What connection do Paul and the author of "The Rocking-Horse Winner" have? What in the story can be used to answer the above question?

Indeed, there do seem to be several connections between D.H.Lawrence's life and his fable-like story, "The Rocking Horse Winner."

For both D.H. Lawrence and his character Paul there is a desire for the approval and love of their mothers. There is also an awareness of financial deprivation in the families. In both the author and his character, there is a certain absence of a father, although in differing ways. In Lawrence's story there is a...

Indeed, there do seem to be several connections between D.H.Lawrence's life and his fable-like story, "The Rocking Horse Winner."

For both D.H. Lawrence and his character Paul there is a desire for the approval and love of their mothers. There is also an awareness of financial deprivation in the families. In both the author and his character, there is a certain absence of a father, although in differing ways. In Lawrence's story there is a profound message about wasted lives, a message that seems to emanate from his familial experiences. Furthermore, Paul's death is a cautionary comment on what Lawrence felt was the "misdirection of the life force" caused by social constraints of his time.

Financial deprivation

• During D. H. Lawrence's childhood, his father worked as a coal miner, and his mother, who was from a middle-class family that had fallen into financial ruin, supplemented the family income by working in the lace-making industry. 


• In "The Rocking Horse Winner," there is "an anxiety in the house. There was never enough money."

Absence of paternal influence

• It was Lawrence's mother who exerted the most influence upon him, inspiring in him a love of books. Like Paul, he had a desire to please his mother.


• In the short story, the father goes "to town to some office," but is, for the most part, absent from the narrative.

Desire for the mother's approval

• While Lawrence's mother dearly loved him, he still desired her approval and was greatly influenced by her love of books. However, when he was twenty-five, his mother died and Lawrence was devastated.


• Paul becomes obsessed with winning money so that his mother will be satisfied and happy. When she tells him that she has married an unlucky husband, Paul strives to be lucky. He tells his Uncle Oscar why he rides his rocking horse to win,

"I started it for mother. She said she had no luck because father is unlucky, so I thought if I were lucky, it [the house]might stop whispering."

Message about wasted lives

• Lawrence became increasingly bothered by his society that he felt was too occupied with money. As he wrote in Apocalypse (1931), “What we want is to destroy our false, inorganic connections, especially those related to money.” But, when in the early part of his career, Lawrence was subsisting on borrowed funds, and his wife characterized him as "a walking phenomenon of suspended fury" because he needed money.


• Paul's death and the huge sum of money that he wins --£80,000 in the time of the narrative (1930's) would be worth over $2 Million now--are used to demonstrate the futility of a preoccupation with money, as well as the author's revulsion for the materialistic English society that kills values. Paul's mother, represents a member of this English society, and it is her materialism which destroys Paul.

He neither slept nor regained consciousness, and his eyes were like blue stones.

His mother, who from the beginning of the story "has always felt the centre of her heart go hard," sits at the bedside of her dying boy at the end of the story, "feeling her heart had gone, turned actually into stone." Certainly, her life has been wasted, having gained nothing from Paul's fantastic efforts to provide her with financial comfort.

"Misdirection of the life force"

• D. H. Lawrence felt that there are forces in the natural world accessible to humans, but they restrain themselves from tapping into these because of adherence to cultural and social conventions. By tapping into these forces, people could more readily attain meaningful relationships that bring them happiness and love.


• Paul taps into other forces; however, his motivation is wrong and, so, he is defeated in his efforts. His mother's preoccupation with materialism certainly excludes her from fulfilling relationships with her children, as her life force as a mother is certainly misdirected. Without the normal relationship of mother/child, Paul has gone beyond social constraints to seek to fulfill his needs, but he has tapped into some forces that are also misdirected.  One critic writes that Paul's death is an indictment of London's "staleness, its walking dead, its mechanized ugliness."