SOURCE: "D. H. Lawrence's The Rocking-Horse Winner' : Parable and Structure," in English Studies in Canada, Vol. 13, No. 4, December, 1987, pp. 438-50.

In the following essay, Wilson compares "The Rocking-Horse Winner" to a parable, addressing the story's use of anonymous characters and supernatural elements. The critic also examines how the characters in the story utilize language and how false meanings and unrecognized messages bear upon the tale's conclusion.

The apparent inevitability with which criticism of D. H. Lawrence's "The Rocking-Horse Winner" has reached beyond actual text to speculative context is worthy of remark when one considers, as has rarely been done, that the story has a structural integrity and enclosure unusual in Lawrence's prose. Dickens, Frazer, and Freud have been invoked most frequently, British Imperialism most extravagantly, and Lady Cynthia Asquith most recently to provide contextual buttressing for a story whose parabolic nature can seem deceptively simple when denied such...