conflicts rocking horse winer
"The Rocking-Horse Winner" opens with the distant, singsong voice of a fairy tale: "There was a woman who was beautiful, who started with all the advantages, yet she had no luck." So begins an ancient tale. A brave young boy is challenged by his true love. He rides off into a dreamland where he struggles and succeeds at attaining secret knowledge. He brings the secret knowledge back and with it wins treasure houses of gold, giving all to his love. Undercutting this fairy tale, however, is another, which forms a grotesque shadow, a nightmare counter to the wish fulfillment narrative. The "true love" of the brave young boy is his cold-hearted mother. The quest he has embarked on is hopeless, for every success brings a new and greater trial. Like the exhausted and terrified daughter in Rumplestitlskin, this son is perpetually set the task of spinning more gold. In this tale, no magical dwarf comes to the child's aid; the boy finally spins himself out, dropping dead on his journey, his eyes turned to stone. Like all good fairy tales, this one has several complementary levels of reference: social, familial, psychological. On the social level, the tale reads as a satire on the equation of money, love, luck, and happiness. The target o
Further, Gdog mounts his hobbyhorse, his surrogate sexual partner, only as a way of fulfilling his own narrowly defined program for success and happiness. f the satire, the mother, cannot be happy without an unending flow of cold, sure cash. " But the tale acts out still another nexus of meaning, one implied in both the satire on a society governed by a money ethic and in the dramatization of a mother devourer. In "The Rocking-Horse Winner," the woman cannot alter her husband's ineffectuality. As she sees it, luck and lucre are the same thing. Applying Lawrence's indictment of masturbation to Gdog's situation, we see that Gdog has been taught to ride himself, that is, his hobbyhorse or obsessions, obsessions he inherited from his mother. His action and the result it brings powerfully echo Lawrence's description of masturbation, physical and psychic, in his essay "Pornography and Obscenity. The idea is that mothers shape their sons into the desirable opposite of their husbands. in no case is the object that is to be know -- horse, son, sexual partner -- seen to have a life of its own, an otherness to be appreciated rather than manipulated, a furtherness that can give the knower a glimpse into all that is beyond him or her. If one takes these three levels of reference and seeks out their complementarity, one sees the rich logic of the tale.
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Acceptance Essays
