The Rocking Horse Winner

Psychoanalytic literary criticism, a common lens brought to Lawrence’s work, holds that authors forge their stories from their own experience and neuroses, and “The Rocking Horse Winner” explores an unhealthy form of relationship that preoccupied Lawrence in his fiction all of his life: Paul’s mother expects to have her emotional needs met by her son. A contemporary term for such a dynamic is “emotional incest.” The author’s wife, Frieda Lawrence, said that within the first 20 minutes after meeting Lawrence, they were discussing Oedipus—and Lawrence explores emotional incest most explicitly in his autobiographical novel Sons and Lovers, where the mother is named Gertrude, like the Shakespeare character famous for her oedipal bond with her son Hamlet. Paul Morel, the novel’s protagonist, also shares his first name with the son in “The Rocking Horse Winner.”

The mother in this story is extremely unhappy with her husband’s failure to finance her expensive tastes. Whatever sexual intimacy might have conceived the couple’s three children, Lawrence implies that it died long ago. The narrator dismisses the husband—who is never named and is mentioned only briefly—just as his wife dismisses him for being “unlucky.”

The loveless marriage sets the stage for textbook emotional incest: The mother confides in the son about her feelings and desires, and the son rushes in to fulfill her needs. Paul will become the man, the lucky person. He will demonstrate to his mother that he is lucky. She thinks perhaps she might have once been lucky, but then she married an unlucky man and became unlucky, too. The boy will compensate for this, enmeshed in his mother’s discontent and consumed with the desire to perform where the father has failed.

This becomes his quest, and in this way the story follows the quest motif. Paul will be the knight in shining armor. He will rescue the maiden in distress from her agony and imprisonment in the house that whispers the need for more money. How will he do it? He will ride his valiant steed to success. “God” will speak through him and lead him.

The story’s opening evokes folklore, and the narrative unfolds as a fable or fairy tale might: A beautiful woman must be rescued. However, many fables are cautionary tales about foolishness, typically involving a person who is fortunate but fails to appreciate it and, in grasping for more, loses what fortune they had. Likewise, fables often begin with a lie and end in a death. These elements converge in “The Rocking Horse Winner”: This narcissistic woman’s lie—to herself and others—is that she has no luck. In her greed, she concocts a household lifestyle that involves feeling superior to the neighbors. The family are waited on by servants, enjoying the privilege to shower the children with expensive gifts. The woman’s figurative glass is half empty, and it can never be filled. Alas, because the boy is too attached for objectivity, he believes he can do the job. When his mother will benefit from £80,000 at his death, her brother, Uncle Oscar, says she is better off with the money than “a poor devil of a son” (Paragraph 242).

Early in the story, the boy is puzzled by the similarity in sound between luck and lucre, and he wonders if they are one and the same. He has it right, for the mother equates luck with money. This indirectly ties into the story’s underlying psychosexual dimension. The Western literary tradition includes many examples of death symbolizing orgasm, as both death and orgasm are climactic finishes—one a finish to life, the other to sexual stimulation. In Paul’s death, the boy achieves “luck,” which is money—which is death. In common street parlance, he gets “lucky.” The son rides a toy horse to prove his luck, to reach the peak of Dionysiac ecstasy that makes him “sure” of the winning horse. Riding the horse, an act of masturbation, substitutes for the sexual intercourse Paul can never have with his mother, an expression of the ultimate futility of his grandiose intentions.

Such death connotes fulfillment—material and sexual—and, accordingly, it is not the mother who dies. She cannot be satisfied. She has insatiable greed, as does her brother, Oscar. Lawrence was provoked by the greed of materialistic society, here evoking the social issue of materialism versus idealism. He seemed to hold the aristocracy in awe and enjoyed being in its company, but he was never truly comfortable with its representatives. Social class demarcation and the conflict created when marrying out of one’s class prevails in his novels. In this story, the mother seeks the social status of the class just beyond her reach as well as its material possessions. There will never be enough.