Analysis Of D. Lawrence's The Rocking-Horse Winner

I. Introduction

A. Literature Review

The Rocking-Horse Winner has been widely read as a Lawrentian fable accounting the “，nemesis of the unlived life” (Martin 65) in a lower middle class family. Debates has been raged over whether this story is of objective impersonality under modernism standard. While Martin highlights the story’s self-consciousness by its technical perfection, Burroughs, leaning towards Leavis, Hough, Gordon and Tate, insisted RHW’s inefficiency for its lack of imagination and failure to present life in a naturalistic objective standard, and indicated that its didactic purpose relying on the boy’s death is an outdated Victorian pathos (Burroughs 323). However, Junkins nosed out Lawrence’s deliberate use of fancy and myth

Firstly, Snodgrass called attention that the family takes money as its nexus of affection (Snodgrass 117), Secondly, he mentioned father’s withdrawal in domestic matter leaves chances for Paul to take his Oedipal complex into practice and compel her mother’s attention (118). Succeeding Snodgrass’ psychological interpretation, Marks explored the uncanny in the story in details from a Freudian perspective, and substantiates Lawrence’s idea that we should “destroy our false, inorganic connections, especially those related to money, and reestablish the living organic connection with the cosmos, the sun and the earth, with mankind and nation and family” (Marks 383). Whereas Snodgrass deals the money in the story from a moral point of view, Charles Koban thought that a proprer “’religious’ view of the story must […] consider the sublimation of human feelings in the form of money as a mystical force in family life” (Koban 391). In his essay, Koban implies the mother’s ambition for social position and material goods induces to her son’s worship of money and finally his death. He particularly emphasized that we should not castigate Paul under a moral light with his potential contract with the demon, but we should stress on the allegorical meanings

There are characteristic analysis of the mother image as well as studies on the son’s psyche. Family relationship is attended to from the aspects of alienation and eco-criticism. Romantic expressionism is also put into exercise in analyzing its stylistics.

On the whole, the preceding analysis of “The Rocking-Horse Winner” is quite partial and segmented, critics didn’t integrate the modern myth in an encompassed bird-view, where Lawrence deliberately juxtaposes elements of feminism, mammon and Oedipus complex, which bears potential connection in Lawrence’s