The Horse Dealer's Daughter

One major theme in this story is that of female oppression. Mabel Pervin, a young rural working-class woman, appears isolated in the midst of her own family. She has kept house for her three...

D.H. Lawrence's short story "The Horse Dealer's Daughter" is told from third-person omniscient point of view. As noted in the linked eNotes guide to literary terms: The most commonly used form of...

First, let's look at the symbol of mud. Lawrence describes the horses at the ranch as living in "fine black mud." One thing we know about mud is that it's very easy to get in stuck in. One could...

Certainly any work of literature could be argued to have a number of different themes, and this excellent short story by D. H. Lawrence is no exception. However, one of the themes that I found...

Lawrence's story raises some interesting questions about love and gender relations. First, Mabel's strength of character stands in contrast to her brothers, although, as men, the brothers are...

In D.H. Lawrence’s story, Mabel is a young woman who is living with three adult brothers after their parents have died. They are all facing a major upheaval because they all must leave the ranch;...

In D.H. Lawrence's "The Horse Dealer's Daughter," Mabel seems to enthrall Ferguson, but not as the story begins. When Mabel and her brothers receive the news of their shattered futures around the...

English Realism is the response by writers at the turn of the century against the Romantic literary movement that idealized life. The distinction between "romance" and "realism" is important....

This is really a very interesting love story to analyse and think about. Key to understanding what Lawrence does in it, however, is to realise how he saw society as a repressive influence that...

It is clear from the ways in which her brothers treat her and discuss her future without compassion or care that Mabel does not occupy a very good position in the family of which she is a part. At...

Critic Jeffrey Mayers writes of D.H.Lawrence's "The Horse Dealer's Daughter," His conscious debt to literary tradition enhances rather than diminishes his originality. Clearly, Lawrence draws...

As D. H. Lawrence so often does, in this story he contrasts the class distinctions that are so important in social conventions to the authentic passion that human beings experience. Mabel Pervin...

In the passage from The Horse Dealer's Daughter, the third-person narrator is providing Mabel's thoughts as she prepares to take her own life. As the only girl among the siblings, Mabel understands...

In D.H. Lawrence's "The Horse Dealer's Daughter," the narrator presents the notion that life can often astonish us. Mabel and Fergusson are very different people: she has grown up with nature, and...

In D.H. Lawrence's short story, "The Horse Dealer's Daughter," the speaker first mentions familial love. Mabel has known no love from her brothers—they have treated her as if she were invisible....

Jack Fergusson is a young doctor. He is introduced to the reader at the beginning of the story when he visits Mabel’s family, just as they are nearing the end of what appears to have been a family...

The opening scene of "The Horse Dealer's Daughter" by D. H. Lawrence displays the hopelessness of Mabel's situation, which leads to her suicide attempt and desperate demands for the love of the...

Significantly, animal imagery is used to describe Mabel when she is naked and after she comes round when Fergusson revives her after she tries to drown herself. This of course is highly...

Initiation is defined as... […a] ceremony, ritual, test, or period of instruction with which a new member is admitted to an organization or office or to knowledge. In D.H. Lawrence's short story...

D. H. Lawrence chose a third person narrator for this story. Writing in the third person, the author works within realism by providing a broad view of both major characters’ experiences and...

Love does steal upon both of the central characters rather swiftly in this excellent short story. We first see the indications of love when the doctor brings Mabel around after her abortive suicide...

In this D. H. Lawrence novel, Jack Fergusson is initially presented as the town physician. He visits the Pervin siblings on their farm to bid them all farewell as they prepare to leave for good....

Both Dr. Ferguson and Mabel, following his rescue of her from trying to drown herself, experience a serious sexual awakening as they literally are overcome by passion and their reason is...

Allegory is a lesson communicated through symbolism, usually involving moral or spiritual ideas. A paradox is a statement that seems to contradict itself but actually contains a truth, or it can be...

The basic premise of Modernism can be seen in the background of the family that Lawrence outlines in his story. Initially, consider Woolf's understanding of a critical element of the "shift"...

In writing "The Horse Dealer's Daughter," D. H. Lawrence was strongly influenced by the work of the Italian author Giovanni Verga. Verga was renowned for his ability to capture peasant life,...

One motif is the interaction between two classes of people. Jack Ferguson is a young doctor and he represents someone of a different social class than the Pervins. He has a job that we might call...

Freytag's Pyramid is a tool that enables literary analysis through the structure of a work of literature. It has five parts: the exposition, the rising action, the conflict, the falling action, and...

The short story "The Horse Dealer's Daughter" by D. H. Lawrence tells of siblings in a once-prosperous family that has fallen into poverty and debt. Their mother died years previously, and now...

You might want to consider the way in which Lawrence describes the figure of Mabel as she sets herself on her course to killing herself. Note the way in which the powers of the imagination are...

This is a romantic story unlike the traditional romantic tales that a reader might expect to read. This is achieved through the focus Lawrence places on the tension between the "mental...

In the short story "The Horse Dealer's Daughter" by D. H. Lawrence, three men and a woman, the sons and daughter of a formerly well-to-do horse dealer, meet in the kitchen of their home after their...

The major theme that can be detected in all of Lawrence's fiction is the power of passion and how it often overpowers the intellect and reason. This is of course expressed primarily in this story...

I suppose one way to do this would be to examine the way in which love overrules judgement. This is an archetypal theme and is present in so many stories, mythological or otherwise. If we look at...