58 pages • 1-hour read
The Rocking Horse Winner
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Character Analysis
Paul
Even though the first seven paragraphs of “The Rocking Horse Winner” focus on his mother, Paul is the protagonist and dominates this story. Paul unconsciously attempts to fill the place of the man dismissed from the mother’s life, the luckless husband. Paul will prove that he has luck, for God told him. When the mother ignores his claim, he becomes angry and determined “to compel her attention” (Paragraph 40). With his whip, he beats the rocking horse that charges, careers, snorts in response to Paul’s mad, frenzied, wild ride to force it to take him to “where there is luck!” (Paragraph 43).
Paul gets “there” through riding the horse, an act of masturbation Paul pursues with passion. The names of the winning horses that come to Paul—undoubtedly mentioned by his betting partner, Bassett, who talks the horse races with Paul—appear to come out of nowhere. This inner light of intuition climaxes at the conclusion of the rides. The sexual act links to “luck.” He and Bassett discover the horses whose names erupt from the rides are winners, empowering him to win thousands of pounds.
When Paul first presents his mother with £1,000 a year on her birthday for five consecutive years, she uses the gift only to demand more, all of it at once. Paul cannot satisfy his mother. With one last ride that brings the name “Malabar,” Paul collapses at climax into unconsciousness, rejected by his uncle as a “poor devil."
The Mother
The mother remains nameless until the end when her brother refers to her as Hester. Lawrence intended this, for she functions in the story by role only, the motivating force for her eldest child, who attempts in vain to satisfy her. Insatiable, narcissistic, loving only herself, absorbed in her self-pity, hard-hearted at her core, she confesses her disappointment in life to Paul and intimately involves him in her dissatisfaction.
This woman will never be satisfied, and her voracious materialism haunts the house with mysteriously unspoken whispers—and eventually screams—for more money. She considers herself “unlucky” in marriage and in life. The success she has at sketching ladies in furs and silk and sequins brings her no satisfaction. A younger woman earns several thousand to the mother’s several hundred, so “she was again dissatisfied. She so wanted to be first in something, and she did not succeed, even in making sketches for drapery advertisements” (Paragraph 169). Her attractive children, her lifestyle, her social status, none of it matters or is ever enough. The burden should not belong to a child, yet she gives it to Paul, confiding in him as one would in a husband. When Paul takes on the burden, she dismisses him as she dismissed her husband who has no luck.
Paul understands her completely when she attempts to distinguish luck from lucre. They are one and the same to her. Run by money, by the desire for money, by the material objects money can buy, she spends it as soon as she has it. When Paul gifts her £1,000 a year for five years, she demands it all at once and spends it immediately. In the end, the only glimmer of her maternal instinct manifests as “anxiety” about her overwrought son, but it is too late.
Uncle Oscar
Oscar and his sister share the love of money. Unlike her, however, he enjoys it as something of a toy rather than an obsession. Paul rides a toy horse and bets on horses. Both want to win for money—for Oscar to amuse himself, and for Paul to manifest “luck.” When Oscar discovers his nephew has an inside track to winners at the races, his curiosity overcomes his initial skepticism and he becomes a player, a partner. Reluctant to go all the way, he tests the water and is an astute gambler.
Callous to the core, he provides an objective view of the situation. When Paul tells him he wants to stop the whispers in the house, Oscar reveals he knows about the shortage of money, about the writs (legal notices of debt). Condescending toward Paul at first, the more Oscar researches the activities of Paul and Bassett, the more deeply he becomes involved. At the end, as invested as Paul in the winner of the Derby, but with an entirely materialistic motivation, he articulates this when he tells Hester she is “eighty-odd thousand to the good, and a poor devil of a son to the bad” (Paragraph 242). Life adds up to a wager, to “luck."
Bassett
Bassett’s deference to Paul as “Master Paul” indicates he accepts his position from an inferior social class, that of a servant. Oscar Cresswell, with an uppity name, got him his job. Paul, however, treats him as an equal, trusts him unequivocally, and consults him before each transaction at the track. Uncle Oscar, suspicious of Bassett and of the amount of the winnings, quizzes him at each juncture. Yet when Uncle Oscar realizes they are dealing in pounds, not pennies, he begins to take both Bassett and Paul seriously. When Bassett tells him Paul’s choices are “as if he had it from heaven,” Oscar’s smile turns to amazement upon learning his nephew has £1,500 locked up in a safe by Bassett (Paragraph 118).
Basset holds nothing back and acts as a faithful steward. Paul will decide to make his uncle, and not Bassett, a partner; Bassett will accept the arrangement. When Oscar asks to be shown the money, Bassett takes him to it.
Bassett believes. He does not know Paul’s “secret of secrets” (Paragraph 201), the rocking horse, but he believes in Paul with a religious awe. He adheres to the rule of secrecy, acts with discretion, and is steadfast and trustworthy to the end. Bassett asks to come for just a moment, “touches his imaginary cap to Paul’s mother” before approaching the bed to tell Paul he carried out his wishes: Malabar “came in first all right, a clean win” (Paragraphs 235-26). Because Bassett obediently placed the bet even while Paul was unconscious, Paul won £70,000, bringing his total up to £80,000.
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