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"The Rocking-Horse Winner" is a short story by D. H. Lawrence. It was first published in July 1926 and subsequently appeared in the first volume of Lawrence's collected short stories.

Contents 1 Summary 1.1 Dramatizations 1.2 Literary Interpretation 1.3 Standard edition

[edit] Summary

The story describes a young middle-class Englishwoman who "had no luck". Married, with a young family, outwardly successful, she is haunted by inward failings. The family's social position and lifestyle exceed their income. Financial worries, though unspoken, permeate the household. The children, her son Paul and two younger sisters, hear a persistent whisper: "there must be more money!" When Paul asks why they are the "poor members of the family" his mother tells him that it is because his father is unlucky and that she must be unlucky too, to have married an unlucky husband.

To be lucky becomes Paul's only motivation in his small life. Though he has nearly outgrown his rocking-horse, he begins to ride it wildly, demanding that it take him "to where there is luck!" Paul's uncle, Oscar Cresswell, while visiting one day asks Paul the name of his horse. He reluctantly answers that the horse has no name, or rather that "he has different names. He was called Sansovino last week." The uncle is aware that Sansovino was the winner of the Ascot the previous week. He asks Paul's mother how Paul knows the name of a racehorse and she tells him that Bassett, the gardener, Cresswell's former batman, talks with him about racing.

Questioning Bassett and then Paul, Cresswell learns that they have been betting on horse races and that Paul has won three hundred pounds, starting with a ten shilling stake. Paul believes that he and Bassett are lucky and, since his uncle gave Paul the original ten shillings, he must be lucky too. Bassett confirms Paul's story and attributes their success to Paul's ability to "know" the winners of upcoming races. At first incredulous, Cresswell puts Paul's ability to the test. Paul picks the winners of several more races, some of them long shots, and Paul has accumulated a considerable sum (as have Bassett, and now Cresswell).

Paul confides to his uncle that he does this hoping to "stop the whispering". They arrange to give his mother a gift of five thousand pounds, but the gift only results in more lavish spending and increased whispering. Disappointed, Paul tries harder than ever to be lucky, and we learn that his secret is to ride his rocking-horse until he "knows". As the Derby (presumably the Epsom Derby) approaches, Paul is determined to learn the winner. To the household, Paul appears to be going crazy. His mother, worried, wants to take him to the sea-shore for a vacation, but he persuades her not to leave until after the Derby. Two days before the race, she hears him late at night and enters his room as he falls from the horse and screams "in a powerful, strange voice. 'It's Malabar!'"

Paul falls unconscious and remains ill through the day of the Derby. Informed by Cresswell, Bassett has placed Paul's bet on Malabar, at fourteen to one. When he is informed by Bassett that he now has eighty thousand pounds (in 1926 eighty thousand pounds was worth 2006's 3,200,000 pounds or USD $6,400,000.00), Paul says to his mother:

"I never told you, mother, that if I can ride my horse, and get there, then I'm absolutely sure – oh absolutely! Mother, did I ever tell you? I am lucky!"

"No, you never did," said his mother.

But the boy died in the night.

[edit] Dramatizations

The story has been dramatized on film four times: in 1950, 1983, 1997, and 2002.

[edit] Literary Interpretation

Author W. D. Snodgrass published a literary interpretation of the story in 1958 that drew Oedipus-like similarities between Paul's "luck" and sexual potency, replacing his father's inability to make money aka be "lucky".

The following is a summary of that 15 page interpretation, written in 1973 by Gorman Beauchamp at the University of Michigan:

D. H. Lawrence's story The Rocking-Horse Winner is easily and profitably susceptible to psycho-allegorical readings -- e.g., W. D. Snodgrass , "The Rocking-Horse: The Symbol, the Pattern, the Way of Life," Hudson Review, 1958 , XI, 191-200. The Oedipal conflict in it is pronounced, with the boy Paul wanting to supplant his sire by supplying his mother with the fruits of the "luck" the father lacks. The desiccating materialism of modern society has destroyed the ability of Paul's mother to feel love; in place of love she lusts after luck, by which she means the power to get money. Paul's identifying "luck" with "lucre," overtly accidental, is covertly quite correct, for the socio-psychological confusion of values has resulted in the equation: love = luck = lucre. To give his mother love Paul must have the lucre which comes of luck.

Luck is thus the equivalent of sexual potency, lucre of sperm. While such readings have been propounded before, no one has yet pointed out the clearly orgasmic effect that Paul's first gift of lucre has on his mother. Their house--an appropriately Freudian symbol--is through- out the voice of his mother's sublimated sexual craving: "There must be more money! There must be more money!" wails her alter ego. The voice of the house, then, is hers; and when Paul, as the result of his luck-potency, gives his mother five thousand pounds of the lucre, that voice "simply trilled and screamed in a sort of ecstasy: 'There must be more money! Oh-h-h; there must be more money. Oh, now, now-w! Now-w-w--there must be more money!--more than ever. More than ever!'"

The passage--and there is none other like it in the story--is a mimetic representation of a woman in the throes of sexual climax. But it is a climax which only titillates without fulfilling. Paul's mother's lust for lucre is insatiable; she is a fiscal, rather than a physical, nymphomaniac. Having thus only whetted her appetite for more, more, now-w-w!, Paul has to drive his luck harder than he--or it--can bear, and dies attempting to satisfy his mother's perverted craving.

--GORMAN BEAUCHAMP, University of Michigan

http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&se=gglsc&d=96250915

[edit] Standard edition

The Woman who Rode Away and Other Stories (1928) edited by Dieter Mehl and Christa Jansohn, Cambridge University Press, 1995,pp 230-243, ISBN 0-521-22270-2

Online version available here: http://www.geocities.com/short_stories_page/lawrencerockinghorse.html