D.H. Lawrence - The Rocking-Horse Winner - Literature review Example

D.H. Lawrence: The Rocking-Horse Winner

The Rocking-Horse Winner, often cited to be atypical of Lawrence's stories, is at the least consistent with this particular social concern, and an enactment of one person killing another about it. The tale also utilizes elements of the supernatural, which Lawrence had turned to occasionally in earlier stories. The Rocking-Horse Winner is a story about the devastating effects that money can have on a family, and, further, that Lawrence's specific objections in the story are not to money abstractly conceived, but to money as it is understood and valued by capitalist culture.

The class nature of labor under capital is presented symbolically in the story in terms of the adult and non-adult worlds. That is, social reality is controlled by parents whose primary concern is to bring in money sufficient to "the social position which they (have) to keep up" (790). While they have a small income, and while "The father went in to town to some office" (790), they never are really seen to work actively and productively. Rather, they set a tone of need in their world that generates intense and pervasive anxiety, which then is passed down to their children, who interiorize the values and attitudes of the adult world and set about (as best they can) to satisfy the demands of that world.

Young Paul exemplifies vividly the sort of work that arises under capital. Simply put, he is a laborer for his mother, to whom he gives all of his money, only to find that the more he gives the more she needs. It is true, of course, that as a handicapper he invests money, betting on a profitable return on his investment, and that in this sense he is a sort of capitalist; indeed, it is his betting that is the literal sign of the economic relations controlling the world of the story. But at the same time his character is made to carry a much larger symbolic significance, for what he is investing, in real terms, is himself, selling his skills to generate wealth that he is not free to possess, but that is necessary to the maintenance of existing social relations.

Hester in The Rocking-Horse Winner is a woman "who started with all the advantages, yet she had no luck. She married for love, and the love turned to dust." Lawrence does not describe the process of disillusionment that has occurred in Hester's marriage, caused by the husband's failure to be an adequate bread-winner and supporter of the family. The father in The Rocking-Horse Winner is clearly a failure as provider and family-head, so much so that we are scarcely conscious of his existence. He fades into the background. And his failure is aggravated by the high social position the family tries to maintain. "There was never enough money," we are told. "The mother had a small income, and the father had a small income, but not nearly enough for the social position which they had to keep up."

When The Rocking-Horse Winner opens, the process of disaffection has already occurred, and the close love between husband and wife which would have generated the mystical energy necessary for the family's well-being has been transformed into an ugly passion, greed. Hester romanticizes the family greed into mystical love of money, as personified in the whispering house, which "came to be haunted by the unspoken phrase: There must be more money! There must be more money!" (793) And her mystical abstraction communicates itself insidiously to the children, making them insecure and self-conscious just as the love between her and her husband if it still existed would have made them feel wanted and safe.

Hester is closer to her children, especially Paul, than to her husband. Though she is incapable of love, she is out of a sense of duty at least solicitous for her children, for they are her link with life and vitality—with the mystical force of love that is nearly dead in her heart. The story can be read as the climax in the chronicle of the death of love in Hester, the death of her heart, and that as such it ought to be read primarily as an allegory of the death of the child in her, the death of innocence and love. At the beginning of the story we are told that "at the center of her heart was a hard little place that could not feel love, no, not for anyone." (796)

The motif of Hester's hardness is repeated in the story though she clings to her anxiety over Paul, but by the end of the story when Paul has lapsed into a coma she is "heart-frozen." Just as Paul's eyes are like "blue stones," so his mother's heart is stone-like. "His mother sat feeling her heart had gone, turned actually into a stone." With Paul's death the death of spirit in Hester is complete, for he was her last contact with the mystical springs of love that well up in all of us only if we love some other human being, as Lawrence said, with complete "nakedness of body and spirit." The mystifying of greed is finally an empty mysticism, which destroys the worshipper of money as it destroys Paul and as it destroys Hester.

