58 pages • 1 hour read

The Rocking Horse Winner

Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1926

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.

Download PDF

Summary

Background

Story Analysis

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

Beta

Discussion Questions

Literary Devices

Folklore: Legend, Fairy Tale, Fable

The short story blends elements of folklore, from legend to fairy tale to fable, and it opens in the manner of oral storytelling: “There was a woman who was beautiful, who started with all the advantages, yet she had no luck” (Paragraph 1). Fables, very broadly speaking, are a literary genre including simple stories—often with animal characters and fantastical elements—that convey a moral, and Lawrence’s fable plainly concerns the consequences of avarice. Fairy tale elements, on the other hand, appear wherever there is the suggestion of the supernatural—enchanted horses, whispering houses, prophetic insights.

Among the most important folkloric qualities is how the basic elements of a quest legend dominate the structure of the story: A youthful knight riding a horse seeks to rescue a beautiful, imprisoned woman. His quest succeeds, but the final act leads to his death. This plot also mocks the “tragic action” defined in Aristotle’s Poetics with a recognition, the knowing of the winning horse’s name, Malabar, and the subsequent reversal, the death of the protagonist, the deliverer, pathetic rather than heroic (see “Irony” below).

Irony

Irony, in its most basic sense, occurs when a situation presents two contrasting realities, often in the form of appearance (or expectation) contrasting with actuality. “The Rocking Horse Winner” plays with such contrasting realities, as the fable overtones evoke a legendary loftiness that does not quite match the actuality of plot events. The story’s tragic action, which presents this irony, reaches its climax when the mother opens the bedroom door: It reveals not a knight in shining armor on his noble steed delivering the holy grail to a beautiful maiden, but rather, a puny “poor devil of a son” masturbating on a rocking horse to deliver “Malabar” to a fearful woman (Paragraph 242). She confronts not a room filled with sunlight but a grotesque and lurid scene:

Then suddenly she switched on the light, and saw her son, in his green pyjamas, madly surging on the rocking-horse. The blaze of light suddenly lit him up, as he urged the wooden horse, and lit her up, as she stood, blonde, in her dress of pale green and crystal, in the doorway (Paragraph 221).

Personification

Personification is the endowment of inanimate objects with human characteristics. The device appears vividly throughout the story: The house whispers, the toy rocking horse bends his “wooden, champing head” and hears (Paragraph 6). The doll smirks and hears. The foolish puppy hears. The “whisper” breathes life into the inanimate, and the voices in the house “trilled and screamed” (Paragraph 180). While authors often use personification to make a scene more evocative or to indirectly imbue an object with symbolic meaning, Lawrence’s usage takes the dynamic a step further to lend the setting the sense of haunting or possession. This is germane to the fiction anthology of the story’s original publication (Asquith’s Ghost Book), but it also creates the air of magic and enchantment that typifies fairy tales. In this case, personification plays into the story’s impression as folklore.

Repetition

Repetition is a literary device in which the author repeats words, phrases, images, or ideas to create emphasis. For example, Lawrence uses repetition with eye imagery (see: Symbols & Motifs). Lawrence also does this with descriptions of the mother’s heart and face: When her children are in the room, she “felt the centre of her heart go hard” (Paragraph 1). She knows “at the centre of her heart was a hard little place” (Paragraph 1). Anxiety and failure make “deep lines come into her face” (Paragraph 4). When she tells Paul she is unlucky, “he saw, by the lines of her mouth, that she was only trying to hide something from him” (Paragraph 21). When she reads Paul’s birthday gift note, “her face hardened” (Paragraph 170). Such repetition, because it accentuates these physical and psychological traits in the mother, announces those traits’ importance. Moreover, each time these descriptions occur, they are not mere passing descriptions of happenings; instead, they pertain directly to the core nature of the character. The repetition therefore takes on an especially direct and vehement quality, which suits the tone of a simple, folkloric morality tale.