Essay - Social Status, Most Will Recognize, Is Highly Contingent upon Any...

Social status, most will recognize, is highly contingent upon any number of factors from lineage and occupation to ability ***** physical attractiveness. As such, it would appear that there is an unlimited social mobility potential for almost **********. D.H. Lawrence's short story, "The Rocking Horse Winner," seeks to rebut that logic by constructing a f*****mily so damaged ***** its pursuit of social advancement as ***** destroy itself. (Durawa, 2) Paul, the ********** protagonist, lives constantly in the shadow of his mother's disapproval, a disposition derived from her dissatisfaction with her husband and her standard of living. Hester, embittered by a lifetime of falling behind her more affluent neighbors, is fixated on the notion ***** luck as it pertains to social *****. *****'s tragic fate at the story's conclusion serves to dispel Hester's notion that the acquisition of financial excess is the proof and merit of luck. D.H. Lawrence uses Paul's bizarre lust ***** h***** mot*****er's approval, his obsession with prognostication and his inevitable demise ***** reject the ********** ***** luck and money and interdependent.

Hester's disfavor for her husband's economic impotence was an attitude that she readily projected on her son. So it ***** imperative that, in order to earn his mother's love, Paul mould himself into the perfect specimen for good fortune. Only then would she recognize that he was not his father and, rather, an inherently *****y individual destined for the upper-strata. Essentially, Lawrence creates a ch*****racter, in *****, who must perceive love and ***** as necessarily related priorities. This un*****tunate state is that which sets Paul on his path to oblivi*****, as the mad ***** of a limited commodity like money is *****capable of quenching an eternally perpetuating hunger for love.

That forces him to turn ***** his rocking horse, ***** its furious powers of hypnotic induction, for luck and *****. As he journey's ***** child to racing prophet, Paul contrives a sensation of approval from his uncanny ability to predict the outcome of any horse drag. (Gregory, 1) His success grants him the privilege of satiating his ***** thirst for social advancement, and he assumes ***** a gift of 5000 pounds should surely prove how lucky he is. But when the money d*****appears in a quick torrent of extravagant and extraneous purchase, Paul finds that the favor he had *****ed was as fleeting ***** ***** money with which ***** had attained it.(Gregory, 2) This, ***** course, only intensifies his desire to pick horses with unfettered accuracy. With the approach of ***** Derby, ***** rocking horse revelations consumed him and he spent t***** better portion ***** his waking time riding incessantly and to the detriment of ***** own mental and physical faculties. The ***** with ***** Paul looks ***** achieve his mother's love, so clearly a self-denying and destructive bent, magnifies the artifice that luck is, in some way, a barometer ***** social ga*****.

And the "brain-fever" to which ***** succumbs certainly seems to reinforce this, both for Paul and, ***** poignantly, Hester. Watching helplessly as her