"The Rocking-Horse Winner"

Once upon a time there was a story called The Rocking Horse Winner. In it was a boy, who was sweet and earnest and gifted, and his mother, who was beautiful and did not love her children. It is stated that “she married for love and love turned to dust.” D.H. Lawrence tells us this. He tells us the house whispered for more money. He tells us that the boy and his uncle and the gardener win at the horse races, which the boy predicts.

Even though this story holds incredible potential for psychological analysis (possibly including madness and hallucination, gambling addiction, greed, psychic insight and premonition, loneliness, post-partum depression, the struggle between the worlds of adult and child), these are all viewed and conveyed through an observing, not analyzing, lens. We are told that the house whispers, not that someone thinks or imagines that it does. We are told and see that Paul has some sort of gift, and we, along with Bassett and Uncle Oscar, accept this with minimal questioning. We are told that the mother, “when her children were present…always felt the centre of her heart go hard”, and although we are told that this troubled her and was because she felt that they were thrust upon her.

Although the narrator knows this, and is clearly inside his character’s minds, he does not make the connections for us to perhaps explain the cause of these feelings or the workings of these minds. He gives us all the clues we need to come to many different conclusions about backstory, motive, and meaning, but these conclusions would change upon repeated reading. Lawrence juxtaposes transparency with “secrets within secrets”. We know that Paul has sought and found luck through riding his rocking-horse. Yet the mother, who seemed destined to be the central character in the opening paragraphs, remains unnamed till the second to last sentence. This simultaneous closeness and distance helps create the story’s chilling atmosphere. You are still scared if someone unknown stands in your room or close behind you, even if you know that they are there, even if you can see exactly what they are doing. This is the same feeling. Plainly told that the house whispers and moans, we want to know WHY! and HOW! and REALLY?

This paratactic, only VERY occasionally hypotactic style, may help the story to be seen through Paul's eyes, as a child who understands more than he should, which is true for many children but even more for him. And yet he remains a child and what is told to him is understood as truth and fact, less cause and effect and more simple occurrences, no matter how strange.