D H Lawrence--the Rocking Horse

Shorn of all rich description and psychological exposition, this short Lawrence classic explores the effect of "not enough money" on a family of middling means and higher expectations in early 20th century Britain. In taut description and spare dialogue, Lawrence introduces a family in which father and mother each earn less than their ambitions crave, where mother's heart towards her three children is cold, and where the oldest, Paul, picks up on the desperate atmosphere in the house and tries to make things better. He learns from his mother that what is needed is not wealth but luck. Wealth disappears but luck will never let you down. After asserting to his mother that he, indeed, has luck, Paul retreats to his room, rides his rocking horse with frenzy and, in many cases (when things are clear to him), is able to pick out winners to major horse races. Through this ability, shared only with the gardener and his Uncle Oscar, with whom Paul is in partnership in this horse-guessing venture, Paul amasses a considerable amount of money.

He decides to give 5,000 Pounds of his winnings, a handsome amount, to his mother on her birthday, to still the unspoken voices arising from the very timbers of the house that "There is not enough money." The money is to be paid out in five installments over five years, but his mother, pressing the agent who holds the money, actually is able to get the money all at once. Rather than stanching her fears and making the voices disappear, the money gets spent right away on debt repayment and househould luxuries. A frenzy replaces the insistence of the earlier voice. "There must be more money. More than ever! More than ever!" becomes the insistent sonorous plea. Because Paul's luck is intimately tied to his riding of his rocking horse until he achieves a sort of frenzied clarity regarding the winner of an upcoming race, he goes back to the horse with a determination to put his all into it. The big Derby is coming, and Paul works himself into such a frenzy that he dies of the exertion. Before his death, however, he speaks out the winner of the Derby--"Malabar!" At his death, he was able to win the astounding sum of 80,000 Pounds.

Interpretation

This engaging but disturbing story explores a number of highly charged themes in family and individual life. Is success, in monetary terms, a result of hard work or luck? Paul is fully convinced that it takes luck to succeed. Indeed, his mother characterizes his father as having no luck. Had he had luck, things would be different. Paul decides that he has luck, but to actuate or discover this luck, he has to work very hard--at riding the horse. Sometimes the winner of the race emerges clearly after these furious rides; other times things are more obscure. When he is clear in his mind, he is always correct, and he wins a sum depending on the odds and the amount advanced. Ultimately his "work" kills him. So, what will it be for us? How do we parse or tease out the connection of luck and work as it relates to our success? We hear all the time of stories of people who attribute their success to being at the right place at the right time; we hear all the time of extraordinarily talented people in impoverished lands who die with all their talents locked within their hearts; we read of stories where the flower of a generation is wiped out in a war. Lawrence, as usual, has put his finger on a hot-button issue for us.

An even more emotion-laden issue is the place of love in a family and the effect of its absence on the dynamics of family life. We don't learn all the reasons for the mother's cold-heartedness towards her children; it just seems as if the children came upon her rather unexpectedly, and coldness is the order of the day. Like a person's essential personality traits, we never really know whether they are "chosen" or "innate." But the effect of this deficit in love is an attempt to compensate by Paul. He sees the effect of lovelessness on the family. Or, alternatively said, he sees that love is replaced by a sort of craving, an unsatisfied desire to have more money and a manifest a higher living standard--a standard that fits one's social location. Paul, ever sensitive to the messages that the home emits, decides that if he can help make that money, he will "solve" the family's craving and calm the house's message to him and to all around.

This issue, I think, is the saddest of all and is an issue that can make a person cry a river of tears. It is when a child perceives that something is not fundamentally right with the family (in this case, no love and an unspoken desperation about money), and decides that he has to make things "right." But in his simplicity and youthfulness, he doesn't know the pathology of lovelessness or greed. He doesn't know that the satisfaction of the apparent need might have little or nothing to do with satisfying the essential need--the desire for love and acceptance in the family. He feels, in his childhood simplicity, that if he is able to earn money through luck (and he is lucky, as he tells his mother), he will be able to give her money, and this money will then quiet the voice of the whispering demons that infect the house. When these voices are stilled, he must think, other voices will prevail--the voices that want to promote happiness or love or some kind of family harmony and solidarity.

Precocious children can often perceive that something is deeply wrong in the family and that they want to give all their efforts, even their own lives, to try to "fix" it, to make it right. But because of their immaturity and simplicity, they don't perceive that issues that seem so related to them are fundamentally unrelated in the parents' minds and experience. He thinks, "If I earn money for the family, I will solve all our problems and we will have what my soul teaches me we must have and need--love." But he is utterly mistaken. And that is the tragedy of "The Rocking Horse Winner"--the child will give everything, even his life, in a vain attempt to patch up what he can in no way patch up. Only the mother or the parents, who perhaps are unable even to identify, much less deal with, their grief and feelings of inadequacy, can "solve" their problem. But little Paul feels like he has to take the weight of their world on his shoulders to solve it for them. And, he gives up his life in the process. And, now grief is compounded with the pre-existing greed, lovelessness and the sense of desperate shortness of money. One person's frenzied attempt to still the dervish-like voices of frenzy only exacerbates them. And, we have the death of the only son in the process.

Who wouldn't weep, or at least wonder deeply about life, after reading this story? Which adult wouldn't comb his/her own past to try to identify what role love, greed, lack, longing, craving played in defining his/her own family-of-origin dynamics. How has he/she contributed to those in his/her later family? It is almost as if the big issues of life are so big that they are impossible to bear, and we simply are victims of a tide that easily swamps the small bark that is our life. Perhaps that is why we pray, hoping that there is some force out there to save us from the overwhelming sense that we can't escape from the situation in which we find ourselves, and that we need help to rewrite our basic life DNA. Lawrence, however, gently reminds us that this really isn't possible.

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