse in his bedroom. He thought that if he rode long enough he would eventually find luck. When Paul would fiercely ride his horse, he would go into an almost catatonic state. Paul would ride his rocking horse until something or some greater force allowed him to know who the winner of the next horse race would be. Paul began betting on the horse races with his Uncle Oscar and Bassett, the gardener. Eventually, Paul’s luck began to slow