The Rocking Horse Winner free essay sample

â€Å"The Rocking Horse Winner† In the short story, â€Å"The Rocking-Horse Winner,† D. H. Lawrence portrays the main character, Paul, as someone who adopts an abnormal behavioral quirk and takes it to the ultimate extreme. He is the young son of a poor family in England whose members equate luck with money and money with love, consequently Paul has a distorted perception of what is required to be considered successful and also how to find affection. Much of Paul’s perception and consequent behavior can be attributed to his mother, who is a self absorbed spendthrift. Her general coldness and lack of interest imparts in Paul a desperation to find a way to provide her with the money she so obviously desires. He exhibits a great mount of luck in naming winning horses, which he attributes to his superstitious behavior. This abnormal behavior so consumes Paul that it leads to the end of his life in a failed attempt to gain his mother’s love. We will write a custom essay sample on The Rocking Horse Winner or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page Paul’s determination to win, his hunger for his mother’s love and the abnormal, self-destructiveness behavior he exhibits are a direct result of his mother’s lack of emotion. Paul’s innocent determination to please his mother is what leads him down the path to his ultimate destruction. Paul’s mother first plants the seeds of this determination through her never-ending references to money, or lack thereof. Due to this repeated refrain, Paul imagines the house echoes his mother’s words by whispering: â€Å"There must be more money! † (Lawrence, page#). His mother attributes the family’s lack of money to their tendency to be unlucky – his father is unlucky at making money and she is unlucky for marrying him – rather than recognizing it is her own spendthrift ways which have put the family in their financial crisis. Paul asserts that he, however, is lucky because God, speaking to him through his rocking horse, has told him so. He attempts to prove this to his mother but feels he must keep his superstitious behavior of riding the rocking horse to determine horse race winners strictly confidential, fearing his mother will make him stop if she learns he is gambling. Only the boy’s uncle and the family gardener are aware that Paul is posting bets on horse races and he exhorts their help in setting up a fund for his mother’s disposal. This, he feels, will surely make her love him. Instead, she answers his question about her birthday present of unexpected money with a â€Å"voice cold and hard and absent† (Lawrence, page#). The money gets spent and Paul sees the fruits of his efforts throughout the house in the form of new furnishings and luxurious items. But still it is not enough. After Paul experiences the thrill of winning thousands of pounds by using the rocking horse as his guide, he then sets the impossible expectation for himself of keeping that luck flowing. He is unable to stop gambling, however, once started, and the thought of placing winning bets and continuing to make more money becomes the consuming factor in his life. His health begins to deteriorate and the voices in the house, rather than be appeased by the sudden availability of funds, increase in intensity, â€Å"like a chorus of frogs on a spring evening† (Lawrence, page#). Paul’s determination and anxiety at leaving the house, and his rocking horse, dictate his refusal to take the seaside holiday his mother has prescribed. He opts, instead, to mount his rocking horse one last time and stay upon its back until he receives the name of the winning horse in the all-important upcoming Derby race. It is apparent that Paul is not really determined to find, or keep, his luck, or to make more money, but instead is determined to do something which will make his mother exhibit love for him. Her attitude is such that she feels her children â€Å"had been thrust upon her and she could not love them† (Lawrence, page#). The existence of her children has created such apprehension that she strives to make up for this lack of love by being overly gentle with them and all the while her anxiety merely increases. Along with this anxiety regarding her emotionless relationship with her children is an additional concern – that of never having enough money to pay for all the things she wishes to buy. Because she dwells so often on her lack of financial resources, Paul’s mother has imbued in the boy the inclination to equate money with love. Consequently, Paul imagines that if only he can give his mother more money she will be able to demonstrate the love for him he so desperately craves. With enough money, Paul feels the house may finally stop it’s whispering, that the family’s creditors will be appeased, and that his mother will finally be happy. This, he imagines, would be the perfect birthday present for his mother. Paul sets a goal for himself of earning enough money from gambling to allow him to unequivocally buy his mother’s love. Unfortunately, Paul’s motivation becomes skewed and eventually forces him to go beyond merely making money for his mother; gambling becomes a compulsion, an obsession. His abnormal behavior becomes more than disturbing; in fact it develops into a self-destructive energy. It is no longer good enough to give his mother a lump sum of five thousand pounds for her birthday; he feels obligated, instead, to give her all that he has earned. His first inclination, to make the rest of his mother’s life worry-free by providing enough money that even she will be unable to spend it all in a short amount of time, soon begins to have additional, adverse effects. Paul’s plan backfires and â€Å"the voices in the house† suddenly go crazy â€Å"like a chorus of frogs on a spring evening† (Lawrence, page#). Paul’s luck seems to be running out and he goes into a frenzy when he finds himself unable to predict the next race’s winner. The boy feels he must push himself, and the rocking horse, harder and harder, faster and faster, until the name of the winning horse is revealed. In a frenzy now, Paul refuses to stop rocking the horse and he eventually does come up with a winning horse, Malabar, but it is his last opportunity to gamble. Paul falls sick and becomes unconscious. Before he dies, he tells his mother, â€Å"Mother, did I ever tell you? I am lucky! † (Lawrence, page#). Paul’s final hope, then, is that his mother will believe in his luck and show him some affection for proving this. The combination of Paul’s incredible determination, his hunger for his mother’s love and his resultant abnormal behavior are portrayed through third person narrative in D. H. Lawrence’s â€Å"The Rocking Horse Winner†. The story affords an eerie depiction of the effect greed, along with a lack of genuine emotion, can have on a family. It also touches on the compulsive behavior of addictive gamblers and how debilitating a removal from the reality of life can be, as said by Paul’s uncle, â€Å"†¦poor devil, he’s best gone out a life where he rides his rocking horse to find a winner† (Lawrence, page#). But all of these negative aspects can be attributed originally to the manner in which the mother raised her children – to worship money and to not expect love and affection. If Paul’s mother had not been so possessed by greed, the tragic consequence of her son’s gambling addiction and subsequent death may never have occurred. When greed for money is used to replace love, tragedy is the end result.