Tuesday, September 29, 2009

Good luck, Lawrence!

In his short story, The Rocking-Horse Winner, D. H. Lawrence explores the universal theme of luck as well as the more culturally specific theme of class. Lawrence portrays an upper-class family living in financial anxiety, to the extent that their house seems to whisper to everyone, including the covertly observant children, "There must be more money!" The family obsessively maintains the appearance of their wealth and class, even as it plunges further into debt and despair. Lawrence conveys this pressing anxiety through a highly physical prose, employing onomatopoeia extensively, as well as images that relate to physical sensations.

It came whispering from the springs of the still-swaying rocking-horse, and even the horse, bending his wooden, champing head, heard it. (Lawrence, 276).

The alliteration of this sentence gives it an onomatopoeic quality. The preponderance of s-sounds emphasize the secretive, hushed communication of this anxiety, while the focus in the sentence on the "springs of the still-swaying rocking-horse" grounds the reader in the physical momentum of the toy. One can hear and feel the springing under the horse through the diction in this sentence. The use of the word champing is clever, also. Its most obvious meaning is that the horse is 'champing at the bit'; however, as this rocking-horse will be revealed to be the luck winning horse, it also seems to pun on champion, especially when used in reference to the head and not the mouth.

That the toys whisper the anxious refrain in such a personified manner adds an element of magical realism to the story that is consistent with the imaginative point of view of a child. While the story is not narrated by Paul, he is the main character, and the narrator seems to speak from his point of view or in his voice often. The dialogue in the story is quite striking, as it seems very sincere interactions between children and adults. The dialogue is also very revealing of the characters, in place of more descriptive characterization by the narrator.

'Hallo, you young jockey! Riding a winner?' said his uncle.
'Aren't you growing too big for a rocking-horse? You're not a very little boy any longer, you know,' said his mother. (278)
While Paul's uncle plays along with his nephew's game, his mother seeks to put an end to his imaginative play.
'Well, I got there!' he announced fiercely, his blue eyes still flaring, and his sturdy long legs straddling apart.
'Where did you get to?' asked his mother.
'Where I wanted to go,' he flared back at her.
'That's right, son!' said Uncle Oscar. 'Don't you stop till you get there. What's the horse's name?'
(278)

By contrast to the mother's indecisiveness, Uncle Oscar praises the boy for his certainty and command of the horse, encouraging him to keep on his journey until he 'gets there.' Throughout the story, Uncle Oscar is explicitly connected with luck, while the mother is not. This is one of the first instances, in which the dialogue between the three makes a stark comparison between the two adult influences in Paul's life. "And he would slash the horse on the neck with the little whip he had asked Uncle Oscar for. He knew the horse could take him to where there was luck, if only he forced it" (278). Unlike Paul's mother, Uncle Oscar forces his luck rather than waiting for it to fall into his hands.

If this story is so admired, I imagine there have been some interesting feminist critiques of it. Running parallel to the theme of luck is the theme of patriarchal control that is integral to the British system of class. The mother is immediately identified as being without love for her children; two motifs of the story are the mother's stony heart, contrasted with the vivid, firey blue eyes of her son. This becomes one motif when the boy becomes ill: "He neither slept nor regained consciousness, and his eyes were like blue stones. His mother sat, feeling her heart had gone, turned actually into a stone."(not sure of page) The mother's luck begins to go downhill after she marries; she loses love for her husband, and her husband fails to live up to both of their expectations as a provider, despite having "good prospects." Both parents fail to provide an income adequate to the lifestyle their appearance of superiority requires; but the mother fails especially, since she can never earn as much as her husband, nor can she love her children properly, although she maintains the appearance of motherly adoration. When asked if she is lucky, the mother replies, 'I can't be, if I married an ulucky husband.' 'But by yourself, aren't you?' 'I used to think I was, before I married. Now I think I am very unlucky indeed.' (277). The mother is unable to define herself outside of her husband, like her son who simply declares that he has been endowed with luck by God. While the mother doesn't know that her young son is providing for the family so that she can continue spending at excess, she must be humiliated by the fact that Uncle Oscar, one of the well-off family members, must meet with the family lawyer and sign off in order to allow her to withdraw the 5,000 pounds supplied by her son at once.

Ultimately the boy's luck is shallow and attached only to earning money through gambling on horse racing. The end to the story has an element of morality tale: luck is a gamble. Would the boy's luck have continued as he grew older? Eventually he would have completely outgrown the rocking-horse and would have been unable to use it to predict winning horses. It seems the boy's luck would not have outlasted his childhood, his ability to imagine and create his reality through belief. Perhaps that is what is meant by Uncle Oscar's puzzling pronouncement on the boy's luck at the end.

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