The Rocking Horse Winner

Rocking Horse Winner-Analysis

“For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. Some people, eager for money, have wandered from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs.” (1 Timothy 6:10) I am sure many people, whether you attend church or not, are familiar with this passage of scripture from the Bible. It states that the love of money will eventually lead to self destruction. I think that this is the central theme in “The Rocking Horse Winner” by D.H. Lawrence. The mother is so consumed with making money that she finds herself in a constant dissatisfaction with her life, unable to love her husband or her children. This grief over takes her children, specifically her son, Paul.

It wasn’t until the mother became so consumed with her constant quest for more money that she became incapable of loving her husband or her children. In the story, Lawrence stated that, “she married for love” (Lawrence 493) but I think that she fell in love with the lifestyle that her husband led because the husband was “always very handsome and expensive in his tastes” (Lawrence 493). He represented the image that she wanted to portray in society. Wealth is often associated with how handsome or beautiful you are and the material things that you surround yourself with. He, know doubt, lavished her with expensive gifts and empty promises before they were married.

The mother was incapable of loving anyone, because the text says; “Only she herself knew that at the center of her heart was a hard little place that could not feel love, no, not for anybody” (Lawrence 493). I think she thought her husband would be a good provider and would be able to give her the finer things in life. Once they were married, she realized that he was incapable of affording the type of lifestyle that she had become accustomed to, leading her to resent him.

I felt that the family would have been able to live a comfortable existence had the mother and her husband been able to be content with what they had and not try to live this big, lavish, unrealistic lifestyle. In a literary criticism of “The Rocking Horse Winner” written by Elisabeth Piedmont-Morton, she states, “The force of Lawrence’s satire is directed at a society that is dominated by a quest for cash, and at those who buy into the deadly equation of love equals money”(Morton 2) . The woman, in her constant search for more money, allowed her obsession to over rule he sense of reasoning. She always felt like she needed more, even though the story never stated that they lacked the necessities of life, “Although they lived in style, they felt always an anxiety in the house. There was never enough money…There was always the grinding sense of the shortage of money, though the style was always kept up” (Lawrence 493).

This feeling of anxiety spilled over into her children, because they began to feel as though there was never enough money, as well, hearing the same voices in the house that their mother did, “There must be more money! There must be more money!”(Lawrence 493). I believe that Paul was more affected by his mother’s obsession with money than the girls because the mother blamed the father as the reason