My favorite Lawrence story, bar none, is called “The Rocking-Horse Winner” (1932), about a little boy
who wants to please his mother. His father is a failure in business and therefore a great disappointment to
the materialist mother. The son, Paul, senses the desperation for money in the house, senses his mother’s
dissatisfaction, senses the inability of his mother to love him, or anyone, in the face of her own colossal
self-absorption. He connects the lack of his mother’s love with the lack of money, then discovers that he
can pick the winners of upcoming horse races if he rides his rocking horse to the point of exhaustion.
Here’s what Lawrence has to say:
He wanted luck, he wanted it, he wanted it. When the two girls were playing dolls in the nursery,
he would sit on his big rocking horse, charging madly into space, with a frenzy that made the little
girls peer at him uneasily. Wildly the horse careered, the waving dark hair of the boy tossed, the
eyes had a strange glare in them. The girls dared not speak to them.... He knew the horse could
take him to where there was luck, if only he forced it.... At last he stopped forcing his horse into
the mechanical gallop and slid down.
Say what you will, I think he’s talking about masturbation. When I teach this story, I try to lead the
students to this idea without insisting on it. Usually there is one hardy and perceptive soul who gets it and
asks, with something between a smirk and a cringe, the question I’m hoping for. One or two others nod,
as if they sort of thought that but were afraid to think it through. Thirty-five others look like the ceiling is
about to fall.
Is it really?
Let’s look at the pattern that’s set up: child wants to supplantp. 141father in his mother’s affections,
child desperately wants mother’s approval and love, child engages in highly secretive behavior involving
frenetic, rhythmic activity that culminates in transporting loss of consciousness. What does that sound like
to you? This is one of the clearest Oedipal situations ever captured in fiction, and for good reason.
Lawrence was part of the first generation to read Freud and so, for the first time, to consciously employ
Freudian thinking in literature. The notion of sublimation kicks in here, for both character and writer.
Obviously, sexual engagement with the mother is not an option, so Lawrence sends the boy, Paul, in
search of the luck his mother desires so terribly. The means of his search is sufficiently creepy that it
frightens his presexual sisters and causes consternation among the adults, who feel that he’s too big for a
rocking horse.
Is it really masturbation? Not literally. That would be icky and not particularly interesting. But
symbolically it fulfills the function of masturbation. Think of it as a surrogate for a surrogate for sex. What
could be clearer?
Why? Part of the reason for all this disguised sex is that, historically, writers and artists couldn’t make
much use of the real thing. Lawrence, for instance, had numerous novels suppressed and undertook a
monumental battle with the British censors. Same as in film.
Another reason is that scenes in which sex is coded rather than explicit can work at multiple levels and
sometimes be more intense than literal depictions. Those multiple levels have traditionally been to protect
innocents. Dickens, who could be very suggestive, was aware that his novels were often read around the
family breakfast table, and he wanted to protect children from anything luridly sexual, as well as to