58 pages • 1 hour read
The Rocking Horse Winner
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Background
Ideological Context: The Apollonian/Dionysian Dichotomy
Friedrich Nietzsche published The Birth of Tragedy in 1872, based upon his interpretation of the works of the ancient Greek dramatists Sophocles, Aeschylus, and Euripides. He articulated and philosophically developed the Apollonian/Dionysian dichotomy, named after Apollo, god of the sun, dreams, and reason; and Dionysius, god of ecstasy, “madness,” and intoxication. This dichotomy, which Lawrence knew from his familiarity with Nietzsche, provides a contextual framework for “The Rocking Horse Winner.” The protagonist attempts to bring order to the house of “madness,” haunted by its persistent whisper, “There must be more money!” To achieve his dream, he enters a state of frenzy, “madly surging on the rocking horse” (Paragraph 221). The masturbatory Dionysian sexual climax brings him to a moment of insight, an inner knowing that manifests as the name of a winning horse.
The Apollonian exists in a home where there is order, meaning, and value. The haunted home that engulfs Paul exudes ostentation and excess and clamors for more, creating chaos, fear, and anxiety. If Paul were able to individuate from the mother, he would recognize this and deal with it in a reasoned manner. Locked in his mother’s obsessive desire, he acts out his displaced passion for intimacy with her on the toy rocking horse, using it to produce a “winner” to gain her attention. Only money gains her attention. Paul, puny and pathetic and childlike, with his Dionysian, erotic trances, lacks the stuff of a tragic hero, dying as a “poor devil of a son” (Paragraph 242).
Social Context: Class and Wealth
Lawrence crosses social classes with Bassett, the only central character detached from obsession. Bassett is trustworthy, always deferential to the “master,” and knows his place as a servant in the house. Lawrence intends to demand the reader’s respect for Bassett, whom the mother threatens to send away: “My family has been a gambling family, and you won’t know till you grow up how much damage it has done” (Paragraph 188). The irony is that the “damage” has been done already, and she has created it with her excessive greed for everything material.
Lawrence despised the materialist culture. Both parents in “The Rocking Horse Winner” have “expensive” tastes, but the father disappears early and the material possessions driving the mother move the plot of the story. Money measures success. The mother’s “odd knack of sketching furs and dress materials” does not bring success, because a young woman artist makes more money (Paragraph 169). This professional sojourn leaves her “again dissatisfied,” with insatiable desire for what money buys: “the expensive and splendid toys” that fill the nursery (Paragraph 5), furnishings, tutors, entrance to Eton, off-season flowers, “iridescent cushions,” and most important of all, the mother’s attention, the only kind of “love” she can bestow on her oldest child.
Defined as luck, which “will always get more money,” Paul “wanted luck, he wanted it, he wanted it” (Paragraph 41). The mother’s brother, Uncle Oscar, craves money. He takes an interest in his nephew only because of the winners he so strangely identifies, entering partnership with the “devil of a son” (Paragraph 242); this is essentially a wager with the satanic for the winnings from races, ill-begotten wealth.
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By D. H. Lawrence
