The Rocking-Horse Winner, D. H. Lawrence | Daniel P. Watkins (essay date 1987)
Daniel P. Watkins (essay date 1987)
SOURCE: "Labor and Religion in D. H. Lawrence's The Rocking-Horse Winner'," in Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. 24, No. 3, Summer, 1987, pp. 295-301.
[Here, Watkins examines "The Rocking-Horse Winner" as "a symbolic formulation of social life in the grip of capitalism. " He also argues that Lawrence uses the spiritual aspects of the story to represent orthodox Christianity and to illustrate how the religion supports capitalism.]
It is a commonplace that D. H. Lawrence's "The Rocking-Horse Winner" is a story about the devastating effects that money can have on a family, and, further, that Lawrence's specific objections in the story are not to money abstractly conceived, but to money as it is understood and valued by capitalist culture. This is one of Lawrence's most savage and compact critiques of what he elsewhere calls "the god-damn bourgeoisie" [in the poem "Red Herring"] and of individuals who, despite...
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