The Rocking-Horse Winner

The Rocking-Horse Loser
Money, although important, is not the only thing that makes life worth living. However, for the characters in D. H. Lawrence’s short story “The Rocking-Horse Winner,” money appears to be the only thing that produces happiness. This ideology proves quite toxic, as seen in the characterization of Paul and his mother; it is through these two vessels that Lawrence accentuates the consequences of greed and materialism.
Paul’s death is the result of his mother’s selfishness which highlights the toxic aspect of his mother’s selfishness. His desire for luck arises from a conversation with his mother in which she laments that she married a “very unlucky man” (Perrine’s 287). Paul, believing that luck is “what causes [him] to
have money” (287), seeks a solution to the family’s financial crisis. His motives lie within understanding the mother’s true feelings towards her children. Although she appears to be a loving mother, she only adores her children when under someone else’s gaze. Everyone knows “she is such a good mother” (286) but Paul sees her love for what is it: a façade. Her heart holds no love for him or his sisters. Despite this, he feels a need to provide for his mother, as though the financial burden is his responsibility alone. This can be considered selfish; however, Paul is too innocent to truly be greedy. He makes Oscar promise, “honour bright” (290), to not tell his mother what he is doing for her. If Paul’s intentions were anything but pure, he would want his mother to be aware of what is happening. He takes his mother’s lack of affection as a personal insult and he hopes that changing the family’s situation will give him genuine affection from his mother. When he makes a considerable amount of money, he donates a portion of it to his mother. It produces the opposite effect, as it makes her face “expressionless” and her voice “cold and hard and absent” (294). She is too obsessed with the notion that money is happiness and her greed blossoms into something deadlier when she asks for the five thousand pounds instead of being content with the one thousand. This causes emotional turmoil for Paul because the whispers of “there must be more money” (294) evolve into “trills and screams” and his anxiety grows in tandem. He becomes “wild-eyed and strange, as if something were going to explode in him” (295). The pressure to win the Derby increases and Paul’s desire to win over his mother’s affection drives him to his death. His last words “I am lucky” (298) are ironic and sorrowful. He isn’t lucky because right before he died, he had won over eighty thousand pounds, equivalent today to approximately one million U.S. dollars. He isn’t lucky because he never won his mother’s true affection. He isn’t lucky because the hard work and effort he put into finding a winning horse had taken him to the grave too soon. Because he felt he was responsible for his mother’s indifference, he sought out the fabled luck, but because his mother’s greed was depthless, Paul pushed himself too hard.
Lawrence uses Hester, Paul’s mother, to convey the idea that materialism and greed are detrimental to all because neither can ever be satisfied.
Her introduction is full of contradictions: she is a woman who “started with all the advantages” but “had no luck” and “had bonny children yet she...could not love them” (285). These discrepancies are critical because first impressions assist the audience in comprehending the characters. The juxtapositions highlight her unhappiness with her current situation and set up the reason for her neglect. Because she is used to upholding a high social status, she cannot bear to live a life without the expensive tastes she is accustomed to, so she continues to maintain her lavish lifestyle, despite the house’s cry of “There must be more money!” (286). Her selfishness is also evident in the way she speaks about her husband. They are the “poor members of the family” because she married an unlucky man with an affinity for the same upscale lifestyle that they cannot afford. The paradox in being the underprivileged part of the family is that they are far from poor. Even before the assertion, the family felt “superior to anyone in the neighbourhood”. Money, in this story, correlates directly with personal worth and because they have more wealth, it enables them to feel that way. She associates money with luck and that is what causes her misery and suffering. She does not realize that hard work is essential to money-making and she would rather blame it on luck because if God is the only one who knows who is lucky and unlucky, then she could not possibly be at fault for not having enough money. Her hunger for more money is consistent through the entire short story, but is most prevalent when she receives a generous donation on her birthday. Instead of appreciating the gift, Hester becomes more withdrawn and has the audacity to ask for all of the money at once. She claims she is “in debt” (294), so Paul forwards her the entire sum. Instead
of paying off her debt, however, Hester spends it on appearances because she is too tangled up in what she believes she deserves: a more expensive lifestyle. She is selfish because she does not purchase anything worthwhile—with five thousand pounds she could surely afford a car so they would not have to rely on their aunts and uncles to take them places—and she is greedy because the initial amount was not enough. Her parental concern appears too late; only when her son is chasing death does “her tormented motherhood” (298) surface. The last quote from Hester’s brother, Paul’s uncle Oscar, serves as a grim reminder of the mother’s greed. According to him, Paul is “best gone out of a life where he rides his rocking-horse to find a winner” (298), meaning his death benefits him more than continually seeking something he’ll never achieve i.e. his mother’s love. Hester’s unattainable social status and inability to look beyond her own selfish desires function as the conflict of interest of Lawrence’s short story to reveal the atrocity of her actions.