Rocking Horse Winner Essay, Research Paper

This popular story was written in February of 1926 as a favor to Cynthia Asquith for a collection of ghost stories she was preparing. It’s believed that the model for Paul was her autistic son, John, combined with Lawrence’s own troubled past.

A remarkable film adaptation was produced in 1949, written and directed by Anthony Pelissier and starring young John Howard Davies (of Oliver Twist fame) and Valerie Hobson. It’s black and white, making good use of light and shadow in a “film noir” style that also calls to mind the best of the Twilight Zone. The toy-horse in the movie would give anyone shivers with its wild eyes, flared nostrils, and hideous toothy smile like a donkey braying and laughing. The film adds on a final scene where the rocking-horse is taken out of the house and burned. I found that a fitting end and a possible bowing to the story’s creator, Lawrence the Phoenix. And like the returning mythical bird, the memory of Paul’s pitiful death will continue to haunt the characters (and us, as well).

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Winner or Loser?

In “The Rocking-Horse Winner,” who won and who lost? Who was lucky or unlucky? What does it mean to be “lucky”? What does it mean to be “successful”? How does money corrupt those terms? There’s a lot going on in this story of a boy competing for his mother’s love and approval–some see the story as sexual or Oedipal, others see it in a supernatural light. Either way it’s an ironic and materialistic tragedy. Lawrence once wrote in a letter (to A.D. McLeod dated Oct. 6, 1912):

Tragedy ought really to be a great kick at misery.

(p. 557/Portable DHL/Penguin, 1977)

I see Paul as kicking his wooden horse into a galloping frenzy to escape the mad whispering of the house: “There must be more money! There must be more money!” And it happens to be a “modern” toy with manufactured metal springs, a product of the industrial age given at the most materialistic of holidays–Christmas. Beyond that, the symbol of the horse has traditionally been as a transport for the soul and often regarded as an omen of death. According to Barbara Walker, this soul’s journey could be “a trip to the moon, or to the Other-world, or to the land of the dead where the visitor might learn the great secrets of life, death, and magic, and return to earth with godlike wisdom.” (p. 378/Woman’s Dictionary of Symbols & Sacred Objects/Harper & Row, 1988) Or in Paul’s case, he rides round an imaginary race track and returns from his trance-like state with the winner’s name. The wisdom, however, resides in the sobering moral of the tale.

Many of Lawrence’s “money” poems can be profitably compared with this story. (ha, ha) The two I’d recommend are “Wages” and “A Played-Out Game.” The poem “Wages” begins:

The wages of work is cash.

The wages of cash is want more cash.

The wages of want more cash is vicious competition.

The wages of vicious competition is–the world we live in.

The work-cash-want circle is the viciousest circle

that ever turned men into fiends.

(p. 194/DHL: Selected Poetry/Penguin, 1986)

The rest of the poem goes on to describe “earning a wage” as a “prison occupation.” Notice how the “vicious circle” and repetition within the first stanza is much like a rocking horse going back and forth, back and forth–and getting nowhere fast. Where do you end up when you spend as quickly as you earn–in a sort of cage or prison–trapped.

Lawrence’s poem “A Played-Out Game” begins:

Success is a played-out game, success, success!

because what have you got when you’ve got it?

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Our poor old daddies got on,

and then could never get off again.

(p. 518/Complete Poems/Penguin, 1993)

“Success” in this poem is like Paul “getting on” the rocking horse and “unable to get off” till he dies from nervous exhaustion. (Do you think Lawrence intended the sexual pun?) Does the addiction to money have an emasculating and dehumanizing effect? Doesn’t Paul’s mother seem quite cold?

she felt she must cover up some fault in herself. Yet what it was that she must cover up she never knew. Nevertheless, when her children were present, she always felt the centre of her heart go hard. This troubled her, and in her manner she was all the more gentle and anxious for her children, as if she loved them very much. Only she herself knew that at the centre of her heart was a hard little place that could not feel love, no, not for anybody.

(p. 147/Portable DHL/Penguin, 1977)

Success for the mother is acquiring more wealth to hide her inadequacies. This time the frustrating and futile game was indeed “played-out” to the finish! Paul’s death seems like a silly and pointless way to die, and yet the “poor old daddies” are all playing the same childish game!

How wonderfully Lawrence captures the debilitating aura of stress that only grows stronger in our modern society. Now-a-days the “Mommys” have also leaped upon the rocking-horse, riding and commuting, to get ahead of the rising day-care costs for their children and help support the bigger house and newer car. And still the children suffer as the whispering money chant becomes a national roar. Lawrence’s poignant last line haunts one: “But, poor devil, poor devil, he’s best gone out of a life where he rides his rocking-horse to find a winner.”

(p. 166/Portable DHL/Penguin, 1977)