As his mother touches the money he earns, she uses it not to satisfy family needs — it has little or no use value — but to extend her social position and social power, and the process of extension of course is never ending, requiring ever greater sums of money: "There were certain new furnishings, and Paul had a tutor. He was really going to Eton, his father's school, in the following autumn. There were flowers in the winter, and a blossoming of the luxury Paul's mother had been used to. And yet the voices in the house, behind the sprays of mimosa and almond-blossom, and from under the piles of iridescent cushions, simply trilled and screamed in a sort of ecstasy: 'There must be more money!' " (800). This passage clearly focuses the priority of money over commodity and the relentlessness with which the power associated with money controls even the most personal dimension of life.

The closeness between mother and son is carefully developed in the story. Their conversation and interaction make for the central human interest in the story, but the relationship is unfortunately blighted from the beginning by Hester's hardness of heart. She cares only for money and her terrible romanticism infects Paul in his solicitation for her. He is trapped in the web of mystified greed that she has woven and which she calls luck: "...he went about with a sort of stealth, seeking inwardly for luck. He wanted luck, he wanted it, he wanted it" Luck is money in the abstract, the mystical sense because luck will always bring money and, being divinely given, cannot (unlike money) be taken away. "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.'" (797)

The spurious mystical net is cast by the mother and the son is caught in its cords. From this point on they are one in their self-destructive mystical union. At the point when the boy is in the depths of his agony over the upcoming Derby, the union grows particularly strong and weighty— the mother's "heart curiously heavy because of him." In an interview he advises her not to be anxious about him: "I wouldn't worry, mother, if I were you." "'If you were me and I were you,' said his mother, 'I wonder what we should do.'" (796)

And it is so, as her response indicates: they are for the time one. The motif running throughout the story of the flaming, glaring, sometimes wild blue eyes of the boy reinforces the idea of their union. It is as if an alien spirit inhabited and drove him to seek for luck and the spirit is of course the spirit of his mother, the spirit of greed. She is inside of him, flashing out from behind "his big blue eyes blazing with a sort of madness." His madness is hers, and with his death she is left to a living death.

The fusion of souls between Paul and Hester has the effect of distributing Paul's consciousness far abroad from himself so that the boy does in a sense understand; but the secrets which their mystical oneness reveal to him are the secrets of winning money disclosed in a mystified greed, and not the rewarding mysteries of life that motherly love would have opened up. Paul, is urged on and on in his quest for luck, riding a rocking-horse which he urges on and on; yet Paul is urged not into life but death for he shares with his mother not the "reciprocal love" that would make them both sensitive to life but a ratified greed that finally consumes them both.

Paul is innocent, naive, and even loving of his mother. It is his mystical openness to her that leaves him vulnerable to the terrible forces she unleashes in her own household. To take him too realistically is faulty criticism for he is very much a symbol of the childish innocence that his mother has sadly let die in her. He accepts her worship of luck unconsciously:

"Well, anyhow," he said stoutly, "I'm a lucky person." "Why?" said his mother, with a sudden laugh. He stared at her. He didn't know why he had said it; and he pursues that nebulous entity under the almost religious guidance of Bassett, who "was serious as a church." (798)

In another context and under more admirable inspiration, the boy's death might even be seen as the supreme sacrifice, since he gives up his life to placate his mother's tormented spirit. Alas, she will not now have to worry about money: "'My God, Hester, you're eighty-odd thousand to the good, and a poor devil of a son to the bad." (799) Paul is finally pathetic rather than immoral, and pathetic too is the stony-hearted mother.

Relying upon the devices of allegory, Lawrence sets in place a definite set of religious interests that illustrate the role of Christianity under capitalism. The presence of Christianity in the story is set forth most readily, of course, in the depiction of the young Paul as a Christ figure; not only is he referred to repeatedly as "son," but he also possesses a seemingly magical power that comes from heaven. The symbolic dimension of Paul's characterization becomes even more apparent when it is placed in the context of the descriptions of Bassett and Uncle Oscar, who are presented as participants in the serious money-making scheme to which Paul is committed.

