Welcome back to Dissecting The Dark Descent, where we lovingly delve into the guts of David Hartwell’s seminal 1987 anthology story by story, and in the process, explore the underpinnings of a genre we all love. For an in-depth introduction, here’s the intro post.
D.H. Lawrence was something of an iconoclast even among the modernists. While many authors of his generation pushed boundaries, Lawrence’s devotion to evoking the sensual, romantic, and naturalistic in his writing was intense, which led to several of his novels becoming the target of obscenity trials. Escalating literary, legal, and political clashes and persecution led to his voluntary exile from England, and he eventually founded an artists’ colony in Taos, New Mexico. While he wrote very little that could be called “horror” over the course of his life, “The Rocking-Horse Winner” is one excellent example, taking Lawrence’s gift for sensation and the general structure of a children’s fantasy story and twisting those elements into a gothic horror tale about how a family blinded by materialism eventually destroys their eldest son, who is desperate for his family to love each other.
The Cresswell family aren’t starved for opportunities, just luck. Their absentee father is solidly middle class, their mother Hester is from a rich family but is resigned to be the poorest among her relatives, and the three children are aware that in some ways their mother resents them and they her. Their life is constantly beset with the house whispering “there must be more money,” a constant refrain driving home that they’re the poorest branch of their wealthy family tree. Until one day Paul, the eldest son, realizes that if he rides his toy rocking-horse, he can generate visions of the future winners of high-stakes horse races, allowing him to make huge amounts of money and change the fortunes of his family. But as Paul’s visions grow stronger and take a greater toll on his health, the question arises: Is his family’s newfound luck worth the damage to Paul’s body and mind?
“The Rocking-Horse Winner” in many respects takes the form of British children’s fantasies (like those written by one of our previous subjects, Ms. E. Nesbit), with their magical toys, kindly hired help, and cheerful older relatives who believe their younger relations unquestioningly. Those stories usually feature something strange and magical bringing their young protagonists fame and riches, their loving family now transformed into the best versions of themselves, basking in a warm glow of togetherness and comfort.
Here in this story, however, the family doesn’t love each other, the divine powers slam into Paul like a freight train, and Paul’s addiction to the prescient rocking-horse ultimately kills him, leaving the family broken but eighty thousand pounds (6.3 million pounds in today’s money) richer. That Paul’s death is seen as a kindness because he gets to stop riding the rocking-horse only slams home the satire—Paul is free, and he became so securing a different kind of freedom for his family.
While Hartwell classifies “The Rocking-Horse Winner” as a “possessed child” story with a psychological twist, this isn’t quite accurate. Paul isn’t possessed by anything, nor is the spirit that moves through him connected at all to him. As seen in the latter part of the story, he can’t “know” the winners of horse races on his own, only when riding his rocking-horse “to the end.” In his satire of children’s fantasy stories, Lawrence found a novel take on a different gothic trope, that of the “artifact of doom.” Artifact of doom stories are a beloved fixture of the gothic, with the protagonist being offered a Faustian bargain that grants them great power at the cost of their soul, their lifeforce, or their fortune.
All the hallmarks of “artifact of doom” stories are present in “The Rocking-Horse Winner”—the rocking-horse gives Paul power and control over the material world, but it’s clear that using it not only results in an obsession (he’s compelled to ride the horse more and more and develops an intense attachment to it) but exacts a steep cost, with the boy ending each “ride” weakened and feverish, his eyes blazing with a strange power. In the end, he dies after completing what was, supposedly, one final ride. As with many “possessed artifact” stories, the granting of wishes is paired with a significant drawback or penalty—an aspect of the story that helps drive home the story’s searing indictment of materialism.
The anti-materialistic message Lawrence imbues within his story is blunt. There are scenes where Lawrence takes the reader from one end of the house to the other, the possessions themselves whispering “there must be more money,” to drive home that the family seem to need more, always more, the more money they have and the further Paul’s gift takes him. Paul’s family gains a taste for expensive things as their fortunes change thanks to the boy and his rocking-horse, as he makes them “lucky” at long last. It’s a feedback loop—Paul and the horse generate more money, which bring more material comforts but leads to demand for even greater wealth, which causes him to ride the horse ever more feverishly to provide for his family. As the money brings them increased luck (better jobs, more comforts), they yearn for a life of even higher quality. While Paul’s intentions are noble (desperately seeking to stop the “whispers,” as he calls them), he and his family are trapped in this endless cycle where they will never have enough because they’re always wanting more.
While “The Rocking-Horse Winner” captures the hamster wheel of desperate materialism fairly well, it’s the odd divine touches Lawrence adds to the story that make things truly sinister. Paul considers his powers a gift “from God,” and his religious fervor as he rides his rocking-horse in a mad fever seems to support this, with the boy being described in terms that might evoke a biblical prophet. There’s even the obvious allusion to Paul the Apostle, who was given a divine vision riding his own horse on the road to Damascus that left him blind for three days. Materialism isn’t just a preoccupation for Paul’s family, it’s a divine force ruling their existence, a hungry god that will never be sated, demanding its fill. It’s the invisible force behind “luck,” “money,” and the whispers heard throughout the house by the children. Bassett, the family’s friendly gardener and Paul’s silent partner in placing bets, even drops the G-word directly when talking about Paul and his gift.
The most twisted part of all of this is, of course, that Paul’s only really doing this for love. It’s stated at the beginning of the story that Hester Cresswell and her children don’t love each other, with Paul correctly deducing that his mother’s bitterness is rooted in a lack of money and luck. The Cresswells are a family damned by circumstance, which causes no end of bitterness, since there’s not really anyone to blame. The Cresswells aren’t particularly evil, just cold and driven entirely by materialism. In the end, Paul’s mother is left horrified by the events, and Paul dies still desperate and feverish for good fortune, in the hopes that his sacrifice will somehow bring love into a loveless environment. Sure, the money’s a comfort, but the cost is complete emotional devastation and the death of an innocent.
That final devastation is, of course, the twisted punchline to Lawrence’s tale of social satire—the family’s lust for the finer things and the idea of luck allowing one to climb the social ladder destroys Paul and indeed his family. This grim interplay of materialistic desire, luck, and divine intervention (or perhaps, “invasion”), set in a dissonantly whimsical framework of a child’s rags-to-riches fantasy and shot through with elements of gothic horror and cursed artifacts, forces the reader to confront the unnerving realities of a life spent chasing material comforts and privilege. All the Cresswells had to do instead was love each other. Instead, they get the only thing any of them truly wanted.
And all it cost was one innocent life, body and soul.
And now to turn it over to you. Was there a materialism inherent in British children’s fantasy? Is Lawrence’s depiction of God evil, or just indifferent? Which of Lawrence’s four “obscene” novels is your favorite? (I have a soft spot for Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which I read in Santa Fe around the time the most recent movie version came out)
And please join us in two weeks for gothic horror superstar (and Whovian) Tanith Lee’s “Three Days.”
