Symbolism in the Rocking-Horse Winner

¶ … Poetry, and Drama because I do not have all the information I needed to do so. I also did not have the page annotations for the numbering of the book so I numbered the pages in the parenthetical citations with the number of the page in the story itself. You will need to change the page numbers if you wish them to correspond with the text you were supposed to use. Also your works cited page is annotated with the abstract for the articles so therefore you can cut and paste each entry into a card format. All the articles are available online at EBSCO Academic Search Elite, to access this if you need copies go to the reference desk at any library public or school and they will tell you how to use EBSCO if you don't already know how. Almost every library carries it as one of their free to cardholders internet search engines. It may even be available online through your university website library website and you can access it with your student ID number.

Thanks,

Melissa

The Symbolism of the Rocking-Horse in DH Lawrence's Rocking-Horse Winner

The idea of an inanimate object embodying the representation of another idea altogether was not a strange one in DH Lawrence's time. Not only is it accepted as a psychological reality by psychoanalysts of repute such as Freud and Jung, both embraced by the modernist literary movement because they offered an internal idea of the mind that so altered the ideas of psychology and made acceptable exploration that was previously much more shallow. In the grip of this change DH Lawrence used his raw style to educate the masses about what they are thinking. In the Rocking-Horse Winner Lawrence uses the horse to symbolize not only the lost innocence of childhood but also the lost innocence of a world gone mad with greed. "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." (Watkins 295)

There is some theory that DH Lawrence as well as many other prominent modernists might have been attempting a type of psychoanalysis up their characters in an attempt to find answers to many distressing questions.

D.H. Lawrence novelist emphasizes Lawrence's ability to remain detached form his material, claiming that most contemporary criticism misses the author's ability to be so detached. The main focus of the book is on Lawrence's "determination to be an accurate and honest psychologist. (Buckley 112)

Though DH Lawrence predates WWII, escaping through death in 1930, the extreme disillusion that was brought on by WWI sufficed to plunge not only writers, but seemingly the entire world into a post war depression.

The Great War (WWI) brought about fundamental changes in postwar British and European Society. Apart from the massive destruction of life and property, it had profound effects on attitudes, encouraging disillusionment, cynicism, and political, social, and moral disturbances. (Koh 189)

This antebellum backlash in combination with, often-deplorable labor conditions all over the industrialized world led to a level of hatred for money and all of its trappings previously unseen in the capitalist world. This working for a dollar that never seemed to amount to enough of them left so many people angry and frustrated that no rags to riches story could erase the disdain. DH Lawrence himself explains this general feeling poignantly in Twilight in Italy:

Life is now a matter of selling oneself to slave-work, building roads or labouring in quarries or mines or on the railways, purposeless, meaningless, real slave-work, each integer doing his [and/or her] mere labour, and all for no purpose, except to have money, and to get away from the old system. (. . .) It is as if the whole social form were breaking down, and the human element swarmed within the disintegration, like maggots in cheese. The roads, the railways are built, the mines and quarries are excavated, but the whole organism of life, the social organism, is slowly crumbling and caving in, in a kind of process of dry rot, most terrifying to see. (DH Lawrence, Twilight in Italy, 1997, Penguin Edition: 223/4). (Crump 1999)

The Rocking-Horse Winner is a rags to riches story with a twist. It encompasses the entire feeling of collective disillusion by explaining through the losses of one family just how much the empty striving for wealth can really cost. The meanings of the rocking horse evolve through the story. The object first emerges as a symbol of the type of monetary greed expressed by a family attempting to live beyond their means. "They heard it at Christmas, when the expensive and splendid toys filled the nursery. Behind the shining modern rocking-horse, behind the smart doll's house, a voice would start whispering: 'There must be more money! There must be more money!" (Lawrence 2)

Later the horse becomes the avenue for which young Paul attempts to find the luck that his mother feels she and his father are missing. Paul's mother attempts to explain to him one day why the house is always needing more money and unknowingly she plants a seed in her son that leads him to use his horse as a way to travel to the place where luck is found. "He would sit on his big rocking-horse, charging madly into space, with a frenzy that made the little girls [his sisters] peer at him uneasily…Now! He would silently command the snorting steed. 'Now, take me to where there is luck! Now take me!" (Lawrence 3-4)