Not only is Bassett a permanent presence in the garden, storing there Paul's winnings; he is also described in religious terms and he speaks of Paul's betting in the most reverent voice: " 'Master Paul comes and asks me, so I can't do more than tell him, sir,' said Bassett, his face terribly serious, as if he were speaking of religious matters" (794). Or again when he explains to the doubting Oscar how Paul knows which horse will win, he says: "it's as if he had it from heaven, sir" (797). Uncle Oscar, in his turn, is presented as a sort of father figure, evidenced not only in the fact that he is the only male adult consistently present in the story, but more importantly in the way he expresses his relationship to Paul in paternal terms: "All right, son! We'll manage it without her knowing" (798). "I leave it to you, son" (799). "Let it alone, son! Don't you bother about it!" (800).

Moreover, it is firmly committed to a money ethic that becomes the basis for all human value and the key to all human exchange. As Paul tells Uncle Oscar at the moment the trinity emerges as an actual and discernible presence in the story," 'If you'd like to be a partner, uncle, with Bassett and me, we could be partners. Only, you'd have to promise, honor bright, uncle, not to let it go beyond us three'" (796). This value scheme explains clearly the secrecy that is seen everywhere in the story: in Paul's "secret within a secret" (801); in the decision of Paul, Bassett, and Oscar to withhold information from the mother; in the mother's response to the money that falls her way, as if from heaven; in the mother's secret work "in the studio of a friend" (799), and more.

Even while Lawrence carefully places Christianity at the center of the story as a religion of money, he subtly employs a rhetorical strategy that points up its impurity and ultimately its viciousness. This is seen in several minor touches, beginning with the description of Bassett. While he is "serious as a church" when talking about money, and spends much of his time cultivating the garden under his care, at the same time Bassett is not untouched by the world; in fact he is clearly scarred: "Bassett, the young gardener, who had been wounded in the left foot in the war and got his present job through Oscar Cresswell, whose batman he had been, was a perfect blade of the 'turf " (794). Likewise, despite Oscar's language and his confident paternal nature that would seem to suggest his innocence and integrity, he is not a real father; he only plays the role, assuming authority, for instance, to sign the agreement that allows Paul's mother to touch all of the money he wins.

The most telling example of the true nature of Lawrence's trinity, however, is of course Paul himself, who willingly sacrifices himself to save the world into which he was born. His death gives his family the financial independence that it has sought all along, but the creed that has made this independence possible, even while it appears holy and pure, is in fact emphatically devilish. As Uncle Oscar tells his sister after Paul's death: "My God, Hester, you're eighty-odd thousand to the good and a poor devil of a son to the bad. But, poor devil, he's best gone out of a life where he rides his rocking horse to find a winner" (804).

The story has to it an altogether unbelievable air, not that it lacks therefore conviction and meaning. The whispering house, the riding of a rocking-horse to find race winners, the motif of Paul's blazing, uncanny blue eyes—all give the story an eerie unreality that lifts it out of the moral realm into the sphere of mystical relationships where inexplicable forces shape our lives. Even Paul's death is finally mysterious and can only be explained as resulting from the destructive power of mystified greed in which his mother has enveloped him. Inasmuch as the boy's death marks the death of the last vestige of something vibrant, loving, and irrational in her life, it is also the death in Hester of mystical forces that sustain life while rendering it trying.

Lawrence does not want reader to see Paul as a kind of child-sacrifice; he scarcely wants us to see him in a moral light at all for the moral light is cast full upon Hester and by reflection upon the nearly invisible father and from them out upon our money-maddened, love-starved society. The style of much of Lawrence's fiction is abstruse, dense, and compact, but the style of The Rocking-Horse Winner is deceptively simple with the simplicity of a Biblical parable and with some of the same allegorical overtones.

Bibliogarphy

Lawrence, D. H. "The Rocking-Horse Winner." The Complete Short Stories of D. H. Lawrence. London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1955