Social Status, Most Will Recognize, Is Highly

Social status, most will recognize, is highly contingent upon any number of factors from lineage and occupation to ability and physical attractiveness. As such, it would appear that there is an unlimited social mobility potential for almost anybody. DH Lawrence's short story, "The Rocking Horse Winner," seeks to rebut that logic by constructing a family so damaged by its pursuit of social advancement as to destroy itself.

(Durawa, 2) Paul, the story's protagonist, lives constantly in the shadow of his mother's disapproval, a disposition derived from her dissatisfaction with her husband and her standard of living. Hester, embittered by a lifetime of falling behind her more affluent neighbors, is fixated on the notion of luck as it pertains to social status. Paul's tragic fate at the story's conclusion serves to dispel Hester's notion that the acquisition of financial excess is the proof and merit of luck.

DH Lawrence uses Paul's bizarre lust for his mother's approval, his obsession with prognostication and his inevitable demise to reject the assumption that luck and money and interdependent. Hester's disfavor for her husband's economic impotence was an attitude that she readily projected on her son. So it was imperative that, in order to earn his mother's love, Paul mould himself into the perfect specimen for good fortune. Only then would she recognize that he was not his father and, rather, an inherently lucky individual destined for the upper-strata.

Essentially, Lawrence creates a character, in Paul, who must perceive love and money as necessarily related priorities. This unfortunate state is that which sets Paul on his path to oblivion, as the mad pursuit of a limited commodity like money is incapable of quenching an eternally perpetuating hunger for love. That forces him to turn to his rocking horse, and its furious powers of hypnotic induction, for luck and love.

As he journey's from child to racing prophet, Paul contrives a sensation of approval from his uncanny ability to predict the outcome of any horse drag. (Gregory, 1) His success grants him the privilege of satiating his mother's thirst for social advancement, and he assumes that a gift of 5000 pounds should surely prove how lucky he is.

But when the money disappears in a quick torrent of extravagant and extraneous purchase, Paul finds that the favor he had earned was as fleeting as the money with which he had attained it.(Gregory, 2) This, of course, only intensifies his desire to pick horses with unfettered accuracy. With the approach of the Derby, Paul's rocking horse revelations consumed him and he spent the better portion of his waking time riding incessantly and to the detriment of his own mental and physical faculties.

The obsession with which Paul looks to achieve his mother's love, so clearly a self-denying and destructive bent, magnifies the artifice that luck is, in some way, a barometer for social gain. And the "brain-fever" to which Paul succumbs certainly seems to reinforce this, both for Paul and, more poignantly, Hester. Watching helplessly as her son drifts into death, now wealthy, Hester begins to understand what misfortune truly is.(Gregory, 3) More importantly, as she is forced to accept.