| The Rocking-Horse Winner |

Lust for materials objects, a stylish living, and money can become an obsession in life if one chooses this lifestyle. D.H. Lawrence’s story, “The Rocking-Horse Winner” possesses lust of things throughout the story. The obsessions in the story affects a woman named Hester and then she passes the obsession on to her son, Paul. Part of their obsession is to know if they are lucky people in life or if they are unlucky. Being lucky is just the beginning of Paul’s obsession. Hester is a beautiful woman who was blessed with the opportunity to marry a handsome man but their love eventually runs dry for each other. She has three children, a boy and two girls. However her behavior around people was not the same as when she was around the children. Around people Hester portrayed her love for her children, and they would say that she was a wonderful mother. She may have been able to fool people but she was not able to fool her own children, because they know she does not love them like a mother should. The children can see this in their mother’s eyes but they know of her obsessions with other things in life. This causes her to be neglectful towards her children by not showing the love that children need from their parents. However, their parents provide a nice house with “discreet” servants to help tend to the children and the house. But the mother and father never seem to have enough money to support their lifestyle even though they both have incomes. The father has an office in town where he has promising business prospects, but there prospects never materialize. The mother, Hester, had a job sketching furs and dress materials. She “worked secretly in a studio for a friend” but did not make the money as the friend did in the business. Both parents tried various schemes to increase their income, but their financial success eludes them. Even with all the financial burdens of the family, it seems as if the house was becoming haunted by an unspoken phrase of obsession; “There must be more money! There must be more money!” One day, Paul asked his mother why the family was always taking a taxi or borrowing a car from his Uncle Oscar Creswell, instead of them purchasing one of their own. His mother, Hester, explains that they lack the money to buy a car. She even tells Paul that when his father tries to make more money, he has no luck. If you’re lucky, she tells Paul, you have money. That is her belief and she feels that it is better to be born lucky than to be born rich. She tells that if a person is born lucky, they continue to have money but born rich they lose their money. Paul is very assertive towards his mother about being lucky himself. She does not believe Paul about being lucky, even though he was trying to earn her love for him by sharing that with her. Peeved at her lack of faith in him and wanting to prove himself to her, Paul goes off by himself wondering how to generate luck. In the following days, Paul is riding his rocking horse in the nursery when his Uncle Oscar stops by to visit with his mother. While Paul is riding his rocking horse, Uncle Oscar and his mother are watching him attentively. Uncle Oscar asks Paul “Riding a winner?”, but he does not answer. Paul was riding his rocking horse as if he was a knight on an important quest for the king. He was seeking a great prize, luck, which would enable him to win money wagering on real horses. Once Uncle Oscar understood what Paul was doing, he never took any steps to have Paul stop but encouraged him because of his own obsessions of money. Even thought Paul’s wagers on the real horses made Uncle Oscar nervous, he would ask Paul for tips on the winning horse. Uncle Oscar enjoyed his winning but Paul had a different use for his winning. His winnings were going to free his mother from a great big monster, indebtedness, which consumed all of her attention. Once she was free, she would be able to turn her attention to Paul and give him the greatest prize of all; a mother’s love. When Paul discovers that the five thousand pounds he has set aside for his mother is not enough to achieve his goal, he becomes obsessed with winning more. During Paul’s last ride on the rocking horse, his mother walks in during his riding frenzy cries out “It’s Malabar!” Right after that Paul falls off the horse after suffering from a seizure. Paul remains in a stupor because no one understands that “Malabar” is a name of a horse entered in the Derby. It was not until Bassett, the family gardener, comes to share with Paul that he has won seventy thousand pounds. This gave him a total of eighty thousand ponds saved for his mother. Paul’s luck finally paid off for him to have material things. The material things that his mother wanted and obsesses about carried over to affect him. Paul rode a rocking horse to learn who was going to win the Derby. He wanted his mother’s love so much that his fixation began to rule him, even if he did share his secret with his Uncle Oscar and Bassett. This obsession gave him a fortune to share with his mother which was also his misfortune. His last ride cost him more than money or materials things could ever buy, his life.