The Ideological Structure in “The Rocking-Horse Winner”: Evils of Modernism and Consumerism

Short stories of D. H. Lawrence stay in the background in spite of the fact that he is hailed as one of the most accomplished short story writers in English literature. For that reason, it is not possible to come across with many studies dealing with his short stories. By taking this into consideration, this article will analyze Lawrence’s “The Rocking-Horse Winner” by focusing on its multilayered ideological structure in which the representatives of a large section of bourgeois society are in essence criticized through its distorted and self-disruptive values. Some issues and concepts like disintegration of family, debunking of motherhood myth, evils of consumerism, bourgeois morality, commodity fetishism and alienation will also be used in order to unearth Lawrence’s stance in the story. In this context, Marxist literary theory will be employed. Keywords: D. H. Lawrence, “The Rocking-Horse Winner”, Alienation, Bourgeois Morality, Disintegration.