Rocking Horse Winner

Affects of the Materialistic Pursuit

All the major characters in D. H. Lawrence's, "The Rocking Horse Winner" revolve around the pursuit of materialistic abundance. In the story a boy, Paul, seems possessed to ride a rocking horse to supernaturally find a winning horse to an actual horse race, until he eventually dies because of it. The definition of materialistic in the American Heritage Dictionary, "The theory or attitude that physical well-being and worldly possessions constitute the greatest good and highest value in life" , can be useful to more clearly explain what is affecting the characters, especially Paul, in the story and to point out the irony of his pursuit.

With Paul, the pursuit of money is an obsession. He feverishly wants to show his mother that he can get what she wants- money. When persistently questioned by Paul about her luckiness, Paul's mother gives up and says "Perhaps I'm not really [lucky]", but Paul "saw by the lines of her mouth, that she was only trying to hide something from him." - her belief in her ability to make money. Paul said, "I'm a lucky person", but "The boy saw that she did not believe him" and "this angered him somewhat, and made him want to compel her at

The whispers that are heard coming from the house are identical to that of the mother's desires. Hester's tastes were "just as expensive" as the father's. "And so the house came to be haunted by the unspoken phrase: There must be more money!" The house is a metaphor for the underlying desires of the parents. "Paul's mother had her birthday coming up in November. The house had been "whispering" worse than ever lately." The house needed more money because of the demands of the mother's materialistic pursuits. "There was a grinding sense of the shortage of money, though the style was kept up." "They felt always an anxiety in the house." Paul's mother's desperate attempt to keep up the status of the house was causing stress in the house.

tention." This conversation with Paul and his mother is the impetus for Paul's compulsive horse riding and obsession with money and winning. He becomes "absorbed" and starts "seeking inwardly for luck." "When he had ridden to the end of his mad little journey" , he silently commanded the rocking horse to- "take me to where there is luck! Now take me!" The connotations of phrases like "mad little ride" and "furious ride" that Lawrence uses, show how intensely affected and conflicted Paul was about his search for luck- which he knew from his mother was "what causes you to have money." The materialistic pursuit was Paul's passion, "his intense hours were spent with Basset" whom "he always talked to about the horse races." Paul pushed himself so much for a money winner that "he became wild-eyed and strange, as if something were going to explode in him." This explosion was caused by the "anxiety in the house" and the stress to keep the "style" up in the house. At the end of the story, Paul's materialistic obsession does explode in him while he's on his rocking horse one night finding a winner, when he falls off the horse and remains unconscious for three days until he dies. His crazy pursuit to show his mom that he was lucky, or born to have money, was obvious with his last words, "Do you think I'm lucky, mother? I knew Malabar, didn't I? Over eighty thousand pounds! I call that lucky, don't you, mother?" Paul